April 28


ISRAEL:

Museum Aims to Keep Holocaust Legacy Alive

Israel's main Holocaust memorial center is building an
underground museum to preserve survivors' stories and to keep alive the
memory of the millions of Jews who were killed.

Officials with the Yad Vashem center showed the museum, still under
construction, in anticipation of Israel's annual Heroes and Martyrs
Memorial Day, which began Monday evening.

Air raid sirens were to sound nationwide on Tuesday morning, when
residents also pause to remember Jewish victims of the Nazis.

The $110 million project will update the existing exhibit to attract
younger people with interactive displays and computer data banks.

The idea is that the technology will someday stand in place of the
experience of meeting and hearing survivors themselves, when they are
gone.

``We understood that we have to disseminate messages in a world that will
one day be without survivors, to build something human, on a personal
basis,'' said Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, touring the underground
structure as workers swung hammers and wielded saws.

Ruth Brand, 75, a Holocaust survivor, said many survivors are now finding
it easier to talk about the horrors they endured to their grandchildren
rather than their own children, whom they sought to protect.

``I think many feel that if they don't open their mouth and talk now, it's
going down to the grave with them,'' she said.

The museum's prism-shaped concrete tunnel, illuminated by skylights, was
designed by Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie. Slicing through the
earth, its two ends pierce the surface, opening onto views of Jerusalem's
western foothills.

Visitors will be able to use computers to see maps and photos of camps,
survivors and documents about Jewish life in pre-Nazi Europe. Video rooms
will screen documentary and feature films on the Holocaust. They will also
show interviews with survivors, produced by American filmmaker Steven
Spielberg.

One hall will display artwork made during the Holocaust. Using authentic
artifacts, galleries will house exhibits on prewar Jewish life, Nazi
Germany, concentration camps and a replica of a street in the Warsaw
ghetto.

The museum's 2.3 million pages of testimony with information on Holocaust
victims -- filled out by relatives and friends -- will be shelved in a
large, circular Hall of Names above a crater dug into the hill to
represent a grave.

In 1999, the museum opened its International School for Holocaust Studies,
where tens of thousands of students and teachers from around the world
participate in seminars and meet survivors each year. The school aims to
train teachers to run courses on the Holocaust.

``Nothing will replace the survivor ... but we are preparing ourselves to
teach the human story with all the materials we have,'' said the school's
pedagogical director, Shulamit Imber.

(source: Associated Press)