Yad Vashem

So on Monday October 15 I went to Yad Vashem which is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem... it was quite overwhelming.  I spent a lot of my teen years loving the hundreds of books I read on the Holocaust and World War II but actually watching all of the videos on different survivors stories gave me a whole new perspective on the entire event.... it was definitely a learning experience...

So this is the outside view of the museum... that triangle is actually where the bulk of the museum is located is was pretty cool.

So ever tree that is planted in the courtyard represents a person, family, or group of people that helped to hide a Jew or get them to safety and accepted that if they were discovered they would accept the same fate as the Jews.  I really liked the idea of it all... I hope that one day I can do what I know is right in spite of the danger I may face.

This is supposed to represent the Jews that went "like lambs to the slaughter"

This is supposed to represent the Jews that stood up defiantly to the Nazis and fought back.

This pillar and the quote next to it pay tribute to the Jews that fought bravely in the forests against the Nazis... it was really cool because the memorial was set back in a bunch of trees... it just looked really cool!

I know you can't see the quote really well so here is what it says: "Now and forever in memory of those who rebelled in the camps and the ghettoes, fought in the woods, in the underground, and with the allied forces... Who braved their way to Eretz Israel and those who died."

This was part of the children memorial for the children that died during the Holocaust... if you look closely the tops of the pillars are hacked off to symbolize how the children's lives were cut short

The grave site of Theodor Herzl who was the leader of the Zionist Movement on Mount Herzl