Yad Vashem

Overview

Yad Vashem is Israel’s national authority for remembrance of the Holocaust’s martyrs and heroes. The Knesset established it by law in 1953 to commemorate the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Its work also honors Jewish resistance, including partisans and fighters in the ghetto revolts, and recognizes non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Yad Vashem is an institution of commemoration, documentation, research and education, with the Holocaust History Museum forming one part of its wider work.

The memorial occupies Har Hazikaron, the Hill of Remembrance, on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. Its setting places remembrance of the Holocaust within Israel’s national commemorative landscape. A path connects Yad Vashem with Mount Herzl, where Israel’s military cemetery and the grave of Theodor Herzl bring together memories of Jewish destruction, national defense and the Jewish national movement. That physical relationship does not mean the Holocaust created the Jewish people’s connection to the land. Zionism, the Jewish national movement for self-determination in the Jewish people’s historical homeland, and the institutions built to pursue that goal preceded the Holocaust by decades. Yad Vashem records the catastrophe and the lives it destroyed within a national history that extends before and after it.

Israel holds its central Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies at Yad Vashem each year on 27 Nisan. The observance gives public expression to mourning for murdered Jews, attention to survivors and remembrance of resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 remains among the best-known acts of that resistance. Yad Vashem’s memorials and programs also recall partisans, other ghetto fighters and the endurance of Jewish communities under Nazi persecution. Its grounds, museum, archive and classrooms serve different purposes, but together preserve a record of individuals and communities rather than reducing the Holocaust to a death toll alone.

Later history

The Knesset’s 1953 act gave Yad Vashem a continuing public role in Israel’s remembrance of the Holocaust. In Israel’s early years, public attention often centered on armed Jewish resistance and the image of a new generation able to defend itself. Remembrance broadened over time to give greater space to the everyday lives of destroyed communities, the experiences of survivors and the choices faced by people under Nazi coercion. Yad Vashem’s recognition of partisans and ghetto fighters remains part of that history, alongside its documentation of people who could not resist with weapons. Its institutional form reflects this breadth: commemorative monuments stand beside a historical museum, a central archive, a library and a research center.

The Hall of Remembrance, known as Ohel Yizkor, is Yad Vashem’s principal memorial. An eternal flame burns inside it, and a crypt before the flame contains ashes of Holocaust victims. Names of 21 Nazi extermination camps, concentration camps and killing sites appear on its black basalt floor. The hall provides a place for mourning and state ceremony while directing attention to the sites where Jews were murdered. Its ashes and flame give material and symbolic form to remembrance; the named killing sites keep the crimes geographically and historically specific. Visitors encounter it as part of a memorial complex whose purpose extends beyond a museum exhibition.

Yad Vashem’s new Holocaust History Museum was inaugurated on March 15, 2005, at a ceremony attended by more than 30 heads of state and ministers. Developed over a decade, it replaced an earlier historical museum and was four times its size. The museum presents the Shoah through the experiences of Jewish victims, using original artifacts, survivor testimonies and personal possessions. Those objects connect the history of Nazi persecution and mass murder with the people who lived through it or were killed. Attention to individual lives helps visitors understand that the six million were members of families and communities, each with a history before the Holocaust.

Survivor testimony also preserves experiences that cannot be conveyed by accounts of Nazi policy alone. On Passover eve in 1945, nineteen-year-old Rabbi Yonah Emanuel read the Haggadah beside his gravely ill mother in Bergen-Belsen. His father and three siblings had already died. The episode illustrates how Jewish religious practice and family bonds endured amid catastrophic loss. Such accounts belong beside records of deportation, camps and killings: they show what persecution did to particular people and what survivors struggled to maintain. Yad Vashem’s use of testimony and personal possessions allows visitors and researchers to approach those histories through identifiable lives.

Israel’s response to former Jewish prisoners who had served as kapos was another difficult part of the early postwar record. Survivors reported former kapos to police, but Israel initially had no law covering acts committed in Nazi camps. Later trials had to weigh survival under extreme coercion against cruelty toward fellow Jews. Those proceedings exposed moral and legal questions created by the camps’ system of forced power over prisoners. They do not erase victims’ suffering or excuse abuse; they show why judgments about conduct under Nazi rule required attention to the conditions imposed by the perpetrators. The wider history of Holocaust remembrance includes these painful questions as well as accounts of rescue and resistance.

