Yad Vashem - November 3, 2011

Yad Vashem, the new Holocaust Museum opened in 2005 is a spiritual, historical, and political experience that most visitors to Jerusalem are encouraged to have. Our delegation visit is part of a day when we are encountering the Israeli side the conflict with Palestine, both historically and in the present. Later we visit the Israeli village near Gaza that has received the most random shelling from Hamas militants.

There is a lot on-line that documents the displays at Yad Vashem, and the emotions that accompany a visit. Wayne found himself moved most deeply by the exhibits documenting the extermination camps, and in particular the models of the gas chamber complexes and what the people whose lives ended there endured in their last minutes on earth. The Children's Memorial by Moshe Safde was also particularly moving in it's simplicity - a room with images of the faces of children who died, a female voice reading their names and ages, and a second room, so dark you needed to hold a hand rail to move through it, in which mirrors created an infinite image of a single memorial candle stretching out into space.

Culturally, historically, and politically the experience documented at Yad Vashem is central to Israeli decision making in the ongoing political dynamics with Palestine and with Arab neighbors. The fact that no church or nation or government (with the exception of Denmark) tried to stop the Holocaust is well documented. Whether and how Israel trusts other nation's and the country's acceptance of it's isolation in the international community has deep roots in the Holocaust experience.

In seminary, Wayne undertook a semester long course on the Holocaust, and one of the memories from that experience that was revived today was the banality of the bureaucratic and administrative policies that made the Holocaust possible. The "final solution" was an ideological decision, but it's implementation required a lot if people doing their part in an elaborate administrative structure from which the was no escape.

Without intending to draw any direct comparison between the Holocaust experience and the suffering of Palestinians, there was a poignancy nevertheless in a display in the museum that documented the process by which the homes of Jews in Poland were appropriated and people expelled from them under German laws imposed when Germany annexed parts of Poland.

Israel is determined that never again will the Holocaust be repeated, but it took more than anti-Semitism to make the Holocaust possible. A blindness to the humanity of other people, and a willingness to ignore the suffering that a matrix of controlling policies imposes on a population, were all among the reasons why the German public allowed the Holocaust to happen.