Yad Vashem

Set in a park in west Jerusalem and adjacent to Israel’s national cemetery, Yad Vashem encompasses a museum, archive, library, school and numerous commemorative and exhibition spaces. There is sadness here, in abundance, but also strength. You feel it in the supremely affecting displays, the extraordinary buildings, the generous scale and intelligent design of the campus’s mountaintop setting and the purposeful vision behind the entire institution.

Allot at least four hours for a visit here, with three hours spent in the memorial’s centerpiece, the Holocaust History Museum. Simply, sharply and unrelentingly built as a long narrow tunnel, it cuts down into the earth and then rises back up. As you proceed along it, you repeatedly leave its central spine and enter galleries left and right along it. Devoted to various stages of the pogrom, these rooms, which you don’t see until you’re upon them, are filled with artifacts, photographs, videos, personal possessions, and together they convey, as understandably as is possible, how the unthinkable was conceived and carried out, and at what cost.

You’ll come away knowing a country’s and a people’s determination that history will forever be a lesson to all, and even if you find it challenging to enter the museum in the first place, by the end you might well find it hard to leave.