Yad v’Shem is my Happy Holocaust Reminder?

Yad v’Shem is my happy Holocaust reminder and my favorite museum. Set in the lovely Judean foothills between Jerusalem and Ein Kerem, where Elizabeth and Zachariah are said to have raised John the Baptist, it is foremost in my thoughts this Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“How can the Holocaust Museum be your favorite?” you ask, aghast!

The answer is that, above and beyond it all, Yad v’Shem is a place of hope that moves me every time I visit.

A Name and A Place

The very name Yad V’Shem, which translates as ‘A Name and a Place,’ has a proud ring to. It is inspired by God’s promise:

“I will give them in my house and within my walls a [yad=memorial] and [shem=a name],

better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting [name],

that shall not be cut off [from memory],” (Isa.56:5).

The Jews have a name and a place in Israel today as a direct result of the Holocaust, which led to The UN General Assembly voting in 1947 for the creation of a Jewish state, so that never again would Jews have nowhere to go to escape oppression and persecution.

Out of Egypt

Following Israel’s Declaration of Independence, on May 14, 1948, Egypt, where my former in-laws had lived for generations, was one of its neighbors to declare war. My late in-laws, Félix and Louli, fled Egypt ahead of the banishment of all its Jews that followed. Unlike European Jews caught up in the Holocaust, they were able to run to Israel.

Everyday Life Before

Yad vShem is housed in a giant hanger. A narrative history begins near the entrance  with a giant wall of film snippets, each a few seconds long, showing us life before the Holocaust: a tailor works at his sewing machine, a sharecropper forks hay in a field outside a shtetl, a cluster of women are chatting, perhaps in Paris…

I have not seen this fascinating view of 1930s Jewish life loop around for a second viewing, despite having stood and watched for ten minutes or more at a time: it is a comprehensive snapshot of the pre-Holocaust Jewish world, showing us what has been lost — the price. That before life was simple, little, ordinary…

Personal Witness Accounts

The Nazis focused their attention on methodically transporting Jews, country after country, to holding camps and then to death camps.

At Yad v’Shem, witnesses are talking heads on screens whose individual stories together form a picture of how Hitler implemented his plan to obliterate an entire people: the Final Solution.

Such hatred is hard to get your head around as you zig-zag through the great hanger, hearing accounts from survivors, seeing artifacts and personal possessions, everyday items that could have been mine— or yours— deploring the evil human beings can be capable of.

From Darkness to Light

The visit ends with a Hall of Names that Yad vShem’s website calls, “a repository for the Pages of Testimony of millions of Holocaust victims, a memorial to those who perished,”

You think you are done but you are not because, at the opposite end of the building to the movie screen that begins our visit is a great picture window and a balcony where we emerge from darkness into bright light and a panoramic view of idyllic sage brush hillside dotted with flat-roofed white houses that look biblical… only they are not. This is not the past but the Israel of today and the hope of tomorrow, framed for the visitor, mostly under a glorious blue sky.

The Hope of 2,000 Years

And tears are welling in my eyes as a lump comes to my throat for the message is clear that, in the end, good has come out of this. A 2000-year-old dream of has become reality and a Jewish State has been born anew in its ancient homeland. The UN General Assembly might never have passed Resolution 181, if it had not been for Hitler.

This is not to belittle the sacrifice of those who suffered, nor the pain experienced by bereaved families. It is to avenge them.

Both the existence of the Israeli flag, that looks like a tallit, (Jewish prayer shawl), and the fact that Israeli women today have an average 3.1 children, way above their counterparts in Britain or France, are a resolute thumbing of the nose at the Nazis, who tried but failed to exterminate the Jews.