Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on Tuesday March 15, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) said.
The ICEJ, an influential Jerusalem based Christian organization supporting Israel, noted that Tuesday’s event was to be "the largest gathering of international leaders in Israel since the funeral of former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin" with high-level delegations from some 40 countries.
Those attending include United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, seven heads of state and six prime ministers, along with New York city mayor Michael Bloomberg, representing the US administration.
MUSEUM REVOLUTION
"The new Holocaust History Museum is a revolution in Holocaust memory," commented the Israel News Agency. "Making the individual victim the center of its story, the Museum weaves more than 90 personal stories into a thematic and historical narrative. Using authentic artifacts, testimonies, documentary evidence, archival sources, films, art and even music, [it] tells the story of the Holocaust through the voice of the individual," the agency said.
"It is impossible to understand the Holocaust and absorb its meaning without learning about those who were most directly affected – the Jews," Avner Shalev, who is also Chief Curator of the new Memorial was quoted as saying.
"As such, we have made every effort to present a full picture of the Shoah – every artifact, document, story and picture that would give the visitor a sense of what the Shoah was and who the people were who experienced it was carefully considered. With more than 2,500 items in the museum, we tried to include both the unique and the representative," he added.
MILLIONS KILLED
It is also an attempt to show the faces behind the hard statistics of roughly 6 million Jews who were massacred in Europe as part of Adolf Hitler’s "Final Solution" to what the Nazi dictator called the Jewish problem, according to Yad Vashem. Most victims were murdered in six extermination camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest and at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there before its liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. In total 85 percent of the Jewish population in Poland died, some 2.8 million people.
Only an estimated 11 percent of Jewish children who were alive in 1933 survived the Holocaust, according to published estimates. About 5.5 million other victims of Nazi atrocities, labeled "enemies of the German state", included up to half a million Gypsies, an estimated 10,000-15,000 homosexuals and 3 million Poles. Catholic and Protestant clergy also were sent to concentration camps as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Some Holocaust researchers condemned wartime allies for not bombing the railway tracks that brought Jews from across Europe to the camps. Survivors lament what Nobel prize-winning author Elie Wiesel describes "as shameful indifference to mass murder," the Reuters news agency reported.
The United States and Britain garnered much intelligence about the camps, other historians say, but their priority was a total military defeat of Nazi Germany, not rescuing European Jews.
GOLD TRAIN
The opening of the new Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem comes after the American government on Friday, March 11, reached a $25.5 million settlement with the families of Jewish Hungarian Holocaust victims of the Nazi "Gold Train" affair, pending court approval. US authorities for the first time acknowledged the American Army’s role in stealing trainloads of the families’ treasures in Austria, at the end of the Second World War.
In Budapest, officials from the Jewish community welcomed the prospect of compensation. "What happened was horrible, people lost everything," said Erno Lazarovits, Foreign Relations Director of Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary in an earlier interview with BosNewsLife. Up to 50,000 Hungarian Jews are expected to receive compensation for the loss of their valuables packed in dozens of boxcars, which were apparently first stolen by the Nazis, and then confiscated by American troops.
Lazarovits recalled how the train wagons, which became known as the "Gold Train," were packed with gold, jewelry as well as art, clothing, oriental rugs and other household goods and religious articles. The US is expected to pay millions of dollars to Hungarian Holocaust survivors, numbering about 10,000 in America, 15,000 more in Hungary and as many as 25,000 in Israel, American media reported.
LARGEST COMMUNITY
Hungary has Eastern Europe’s largest Jewish community outside Russia, however an estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews were massacred during World War Two. Israel hopes the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust will also focus attention on the right of the Jewish State to exist in peace.
However the international peace plan for the Middle East depends on the Palestinian Authority waging a "serious fight" against terrorism, Bloomberg news agency quoted Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as telling visiting UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. "Without genuine action by the Palestinians against terrorism, it will be unable to move anything forward," Sharon said earlier at a meeting with Annan in Jerusalem, reported Bloomberg citing an e-mailed Israeli government statement.
The Israeli Cabinet approved the dismantling of unauthorized settlements in the West Bank, one of the steps required of Israel under the peace plan that is aimed at establishing a Palestinian state. But the government has made clear that these steps require the Palestinian Authority to take action to stop terrorist attacks. (With: Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent BosNewsLife, reports from Israel, Hungary, BosNewsLife Research).
