Yad Vashem Jerusalem

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is the principal Israeli national institution for the documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust. It was established by the Israeli Knesset in 1953 by the Yad Vashem Law and occupies a 45-acre campus on Har HaZikaron (the Mount of Remembrance) in western Jerusalem. The campus includes the Holocaust History Museum, the Hall of Remembrance, the Children’s Memorial, the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, the Valley of the Communities, the International Institute for Holocaust Research, the International School for Holocaust Studies and the largest Holocaust archive in the world, holding around 220 million pages of documentation and over 130,000 audio and video survivor testimonies.

The founding

The institution had been proposed during the war, in 1942, by Mordechai Shenhavi of Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek as a national Jewish memorial to the murdered communities of Europe. The proposal was held in suspension for a decade until the Yad Vashem Law of 19 August 1953 created the institution as a state body. The name Yad Vashem comes from Isaiah 56:5: “Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name [yad vashem] that shall not be cut off.” The choice of the verse was deliberate. The institution’s task, as the founders understood it, was the giving of names to the nameless.

The campus was developed in stages from the late 1950s onwards. The Hall of Remembrance, with its mosaic floor naming twenty-two of the principal killing sites, was opened in 1961. The original Holocaust History Museum opened in 1973; it was replaced by the current museum, designed by the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, in March 2005. The Children’s Memorial, a darkened space lit by candles whose reflections appear infinite through a system of mirrors, with the names of the murdered children read continuously, opened in 1987. The Valley of the Communities, an open-air monument carved from the Jerusalem stone bedrock, recording the names of around 5,000 European Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, opened in 1992.

The archives and the names

The Yad Vashem archive is the largest collection of Holocaust documentation in the world. It includes the captured German records that Israel acquired through the post-war exchanges with the Allied governments, the surviving ghetto archives recovered in Poland, the testimony collections gathered from survivors from the 1950s onwards, and the documentary records of the post-war reckoning with the Holocaust in Israel and elsewhere. The archive has been progressively digitised since the early 2000s and is partially available online through the Yad Vashem website.

The Pages of Testimony project, begun in the 1950s and continuing in 2026, is the institution’s central project. It is the systematic effort to record the name, place of birth, place of murder and biographical details of every individual Jewish victim of the Holocaust. The Pages are submitted by surviving relatives, friends, members of the same community, or anyone with documented information; the institution has now collected approximately 4.9 million Pages and continues to add. The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, the searchable online version, was opened in 2004 and has been continuously expanded since. The eventual aim, which will not be fully achieved because some communities were destroyed without surviving witnesses, is the recording of every name. The project is the practical realisation of the Isaiah verse from which the institution takes its name.

The Righteous Among the Nations

The Righteous Among the Nations programme, established in 1963, is the institution’s recognition of non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The recognition is conferred by a public commission of judges and historians on the basis of documented evidence and survivor testimony. By 2026 around 28,000 individuals from over fifty countries have been recognised. The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations on the Yad Vashem campus, planted with carob trees from the 1960s onwards, originally carried a tree for each recognised individual; the practice was changed in the late 1990s when the avenue ran out of space and recognised names are now inscribed on the Wall of Honour. Recognised figures are addressed elsewhere on this site, including Wallenberg, Sugihara, Schindler, Lutz, Sendler, Sousa Mendes, Perlasca and many others.

The research and education work

The International Institute for Holocaust Research was established in 1993 to coordinate Yad Vashem’s research output, which now runs to several dozen monographs, edited volumes and reference works per year. The institute publishes the academic journal Yad Vashem Studies, which has appeared since 1957. The International School for Holocaust Studies, established in 1993 in a separate campus building, provides teacher training, school programmes and educational materials for use in schools and universities worldwide; its programmes are now used in around forty countries.

The institution receives around one million visitors per year, of whom around 250,000 are foreign tourists. State visits to Israel by foreign heads of government routinely include a visit to Yad Vashem and the laying of a wreath at the Hall of Remembrance; the visit has become, for visiting officials, a form of public engagement with the Holocaust analogous to the German chancellor’s visits to former camps.

The standing of the institution

Yad Vashem is, by general consensus, one of the two principal institutions in the world for Holocaust documentation and education, alongside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The two institutions have substantially different histories, mandates and emphases (Yad Vashem is the Israeli national institution and works within the Israeli political and educational frame; USHMM is the American national institution and works within the American one), but their archives and publications are complementary rather than overlapping, and the historical profession of the Holocaust depends on both.

See also

Sources

  • James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, 1993 (chapter on Yad Vashem)
  • Doron Bar, Israeli Memory of the Holocaust 1945-1990, Berghahn, 2018
  • Mooli Brog, “In Blessed Memory of a Dream: Mordechai Shenhavi and Initial Holocaust Commemoration Ideas in Palestine 1942-1945”, Yad Vashem Studies, vol 30, 2002
  • Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993 (chapters on the founding and early operation of Yad Vashem)
  • Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution, Routledge, 2013
  • Yad Vashem Law, 5713-1953, Knesset of Israel, 19 August 1953
  • Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org
  • Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, https://yvng.yadvashem.org