Yad Vashem

     We reached Yad Vashem after an arduous yet beautiful hike up Mount Hertzl.  Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Museum for Jerusalem.  It is the most comprehensive and explicit Holocaust Museum I've attended yet.  The building was designed by Moshe Safdie, who interestingly enough designed Crystal Bridges in Arkansas.  He formatted the structure to jut out of the mountainside in Modernist geometric angulation.  The forms cut like sharp blocks, creating a jagged prism closely resembling the rocks so abundant in the landscape.  The building wounds the mountain, coyly playing with the visual devices familiar in modernism but metaphorically severing the body of the  mountain.  We hiked up a desert, rich with dry greenery, rosemary and olive trees as well as dust and marble gravel that proved unforgiving.  After we traveled through the historic, then artistic interpretation of the Holocaust in Europe to the settlement of the Israeli state in 1949, we spilled out into a landscape that embraces the promised land.  It astounds and refreshes simultaneously.

     The exhibitions were curated chronologically starting at the rise of antisemitism following World War I, moving through the Nazi Party's ascension to power and the humiliations and atrocities they committed against Jews, Romani people, gays and lesbians, Polish Christians, the disabled, and Jehovah's Witnesses.  Beyond the well known history however, curators provided exhibits showcasing Jewish resistance and militias that took to the forests.  Additionally, the museum supplemented each exhibit with interviews from survivors that both shocked and moved me.  These were the hardest things to bare I felt.  I almost lost my footing at a large scale photograph of a soldier shooting the back of a woman fleeing clutching a baby.  These things etch into my mind and creep in late at night.  The final culmination of this museum did not focus on the Allies winning the war but the aftershock of zealous antisemitism that rippled through Europe following Germany's surrender.  These accounts addressed the  orphans, rebuilding and emigration (legal and illegal) into neighboring countries.  Finally, an explanation on the rise of the Zionist movement and settlement of Jewish Diaspora by the creation of the State of Israel.

The most poignant of exhibits to me, surprise surprise, was artistic.  The Hall of Names holding the pages of testimony commemorating the millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust exemplified metaphor.  It seemed both infinite and intimate.  A dome filled with photos of victims fit within a most substantial library of black binders.  At the bottom of this all-encompassing open sphere was a deep carved well with water.  Pushing our thoughts toward memory, the pool reflected the photographs of those above.  This space echoed with a resounding bong when I threw a coin in and silently said a prayer like many others had done before me, expressly making my physical presence apparent and concrete.  This was an interesting juxtaposition I thought.  The above and below, heaven and earth, death and life, dark and light were in pointed visual commentary.

Now Holocaust museums are never easy, nor should they be.  They fill me with a misanthropy that is almost impossible for me to dig my way out of.  Even though I spilled out from this space onto a landscape of hope, I walked through a city that exists in fear and conflict.  And to be perfectly honest I continually considered American congruencies of rising intolerance, especially to Muslims and illegal immigrants while walking through this museum.  I walked away stunned, disheartened and ashamed.   But I am reminded.  I am here and I have to push forward with the lessons learned from our past.   Yet again, I am reminded of this trip being about binaries.  That one can experience hope and loss simultaneously.