Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem (meaning: a memorial and a name) is Israel's official memorial site to the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis during World War II and the Holocaust. Yad Vashem is a complex of museums, memorial sites and research, documentation and education centers, all of which concentrate on the memory of the Holocaust and its atrocities. In Yad Vashem one can find the "Garden of the Righteous among the Nations”, honoring the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, and the "Hall of Remembrance”, where the visitors can remember the victims of the Holocaust. On the floor of the "Hall of Remembrance” are engraved the names of twenty two out of hundreds of the most infamous Nazi extermination and concentration camps, murder sites and transit camps. At the center of the "Hall of Remembrance” burns the "Eternal Flame” and next to it stands a stone crypt containing the ashes of Holocaust victims, brought to Israel from the extermination camps. One can also find here the "Holocaust History Museum”, the "Warsaw Ghetto Square”, the "Cattle Car Memorial to the Deportees” and the "Children’s Memorial”. At Yad Vashem exists the largest information database in the world on the subject of the Holocaust, which includes more that sixty five million documentation pages and about ninety thousand books on the subject of the Holocaust as well as the Yad Vashem collections of art and artifacts. All around Yad Vashem one can find monuments that commemorate the Jewish victims and their suffering during the Holocaust and reinforce the strong emotional impressions which stay with one following the visit.