JERUSALEM - More than 40 heads of state and ministers, many of them from Europe, gathered here in the chill yesterday evening for the opening of a new Holocaust history museum at Yad Vashem, the Israeli guardian of the Holocaust and its history.
More than 10 years in the making, the new museum tries to tell the story of the 6 million Jewish dead, the names of half of them still unknown, through the diaries, photographs, experiences and testimonies of about 100 individuals.
Rather than the dry history and emphasis on photographs of the old museum, the new one relies on more modern techniques of film and recreation of reality through artifacts, concentrating on the stories of individuals caught up in the horror of a previously unimaginable world.
The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, told some 1,500 guests and dignitaries the story of the extermination of a single French family, recorded in the museum, and then said: "When you leave this museum, you see the sky of Jerusalem. I know how a Jew feels when he emerges from these depths and breathes the air of Jerusalem. He feels at home. He feels protected. He feels the terrible difference between living in one's own country, in one's homeland, in a country which can provide protection, and standing alone, utterly defenseless, confronting a beast in human form."
Sharon then added the real message of Yad Vashem: "He knows Israel is the only place in the world where Jews have the right to defend themselves, and that proves the Jewish people will never know another Holocaust."
The U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said that the United Nations, like the state of Israel, had emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust, which was also a "driving force" behind the adoption of the universal declaration of human rights.
"The Holocaust was not just a Jewish experience. It is an experience of great importance to the whole world," he said, "and we have all drawn lessons from it."
Annan was joined for the ceremony, which comes 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, by officials such as the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski; the French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin; and the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, whose country has become one of Israel's closest allies.
The British sent Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. The U.S. delegation was led by the mayor of New York City, Michael R. Bloomberg. The U.S. delegation includes the Nobel prize winner Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, and other dignitaries, but no representative of the federal government, which caused a lot of tongue-wagging here.
Besides Sharon, Israeli officials included the president, Moshe Katsav, and the education minister, Limor Livnat. Sharon has taken the opportunity to meet with a number of the foreign visitors here, including Raffarin, and Jerusalem was tied into knots with stifling security procedures that closed many main roads.
The $56 million museum is four times larger than the old one and is housed in a dramatic new building of architectural concrete that cuts through the Mount of Remembrance on which the Yad Vashem campus sits. Designed by the architect Moshe Safdie, the building is a huge triangle, nearly 200 yards long, largely underground, topped by a skylight that runs the length of the apex.
Visitors are pulled downward into the earth, forced along a path into galleries that mark turning points in the Holocaust, much as its victims were forced along by history.
After the abyss of the death camps, the floor rises up toward the light, and a visitor is then able to step onto a concrete platform cantilevered over the earth to see the hills, the pine forests and the buildings of the new state of Israel.
"The two cantilevered concrete walls frame the city of Jerusalem," said Safdie. "After death, there is the affirmation of life."
The new museum is an acknowledgment that as the generation of the survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust dies out, responsibility for passing on its experience and lessons will fall to educators and museums.
