With the dedication this month of the new $56 million Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, Jews everywhere will look once more to Jerusalem, our City of Gold, and to Har Hazikaron, the Mount of Memory on which the museum stands.
We look eastward to Jerusalem reflexively throughout the year, but on this occasion we also pause to remember those lost in our great tragedy.
Yet this moment is not entirely somber. As our cover story this week suggests, the effort to build the starkly beautiful museum, along with extensive plans to use it as a focal point of Holocaust education, give us hope that the lessons of that time will never be forgotten.
Cut into the mountainside, the new structure captures in concrete the stony pain of the Holocaust. Inside, state-of-the-art displays, newly curated artifacts and high-impact art installations make this museum exceptionally equipped to tackle its mission. The emphasis is to put a human face on the Holocaust.
The “6 million dead” figure is so enormous that it is difficult to bring it down to the level of the individual. Yad Vashem seeks to address that anomaly. Factor in the striking Jerusalem mountaintop location and the museum will surely prove to be the first stop for those sifting for meaning among the ashes.
On the local front, we salute the Holocaust Center of Northern California, relocating this month to its new headquarters in San Francisco’s Jewish Community Federation building.Like its counterpart in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Center is dedicated to “education, research and remembrance,” as it says in its mission statement. We are proud of the work the center has done to keep alive the flame of remembrance in the Bay Area.
Given the many museums of this kind around the world, some observers warn of potential Holocaust fatigue. We disagree. Rather, we worry more about incremental indifference. For too many, the Holocaust is nothing but a fading page from a boring textbook.
Such indifference may open the door to global anti-Semitism that may erupt in a pandemic of hate. It has happened before. Sixty years of relative stability doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.
We must never allow this to happen. Thanks to the collective will of the Jewish people, and the persistence of those who built the new Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, perhaps it never will.