“The facility was designed to strike a delicate balance between conservation and accessibility, between past and future,” explains Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, earlier this week inaugurated a new home for the world’s largest collection of Shoah-related materials.
Donors, dignitaries, Yad Vashem staff and survivors gathered to mark the opening of the Moshal Shoah Legacy Campus, which includes the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center. The Legacy Campus brings together under one roof a state-of-the-art facility for the collection, conservation and preservation of tens of thousands of Holocaust-related items gathered over decades from survivors and their families.
Along with the artifacts, more than 230 million pages of testimony and documents, and half a million photographs, will now be stored and preserved in optimal conditions in the new six-story building at the center of the Mount of Remembrance where Yad Vashem is located.
“These are our crown jewels,” Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan told the audience at a concert commemorating the opening. “They are a living testament to Jewish history. We have a moral imperative to safeguard our heritage.”