Tell the Tale: Holocaust Remembrance Day
Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior
VP, Product Management
This week Israel observed
HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, a holiday inaugurated
in 1959 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. This is an
especially important day to
id="omu9" >Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based
center for remembering the Holocaust's victims and survivors. I
was fortunate to tour Yad Vashem's
>New Museum with my family last summer, and
was moved and inspired by the experience. Our guide told us an
anecdote about a visitor, a survivor of the camps, who recognized
an item in one exhibit and was able to explain its context to
museum curators and fellow visitors. This is why Yad Vashem is so
important: it's a place that preserves the horrible history of
the Holocaust and puts it in context for all of us.
But a lot of people, including many survivors, aren't able to
visit Yad Vashem. How can they discover and share stories? How can
they see an artifact or a photo and say, I recognize that item or
person because I was there? The answer, of course, is the
Internet.
We're proud to report that Yad Vashem has just launched two new
YouTube channels,
id="gh7u23" >one in English, the
id="gh7u24" >other in Arabic. They feature
testimonies from Holocaust survivors, historians' lectures on
key issues related to the Holocaust, and footage of events big and
small (
id="o1kw" >Pope John Paul
II's visit in 2000, a
>touching family reunion). More
importantly, they are a way for Yad Vashem to surpass its physical
boundaries and reach out to an audience worldwide. This is the
promise the Internet holds: to inform and connect the globe, to
remember stories, to teach us. As
>Elie Wiesel said in
id="gh7u18" >his speech at the opening of the
museum: "If we decided to tell the tale, it is because we
wanted the world to be a better world, just a better world, and
learn and remember."
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