Remember

Yesterday, we spent the day exploring Israel's past on Mt. Herzl. Mt. Herzl is to the secular Jewish state what the Temple Mount is to religious Jews. It symbolizes both the painful past of the Jewish people, with the Holocaust Museum and the Military Cemetery at the bottom of the hill, and the hope of the future for the Jewish state, symbolized by Theodore Herzl's grave at the top of the hill, the founder of the Zionist movement. 

We then spent the afternoon exploring the grounds and museum at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial. The museum is shaped like a triangle, and runs horizontally across the park. We wandered through the trees planted for the Righteous Among the Nations, including the one planted for Oskar and Emilie Schindler. The sculpture below memorializes those who fought back against the Nazi's in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I've visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC as well, and though both are amazingly powerful, the experiences are distinctly different. The DC museum is darker, emphasizing the historical rise of the Third Reich, the degradation of the Jewish peoples, and the horror of the Final Solution in an beautiful use of space and artifacts. Yad Vashem, however, is stark in its simplicity. The design is very industrial. There is a heavy reliance on artifacts and personal testimony, and an emphasis on the resilience of the Jewish people before, during, and after the Shoah. The floor of the museum is sloped up on both ends, with the lowest point at the exhibit on the Final Solution and the camps. However, when you exit the museum at the other end, you are overlooking rolling hillsides dotted with neighborhoods, homes, businesses, and city parks, leaving you buoyed with a sense of hope, despite the dark days past. 

 Yad Vashem humbled me. Not only was it immensely moving, but it proved to me how little I truly know about this conflict in the Middle East. It becomes so easy to blame one side or the other. After spending much of this week within Palestinian communities, traveling through the checkpoint and behind the wall, its easy to blame the Israeli's. But Yah Vashem reminded me that the Jewish people's desire for a Jewish state isn't ridiculous after the hardships they've faced. After the Shoah, they longed for a place to raise their children away from persecution and the horrors that they had endured. However, the correlation between the Jewish ghettos and the Palestinian settlements becomes even more clear after a visit to Yah Vashem. Thus, I left Yad Vashem much more confused than I had been when I came in. The mark of a successful day.