January 27 will mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, and the number of survivors able to tell their stories is dwindling. The story of the Shoah will soon need to be told in different ways, and Israel’s national memorial to the victims, Yad Vashem, is finding new methods to keep their memories alive.
Standing in the lobby of the new David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center at Yad Vashem, one is greeted by a large video-art wall. The work by Ran Slavin runs for 44 minutes and showcases a small part of the vast collection of over half a million photographs, 30,000 artifacts, and 14,000 works of art, weaving a digital tapestry of memories.
Dani Dayan, Yad Vashem’s chairman, says the state-of-the-art center is the most advanced repository for the collection, preservation, restoration, and storage of Holocaust-related materials. Five underground floors are equipped with world-leading technology to optimize preservation of the precious artifacts. These artifacts will be the future storytellers.
Curator Michael Tal shows us a table of artifacts set out for a group arriving later in the afternoon, but it’s a moment of serendipity. There’s a spoon lying front and center. It tells the story of Arthur Poznanski and his escape from a train on the way to Mauthausen. The spoon deflected a bullet fired by the SS and saved Arthur’s life. Arthur Poznanski was the uncle of Mark Gordon, author of this feature.
AS MARK holds the spoon via latex gloves, Yad Vashem’s public relations team snaps some images of this emotional moment. So does Dani Dayan.
Dayan was appointed as chairman for this transformation era in 2021. Although his professional career was as an entrepreneur with a successful software company, he was always passionate about living Jewish history. He completed his spell as consul general in New York and when offered the role at Yad Vashem, he didn’t need to be asked twice.
Telling the story of the Holocaust to as many as possible
He says the role of Yad Vashem is to tell the story of the Holocaust to as many people as possible. It has to collect documents, data, and artifacts to provide the proof. When the last survivors die out, Dayan says it will be the “happy hour” of deniers and distorters, so the story must have a solid platform.
The next stage is to research and then convert the data into knowledge. Then it is important to propagate the knowledge, including the challenge of speaking to a younger generation with a shorter attention span.
Yad Vashem is the second-most visited site in Israel after the Western Wall, and it is important for it to reach a wide audience.
Dayan said he thought that after such a cataclysmic event as the Holocaust, we would be immune for at least a century from antisemitism, but we see today rabid antisemitism. During his spell in New York, 15 American Jews were murdered, including those in the attacks on Pittsburgh and Poway.
Learning about the Shoah is not the cure to antisemitism, but it is an integral part in the fight against the scourge that has raised its ugly head again, he says.
Yad Vashem is vast, sitting on a 45-acre site. The Collections Center, which opens to the public in 2025, is the latest addition to the sprawling memorial that sits on the side of Mount Herzl, connected to the National Cemetery by a path through the Valley of the Communities, a memorial to 5,000 communities destroyed during the Holocaust.
The centerpiece of Yad Vashem is the prism-shaped museum with 10 halls, including the oft-photographed Hall of Names. If there is time after that, scattered across the campus is an Art Museum, the Hall of Remembrance, The Righteous amongst the Nations Garden and the recently opened Book of Names, a listing of nearly five million victims.
DISCUSSING THE use and misuse of terminology around the Holocaust, Dayan gets to the crux of the matter about comparisons between October 7 and the Holocaust.
He recounts talking to US President Joe Biden on the way to the Hall of Remembrance and telling him that for Israelis, the Shoah is omnipresent. Those early stories of mothers muffling their toddlers to stop them crying and being discovered by their assailants gives Jews and Israelis associative thoughts of stories like that of Anne Frank.
But as time has passed in the days and months since October 7, it has become clear that this is not a continuation of the Shoah, despite some similarities in the cruelty and the genocidal intention. In Israel, we had the ability to defend ourselves.
The heroism of the security teams in the Gaza border communities can be equated to that of Mordechai Anielewicz and Pawel Frenkiel in the Warsaw Ghetto, but the purpose wasn’t to die with dignity – it was to save lives. Dayan says there should be no yellow stars worn at the UN because we are not defenseless anymore.
Dayan talks about the late historian Alex Dancyg, ruthlessly killed in 2024 by Hamas. Dancyg had worked with Yad Vashem since 1990 preparing guides to accompany Israeli trips to Poland. Dayan says his murder was gut-wrenching.
He had heard that Dancyg had an intellectual curiosity, whether it was about the Shoah, Polish poetry, or growing organic peanuts on Kibbutz Nir Oz, from where he was kidnapped. Although they had not met, Dayan feels he had a metaphysical encounter with him when he went to Lublin in May 2024 and used Dancyg’s guide as he walked around the city; at each location, he had a feeling that Dancyg was with him.
Yad Vashem is also responsible for awarding the title of Righteous Among the Nations to non-Jews who made great sacrifices to assist victims of the Holocaust, and there is a garden to visit with a wall containing more than 25,000 names, from royalty to simple shopkeepers. Around Europe, there are museums dedicated to some of these heroes, such as the Janis Lipke Memorial in Riga and the Ulma Family Museum in Markowa in Poland.
Dayan says the fact that these people saved Jews in such a period of moral darkness around the world is amazing. “It is important to visit museums such as these but with guides that give the right context.” Sadly, says Dayan, there were many more collaborators than those who helped. It is also important that countries do not glorify war criminals who later fought against the Communists.
Returning to the subject of Yad Vashem as a tourist site, Dayan says there are social media posts talking of people going on first dates at Yad Vashem, and a listing once on Tripadvisor of Yad Vashem as a romantic destination.
He hopes the addition of the new Collections Center, a new theatrical experience based on bringing artifacts to life, and a new immersive audio-visual experience about the communities that were obliterated will keep the visitors flowing in, and he is happy to defer to the Western Wall as the number one destination.
Mark and David host The Jerusalem Post Podcast – Travel Edition (jpost.1eye.us/podcast/travel-edition).