Day 10: Holocaust Museum, Vad Vashem

So we started out the day by visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. When I was here 18 years ago we visited it at that time too. But I came to find out that it has been completely redone and what I saw then has been greatly expanded. Always a difficult experience, but important to take time to remember so we will not let it happen again.

We spent about 2 hours going through the museum which made it a pretty quick pace, no way to view everything, but throughout the experience there were videos interviews of survivors and their stories…very powerful…

At the end of the time there was a room, a huge round room with files on shelves along the wall. In the middle of the room was a sort of carousel of pictures of hundreds of the people who were killed that ascended to the ceiling some 30 feet above. Surrounding this carousel were the shelves with the files, the files contain the names of all those they know of who were killed…they know of about 4,000,000 names and everyday they continue to search for the remaining 2,000,000 names yet to be discovered…there are empty shelves that wait to be filled with these names…that alone is sobering…

As hard as it was to experience the Holocaust museum, it didn’t compare with what we experienced next…the children’s museum…in this museum are represented the 1.5 million children who were killed…as you enter you see faces of pictures of some of the children and you are in a very dark room that is covered with mirrors on every wall and the ceiling. There are only 5 candles that are lit, but because of the mirrors, it looks like countless lights that fill the room as the lights are multiplied by the mirrors endlessly…as you walk through the names and ages of the children are read, and this continues all through the day, every day…no one left that room unmoved…

Following that we met with an actual Holocaust survivor from Auschwits, Jacob Handeli. He was a Greek Jews from Thessaloniki, when he and his family were duped by the Germans into believing that their trip to Poland was for jobs…they came thinking, though it was terrible to leave their home that they would find a new home…they were brought to a ghetto neighborhood in their town, and as soon as the gate shut, they knew they were in trouble…

His story is too long to share here, but several of our people bought his book and I’m sure you can borrow it if you want the whole story…we spent an hour and 40 minutes listening to the miraculous way he survived…he was the only survivor from his family…

We left deeply moved, genuinely appreciative for our freedom… and understanding in a deeper way why Israel will never let themselves be put into a such vulnerable place again…

More later…