New museum puts human faces on six million deaths
DINA KRAFT
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In the Hall of Names, Yad Vashem keeps information on individual Holocaust victims submitted by relatives and friends. |
A visitor descends deep into the earth and takes a zigzag path through cavernous exhibition rooms documenting the fate of the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide. A visitor walks past letters, paintings, poems, diaries, photographs, film and personal artifacts: a doll taken into a ghetto by a little girl, a postcard written from Auschwitz in a mother's pleading hand.
"We want to bring a very personal encounter between the story and the storytellers," said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem directorate and the museum's chief curator. "We want to build empathy."
On March 15, the call of a shofar made secretly at a work camp in Poland by Jewish prisoners in 1943 blasted into the Jerusalem night sky as presidents, diplomats and Holocaust survivors gathered to mark the opening of the new museum.
The surge in anti-Semitism across Europe to levels that have not been seen since World War II added more poignancy to the inauguration of the $56 million museum commemorating the Holocaust.
Speaking at the ceremony, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the dignitaries that the United Nations had an obligation to fight anti-Semitism.
"A United Nations that fails to be at the forefront of anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred undermines its mission," he said.
He said the museum should "stand as testimony that we are standing for a better way." Paraphrasing the Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, who is a Holocaust survivor, Annan added, "Let Yad Vashem inspire us to keep striving as long as the darkest dark crawls the face of the earth."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in his speech that the existence of Israel was the Jewish people's most potent weapon in ensuring they would never again know the horrors of genocide launched against them.
"The State of Israel is the only place in the world where the Jews have the right and the power to protect themselves by themselves," he said. "This is the only guarantee that the Jewish people will never know another Holocaust."
Leaders and officials representing some 40 countries came to the opening. They included French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski. A representative of the Vatican was there as well.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg led the U.S. delegation.
Sallai Meridor, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, said that rising anti-Semitism made the opening of the new museum at Yad Vashem especially important.
"It makes it that much more important that the lessons of the Holocaust do not just become a history lesson, but a living memory for people to take with them," Meridor told JTA.
On the windswept plaza of the Yad Vashem complex where the ceremony was held, the edge of the new museum could be seen - a cutting-edge concrete structure built into the side of a mountain.
It is filled with exhibits of poetry, artwork, letters and photos, some of them shown within displays of video art and films that aim to show the human faces of the people killed in the Nazi genocide.
The new museum replaces the original history museum of Yad Vashem, built in 1973.
Its creators say the museum is meant to bear witness to the story of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
"For years we worked diligently to recover the shards of their stories and the fragments of their memories, their faded pictures - too little - that the victims left behind," said director Avner Shalev, who is also the museum's chief curator.
Designed by the internationally renowned Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie, Shalev likens the museum's cutting through the hillside to "a rupture, a cut into the continuity of Jewish life and Europe and the historical flow."
Safdie says the building evokes the feeling of an architectural remnant, something that has long been there and now is waiting to be revealed.
In an interview with JTA, Safdie said he decided not to cover the concrete with any other material, "because it smacked of the superfluous."
He said he preferred "the minimalism of the place, given the material of the museum and given the outside as well."
The outside world peeks into the museum through a ridge of skylights. In the depths of retelling the darkest of histories, there is the reminder of sunlight and blue sky.
Inside the exhibition rooms, the challenge was to highlight the Jewish voice within the earthquake of the Nazi genocide.
The task felt overwhelming at first, said Yehudit Inbar, who will be the curator in charge of the museum once it opens. The Jews were victims whose property was confiscated and destroyed; the photographs taken at the concentration camps and in the ghettos usually were made by Nazis.
Inbar, Shalev and a handful of other Yad Vashem officials were the first to start planning the new museum. They consulted with historians, psychologists, teachers, survivors and others as they brainstormed their vision of a new museum that would put a human face on the story of the Holocaust.
Among their supporters were Jews from around the world; Holocaust survivors and their descendants were particularly generous.
At the entrance of the museum, visitors will see a large video art display of Jewish life before the war, assembled by Israeli artist Michal Rover from film clips of Jewish families.
Quality footage of Jewish life before the war was hard to find, museum officials said. What was filmed was often taken by visiting American family members during their trips back to Eastern Europe.
Counterposing the life that came before with the atrocities that followed, visitors confront enlarged photographs of the aftermath of a mass shooting of Jews. Pictures of bodies lying in unrecognizable heaps are contrasted with photographs found in the pockets of those same Jews, along with some of their belongings. In one picture a young couple tilt their heads together; in another, family members gathered around a dinner table smile for the camera.
"We want to give back the faces," he said of the decision to focus on the visual, including paintings by Holocaust victims. Near the end of the museum, visitors reach the new Hall of Names, where Yad Vashem keeps information on individual Holocaust victims submitted by relatives and friends.
The hall's centerpiece contains two massive cones. One extends about 30 feet into the air and is covered with photographs and names of Holocaust victims; the other, plunging deep into the ground, was excavated from underground rock. At its base is a pool of water.
The higher cone was meant to give light to those victims with names and photographs, to testify that they were once here, Safdie said. The lower cone is a symmetrical shape for "the memory of those whose names we will never know."