New Yad Vashem links Shoah, Israel

JERUSALEM - More than any other Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem connects the devastation of the tragedy of the Shoah to the rebirth of Israel, and reflects Israel's desire to cast the event as something other than Jewish victimization. (Israel calls its day of Holocaust remembrance, Yom HaShoah v’Hagvurah, emphasizing the acts of resistance.)

Yad VaShem opened its first historical exhibit in 1973. Since then, it has had millions of visitors, but has been criticized for relying mostly on black and white photographs taken by the Nazi perpetrators.

This was problematic technically, especially after the much higher-tech United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington opened in 1993, as well as philosophically, as it seemed to allow the Nazis to tell the Jewish story.

In keeping with the trend of allowing groups to tell their own tales, Yad Vashem began planning this new museum, which opened earlier this year, with the intention of utilizing the personal stories of those who survived, as well as those who perished, and began to search for artifacts and personal letters, diaries, and documents. The resulting objects range from a postcard thrown from a train on its way to a concentration camp to a child's ragged doll.

Nine galleries

The work of Moshe Safdie, internationally recognized Israeli architect, the museum building is replete with symbolism.

The main thoroughfare is a triangular hall with vaulting ceiling, off of which are the nine galleries (“chapters”) that document the history of the Nazi rise to power, the innumerable incidents of humiliation of Jews (many of which were captured on film), paintings by artists such as Felix Nussbaum and Charlotte Salomon, and continuously playing videos of survivors telling their stories or archival footage from the camps.

Because of this organization (or deliberate lack thereof), the thoroughfare must be traversed several times; it, and the constant storytelling, creates a subjectivity and nonlinearity.

Soldiers at Yad Vashem opening: link from Shoah to Israel

Critics may note that the Yad Vashem museum makes the Jewish catastrophe almost the exclusive focus: universal lessons may be derived, but the Holocaust is presented as a particularistic experience.

Relief from nightmare

From the depressing first images that greet the visitor in a continuously playing video by media artist Michal Rovner to the dramatic, conical Hall of Names (where 600 photographs with descriptions are mounted in opposition to a pit-like area containing cuts in the stone symbolizing those whose names are not known), we are conscious of the Holocaust as Jewish tragedy.

One exits as though from a tunnel - with the relief felt when waking from a nightmare - to breathe the Jerusalem air.

Clearly, in Yad Vashem's version of the Holocaust narrative, the story has an ending, and that ending is Israel. The mission of Yad Vashem to be, in the words of Isaiah, “a memorial and a name …an everlasting name” has been not only realized, but, it would seem, internalized.

Reprinted with permission from Zeek , a Jewish culture magazine