Description of the attraction
Yad Vashem - Shoah (Catastrophe) Museum. Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews by Hitler's regime. Six million European Jews were shot, burned, gassed to death, torture, hunger and disease in concentration camps. Memorial complex Yad Vashem is designed to preserve the memory of their names - not without reason its name is translated as “memory and name” or “place and name”. These are the words from the Old Testament: “… to them I will give in my house and within my walls a place and a better name than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be destroyed”(Isa 56: 5).
Even during the war, people began to think about not exterminating the names of the victims and those who risked their lives to save Jews. The first Holocaust museum was founded on Mount Zion in 1948, and Yad Vashem opened in 1957.
It is very difficult to be on its territory; even adult men cry in the historical building. When planning a visit to the memorial, it is better to devote the whole day to it: the study takes several hours, and after that it is impossible to switch to something entertaining.
The Valley of Ruined Communities, the Children's Memorial, the Wall of Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Hall of Remembrance are located on 18 hectares … The monument to Janusz Korczak shows the famous Polish writer and teacher with his wards orphans - he went with them to a concentration camp, although he could have escaped. The current synagogue preserves Torah storage cabinets and other items rescued from synagogues destroyed by the Nazis in Europe.
The memorial complex includes video and training centers, an archive, a library, the International Disaster Research Institute, an art museum, which contains thousands of works created in ghettos and camps. A special unit deals with the righteous of the peoples of the world - this title is awarded to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. In honor of the heroes, personalized trees were planted in the Alley and the Garden of the Righteous of the Nations. Their number has not been definitively determined; the museum continues to receive information about rescue cases.
An important goal of Yad Vashem is to personify the Holocaust, to show that there have been six million individual murders. This idea is embodied in the main building of the complex - the historical museum, which opened in 2005. His unusual project was created by the famous architect Moshe Safdie. The 4200-square-meter concrete building looks like a 200-meter long arrow - it pierces the Mount of Memory on which Yad Vashem is located. In the underground corridor, the history of the Jewish genocide is shown in chronological order - through thousands of personal belongings of the dead and survivors, documents, letters, films. In the center of the Hall of Names at the end of the corridor, there are more than 600 photographs of the victims.
Shocked visitors following this path of horror fall into the “tail” of the arrow building. There, from the observation deck, a beautiful panorama of the mountains and modern Jerusalem opens up: light, space, life that continues, no matter what.
