Friday, July 13, 2012

Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem. The Jewish people's living memorial to the Holocaust
The name of the museum comes from Isaiah 56, verse 5. "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (a 'Yad Vashem' ...that shall not be cut off."

The premier Holocaust museum in the world, it seems more like an university setting rather than a museum. Much of the time was spent outdoors, looking at the Avenue of the Righteous, walking to the Children's Memorial or spending time in the huge exhibits. Yad Vashem has been committed to four pillars of remembrance : Commemoration, Documentation, Research and Education. They place a heavy emphasis on educating the younger generations as the generation that lived through the Holocaust is dwindling. To do this museum justice, it would take at least a day, we spent 4 hours and had to pass up some of the exhibits. Lots of videos for the takeover by the Nazis to the liberation of the camps. Lots of artifacts have been collected and many survivor testimonies were filmed for public viewing. Probably one of the more moving things to happen was one of our teachers' father was a Schindler Jew. He always knew this but when he saw his father's name on the official Schindler's List, he became emotional. It was a sensory overload experience. Probably the most moving exhibit was the Children's Museum-- completely black when you walk in and all you see are candlelights and reflections of those candlelights to represent the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. As you walk through, a voice is saying the names of those children. A picture of it could not do it justice,a but I would suggest you look it up on the Internet.

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