Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is located on the Mount of Remembrance, Har Hazikaron, near Mount Herzl in western Jerusalem, Israel. It was established by the Knesset in 1953 as Israel's official memorial to the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The campus covers about 18 hectares of landscaped hillside. The main exhibition is the Holocaust History Museum, designed by architect Moshe Safdie and opened in 2005. It is a triangular concrete structure cut into the hill, and its long central hall leads visitors through ten chronological galleries, from Jewish life in Europe before the war, through persecution, ghettos, deportations and the death camps, to liberation and the aftermath. Exhibits use personal testimony, original artefacts, documents, film and photographs, with an emphasis on individual stories. The Hall of Names holds Pages of Testimony for millions of victims under a conical ceiling. The Children's Memorial, carved from an underground cave, uses mirrors to reflect candle flames in memory of the 1.5 million children who died. The Hall of Remembrance has an eternal flame and floor stones bearing the names of the major camps. Outdoors, the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations honours non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews, and the Valley of the Communities lists more than 5,000 destroyed Jewish communities on stone walls. The campus also contains an art museum, a synagogue, a library and a research institute. The site is managed as a permanent memorial and educational institution, and its exhibits are regularly updated. The material is graphic and emotionally demanding, so the museum advises that it is not suitable for children under about ten, and a visit usually takes 3 to 4 hours.