Descending In and Out of Darkness

Author: Michael L Weiss

Today we all stared into the face of Evil and were reminded it still exists, waiting for the right moment to raise its head. The study of the Jewish people is one of great jubilation and despair, accounting for less than 1% of the global human population Jews have contributed so much to religion, philosophy, mathematics, healthcare, science, arts, and humanities and yet constantly persecuted relentlessly for over 5,000 years. The Covenant with Abraham came at a great cost, the Chosen People have faced constant oppression and yet they have been blessed and continue to prosper amongst all the odds.  

Capturing these feelings, today we visited two incredible museums that bore witness and documented the depths of despair and the light of hope faced by the Jewish people, namely Yad Vashem and Friends of Zion. You cannot compare one to the other, they are unique in their own way and tell different stories but seeing them both on the same day was an important turning point for our group and when you look at both together tells a story that mankind can change if they have the will.  

Yad Vashem takes one on a journey of humanity going from light into the darkness with the rise of unbridled fascism and blind obedience to a dictator that cares little for God, Mankind, or Country. There is no other repository on this planet that documents the horrors of the Holocaust and the destruction it caused, still felt around the world than Yad Vashem.  Friends of Zion tells a different story, one of hope and perseverance of many nationalities and religions pushing for the creation of a Jewish Homeland. As dark and disturbing as Yad Vashem can be its importance cannot be ignored as it serves all of humanity in teaching us that we cannot allow this to ever happen again to any group of people no matter their faith, nationality, or differences. Friends of Zion tells a different story, one of how many nationalities, religions, and scholars came together to endorse and push the world to create a homeland for the Jewish people. It is a story of hope, determination, and understanding of world leaders. It also stands as a testament that if we work together nothing is impossible and we can make positive changes in the world. 

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior”, and they wanted to create a “racially pure” state. Jews, deemed “inferior,” were considered an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted and killed other groups, including at times their children, because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Romanians (Gypsies), Germans with disabilities, and some of the Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Because the Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” groups, children—particularly Jewish and Romani children—were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust. Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as a result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed however the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.

Group	Number of Deaths
Jews	6 million
Soviet civilians	around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figures for Jews)
Soviet prisoners of war	around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)
Non-Jewish Polish civilians	around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)
Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina)	312,000
People with disabilities living in institutions	up to 250,000
Roma (Gypsies)	between 250,000 and 500,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses	around 1,900
Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocial	at least 70,000
German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory	undetermined
Homosexuals	hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocial noted above)

The museum is only part of Yad Vashem as the mission is much larger than just the museum. As written:

Three generations have come into being since the end of World War II. The generation that lived through the Holocaust is dwindling. The presence of witnesses – the remnant who survived – has always ensured a certain moral strength; their increasing absence creates a moral, cultural, and educational vacuum. How will Holocaust commemoration remain relevant to members of the fourth and fifth generations, both Jewish and non-Jewish? What place will it occupy when the survivor generation is no longer with us? Will remembrance be meaningful in the context of contemporary events? How should we prepare ourselves at this historic juncture?

In the spirit of the Jewish tradition of “Vehigadeta Lebincha” (“And you shall tell your children”), Yad Vashem places great emphasis on educating the younger generations about the Holocaust. 

Yad Vashem continues to pave the way for a brighter future.

The Holocaust History Museum is a massive complex, with indoor and outdoor sections but, mainly underground. It’s a long linear structure in the form of a spike that cuts through the mountain with its uppermost edge – a skylight – protruding through the mountain ridge. Galleries portraying the complexity of the Jewish situation during those terrible years branch off this spike-like shaft, and the exit emerges dramatically out of the mountainside, affording a view of the valley below. Unique settings, spaces with varying heights, and different degrees of light accentuate focal points of the unfolding narrative.

At the end of the Museum’s historical narrative is the Hall of Names — a repository for the Pages of Testimony of millions of Holocaust victims, and a memorial to those who perished.

As you begin your tour, the architecture takes you from the light and as the multimedia and actual collections describe the horrors you descend into darkness. As the war concludes, with the defeat of the Nazi’s you reemerge into the light signifying hope for all mankind. 

Visiting Yad Vashem in my opinion should be mandatory for all that travel to Israel. 

Friends of Zion

I had heard of this Museum from an Egyptian Coptic Christian friend of mine who is a donor, but truthfully prior to that I had never heard of it, and frankly, I was suspect as to its mission. However, as we began to move through its three floors of sensational multimedia exhibits I was blown away by its beauty, message, and feeling of inspiration. The Friends of Zion Museum opened in 2015 in Jerusalem with the help of thousands of supporters of Israel worldwide. It presents a technologically advanced and interactive experience that tells the stories of both the dream to restore the Jewish people to their historic homeland and the brave non-Jews who assisted them in realizing this dream.

The Friends of Zion Museum serves as a platform for fighting BDS and anti-Semitism internationally. While I cannot attest as to who created all the presentations, they were brilliant, the visuals are so clever, done in a style similar to the artist’s Marc Chagall and Claude Monet. The collections are thought-provoking, interactive, and keep you entertained while teaching you the history of the movements that banded together to support the creation of a Jewish homeland. Friends of Zion should also be on everyone’s itinerary when in Jerusalem.

Visiting these two institutions on the same day was a powerful and moving experience and one that I will take with me for the rest of my life. The lessons learned here are simple, there is no place in this world for hatred and bigotry. All people of faith no matter what religion should confront it head-on so that Evil does not return.  

After all, are we not all our brothers keeper? To that question, today I would respond with firm conviction, “Yes, Cain, you are your brother’s keeper, and not only you but each one of us is our brother’s keeper.”