Temple Beth Zion/Westminster Presbyterian Church Travel'Blog'
January 21, 2010 – Shalom from Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority
(Tel Aviv, Sea of Galilee, Mount of Beatitudes, Jerusalem, Old City Jerusalem, Masada,)Ben Gurion Airport
Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name , that shall not be cut off. Isaiah 56:5
A day to remember – in the best and fullest sense of the term. We started this morning by visiting the Chagall windows of the synagogue at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center – Israel’s world famous medical research institute. The windows depict the twelve tribes of Israel in Chagall’s typically bright colors and cubist/collagist style. Coming at the end of the week, the windows were a helpful review of the Jewish history we learned depicting the stories, characteristics and struggles of the biblical leaders of Israel.
From there we went to Mt. Hertzel – where the tomb of Theodore Hertzel, the father of modern Zionism, resides. Hertzel lived in the 19th century and after reporting the Dreyfus trial (a scandalous condemnation of a Jewish man) for the New Press of Vienna
determined that Jews had to get out of Europe and inhabit their own land. Hertzel sensed a dark chapter in human history was fast approaching for the Jewish people.
Mt. Hertzel also serves as a national cemetery where Prime Ministers, Presidents and Speakers of the Knesset are buried as well as rank and file soldiers who were killed in service to the nation. It is a beautiful, thoughtful, powerful place where today there were hundreds of Israeli military inductees touring, learning Jewish and Israeli history.
The culmination came appropriately at the national Holocaust museum – Yad Vashem – a fitting follow up to the twelve tribes of Israel depicted by Chagall and the cemetery for national leaders and military servicemen and women. The grounds of Yad Vashem include at least three museums as well as several outdoor displays. Inside the main building – a long angular stone/cement structure that looks like a spike hammered into the side of the mountain or heart of humanity. In the Hall of Remembrance Rabbi Rosenfeld led us in the Kaddush – prayers for the departed after which we walked quietly through the memorial to the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust.
Arranged from the blissful days of Jewish life in Europe before German occupation to the rise of Hitler and Nazism, to the increasing acceptance of his goal of extinguishing the Jewish people, the photographs, films, memorabilia and physical shape of the museum offer an immersion in the reality and horror of the Holocaust. But toward the end of the displays the “Hall of Names” – dedicated to remembering and housing in archives the names and records of each victim – signals a hopeful conclusion to the exhibits. Thousands of photographs of the victims hang above a deep pit with water at the bottom. As you look into the pit you see the faces of the victims reflected in the water yet appearing as if they are hovering above you as a ‘great cloud’ of witnesses. The genius of the museum is that the message of “never again” is reinforced over and over by the very space itself. As you walk out of the last room into the sky-lighted porch of the building you see across the valley to hundreds of Israeli homes: a tangible symbol after this unthinkable horror that God’s people prevail in one of the great democracies of he world.
As we walked down the Path of the Righteous Gentiles (non-Jews who helped save many Jews) with our friends from Temple Beth Zion we felt closer, more aware, better equipped to fight the forces of darkness in an imperfect world. Tomorrow the Dead Sea.
Shalom and Kol Tuv