Thursday evening we travelled to Jerusalem and stopped at Yad Vashem - the memorial in Jerusalem for the Holocaust victims. It was a beautiful beautiful site - so peaceful and so well done. As you can imagine, the subject could have been presented in graphic and shocking ways, but I didn't find it that way at all. While it was informative and true to the facts and definitly sobering, it was done in such as a way as to honor the victims with respect.
There was a lot of symbolism built into Yad Vashem. The museum where the story of the holocaust is presented is in a rather dark corridor. The tall walls are slanted upward and inward until they join together just above the ground - always allowing a beam of daylight into the otherwise dreary corridor.
The museum is presented with a variety of multimedia and actual artifacts from the time artifacts. Maybe one of the most memorable for me was walking across a plastic floor panel, looking down and seeing thousands upon thousands of shoes and realizing that those were shoes stripped from the people as they were taken to be killed. It was a really sobering thing.
As you progress through the museum, you gradually move upward, more toward ground level. At the end of the museum you enter a huge and beautiful rotunda library with thousands of volumes lining the shelves all around the rotunda. The volumes contain the official list of names of all of the holocaust victims.
As you exit the museum you emerge an a large platform overlooking a beautiful mountainous valley. The way the triangular walls converge with the sky force you to look to the heavens and somehow cause you to feel as if you are ascending.
Above the museum are beautiful and peaceful gardens covering a very large area. It was so peaceful there and so beautiful there and such a fitting memorial to the victims of the holocaust.
As we were driving away from Yad Vashem, I noticed a large monument overarching the road enscribed with scripture from the 37th chapter of Ezekial. It was touching to read:
"Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live and I will bring you into your own land."
2 comments:
That's great that it was a peaceful and beautiful place. When I visited a concentration camp in Dachau, Germany it was depresseingly sobering and I felt like you could literally feel and hear the blood of those innocent people crying up from the ground. It was horrible and definitely a place devoid of peace (which is understandable considering all that took place there). Anyway, Yad Vashem sounds like a great memorial. I'm really enjoying reading about your trip!!
Thanks for the great insights and lessons. I had never thought about the differences between Arabs and Palestinians. I am sorry we missed you, but we loved seeing your family.
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