Yad Vashem’s archives and library support the study of these histories on a vast scale. Its archive holds more than 210 million documents, 500,000 Holocaust photographs and 131,000 survivor testimonies. It also holds 32,400 artifacts and 11,500 works of art. The library contains more than 80,000 titles, together with periodicals and rare documents. These collections preserve evidence for families, researchers, educators and institutions seeking to reconstruct events and individual fates. In 2019, Borussia Dortmund, Daimler, Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen pledged more than $1 million toward Yad Vashem’s Shoah Heritage Collections Campus, a project devoted to safeguarding and making use of Holocaust collections.

Religious significance

Yad Vashem is a national memorial and historical institution, not a site of ancient worship. Its religious significance lies in remembrance of Jewish lives and communities, in the rituals of mourning held there and in the obligation felt by many visitors to preserve their memory. The Hall of Remembrance’s eternal flame and victims’ ashes make that purpose visible. Accounts such as Rabbi Yonah Emanuel’s Passover reading place Jewish observance within the history Yad Vashem preserves. At the same time, the institution addresses a global audience: its evidence, memorials and teaching concern a crime against Jews whose history has significance for people of many faiths and none.

Recognition of the Righteous Among the Nations forms another central part of Yad Vashem’s work. The designation honors non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, often at grave personal risk. It records individual acts of rescue without obscuring the scale of Nazi persecution or the responsibility of the perpetrators and their collaborators. Yad Vashem recognized Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes in 1966 and posthumously recognized Salvadoran diplomat José Arturo Castellanos in 2010. It recognized Vesel and Fatima Veseli and their son Refik in 1987 as the first Albanians to receive the honor. On February 10, 2015, it recognized Roddie Edmonds as the first American soldier honored as Righteous Among the Nations. The rescuers’ different backgrounds demonstrate that help came from individuals across national and religious boundaries.

Egyptian physician Mohamed Helmy became the first Arab recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews from the Nazis. Recognition of rescuers has also prompted debate over how risk and evidence should be assessed. Yad Vashem twice rejected Tunisian farm owner Khalid Abdul Wahab despite testimony from three Jewish women that he protected their family from German officers. Nazi persecution in Tunisia included arrests, torture, forced labor, deportations and executions. The short duration of German control there did not remove danger to Jews or to those who tried to protect them. Abdul Wahab’s case illustrates the importance of examining a rescuer’s documented actions and circumstances individually.

Yad Vashem’s commemorative work has drawn religious and political leaders from abroad. Pope John Paul II visited and paid homage to Jews murdered in the Holocaust, while recognizing the courage of non-Jews who saved Jewish lives. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan laid a wreath at Yad Vashem during his 2005 visit to Israel. Such visits place the murder of European Jewry before international audiences and make the memorial a setting for public acknowledgment. They also underscore its role as an Israeli national institution with a reach extending far beyond Israel.

Research and teaching carry that reach into schools and public life. Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies holds courses each year for more than 100,000 students and 50,000 soldiers. The institution offers teacher courses in Hebrew and seven other languages and sends educators abroad. With ADL and the USC Shoah Foundation, it participates in Echoes & Reflections, a Holocaust education program for American teachers. It also teaches about contemporary Jew hatred through a teacher program and an online Holocaust course. Its educational work connects the established history of Nazi persecution with the need to recognize Holocaust distortion and antisemitism in the present.

Access and disputes

Visitors can encounter Yad Vashem through its museum, memorial spaces and educational activities, but a visit to the museum alone represents only part of the institution. The Hall of Remembrance, the wider grounds and the connection to Mount Herzl place exhibits within Israel’s practice of national mourning and remembrance. The archive, library and research center serve people seeking detailed evidence beyond what a public exhibition can display. This combination of public access and sustained scholarship enables Yad Vashem to preserve original records while presenting the Holocaust’s history to new generations.

Holocaust remembrance can become subject to political pressure and historical distortion. After a World Holocaust Forum event in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem apologized on February 3 for historical inaccuracies in material presented at the event. The apology showed the importance of correcting the public record even at a prominent international commemoration. The institution’s own collections and research give it a means to test historical accounts against documents, photographs, testimony and artifacts. Accurate chronology, attention to victims’ identities and acknowledgment of Jewish resistance matter because distortion can diminish both the crimes and the people who endured them.

Yad Vashem’s response to contemporary Jew hatred rests on this historical foundation. Its teaching introduces students and educators to Nazi ideology, the destruction of Jewish communities, the testimony of survivors and the conduct of rescuers. Those subjects help distinguish evidence-based remembrance from denial and manipulation. Cooperation with teachers abroad extends that work beyond visitors who can come to Jerusalem; the online course broadens access further. Yad Vashem remains, above all, a place where the six million Jewish victims are remembered as people and where original evidence supports continued study of the Holocaust and its meaning for the present.