Yad Vashem

Almost forgot I didn't post yesterday! Yesterday was supposed to be high mass in Latin, but apparently "winter" starts early here so the winter mass time is 5:30, not 6:30, so we missed it. Alas. But we did get to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre without a thousand tour groups milling around. And we caught a glimpse of the Armenian and Greek Orthodox services going on at the time, so that was new to me and very interesting. The sepulchre itself is kind of nice. It's inside a shrine within the church, and no matter how many tour guides are droning on outside, only two or three people can fit in the shrine at once, so it's always peaceful and amenable to reflection, which despite my personal feelings on religion is what I like best about churches.

After that, we toyed with going to Masada or the Galilee for the day, but having gone home to cook breakfast (cooking! what bliss!), it had gotten late so we headed to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem instead. We figured we'd be done in a few hours, but that place is amazing. It took us nearly 6 hours to get through. And we could have taken longer. There is so much material there. Infinite photos and artworks and artifacts, plus hours worth of video testimony by survivors. There were a lot of different people, but some of them repeated several times throughout the museum so by the end it really felt like I'd known them for years and had been hearing their stories all my life. It made the whole thing very personal. I've seen a lot of material on the Holocaust, and of everything I've seen, this was truly a monument to the lives of the victims, not just to the tragedy of their deaths. It was sad, but really beautiful too.

At the end of the museum is the room full of files - one for each victim. They have about 3 million testimonies so far from friends, relatives, co-workers, anybody who can provide information. Each file has the name of the person, pictures if possible, and anything people think the world should know about the person who was lost. The files are kept in a spherical room, which you enter by a platform through the center. In the inside of the platform is a deep rough-cut stone pit. On the outside is a wall of black and white file boxes that curves up from below you and rises up toward the cieling. It really gives you a physical sense of the enormity of the loss, of the emptiness left behind, and it's very powerful.