Frommer's Review
Down the road from Mount Herzl is a ridge called Har Ha-Zikaron (Mount of Remembrance). This is Israel's great memorial and place of commemoration for the millions who perished in the Holocaust and whose graves, both known and unknown, are distant from these hills. The vast, sprawling complex contains many sections. Perhaps the most central is the new Holocaust Museum, opened in 2005 and probably the most wide-ranging museum of the Holocaust in the world. Housed inside a long, tunnel-like structure that finally ends in a panoramic terrace with vistas of the Judean Mountains, this new museum is designed to help give a personal dimension to the overwhelming figure of six million human beings who fell victim to the Nazis. Moving video testimonies by survivors dot the long, meandering line of exhibits that detail the suffering of Jewish communities throughout Europe, from the beginning of the Nazi persecution to its horrific end. There are diary excerpts, personal photographs, letters, and at times, the only remaining mementos of loved ones that have been bravely donated to Yad VaShem by elderly Holocaust survivors. This museum and its vast exhibit replaces Yad VaShem's original museum, built in the 1960s.
Other elements of Yad VaShem include the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, lined with trees planted in tribute to each individual gentile who helped save Jewish lives during the Nazi era -- many of these heroes sacrificed their own lives and the lives of their families. Here you'll find trees honoring those who tried to save the family of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, and a tree in honor of Princess Alice of Greece (the mother-in-law of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II), who hid a Greek Jewish family for over a year in Athens. The heavy entrance gate to the Hall of Remembrance, designed by two of Israel's leading sculptors, Bezalel Schatz and David Polombo, is an abstract tapestry of jagged, twisted steel. Inside is a huge stone room, like a crypt, where an eternal flame sheds somber light over the plaques on the floor: Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Dachau, and others.
Very important to the work of Yad VaShem is the Hall of Names, which contains more than three million pages of testimony, as well as the names, photographs, and personal details of as many of those who perished in the Holocaust as Yad VaShem has been able to gather. Visitors are invited to contribute information they might have about relatives and friends in order that no victim will be forgotten.
On the crest of the western slope of the Mount of Remembrance stands a 6m-high (20-ft.) monument dedicated to the 1 1/2 million Jewish soldiers among the allied forces, partisans, and ghetto fighters. Below the monument one can see the vast sculptural memorial called the Valley of the Destroyed Communities, commemorating the 5,000 European Jewish communities that disappeared during World War II. There is a special memorial to the Children of the Holocaust that is hauntingly moving, donated to Yad VaShem by a husband and wife whose own young child was murdered by the Nazis. It commemorates more than 1 1/2 million murdered children.
Across the hill is an archive building that has the most complete library, research and education center dedicated to this topic. The new Main Entrance Pavilion contains a cafeteria and an extensive bookstore.
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