Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem—the World Holocaust Remembrance Center—is Israel’s national institution dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and the lives of the Jews murdered in it. Established as a memorial project and recognized by the Knesset in 1953, it has grown into a global center for remembrance, documentation, research, education, and the preservation of Jewish heritage. Located on Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance, Yad Vashem connects individual lives with the history of Jewish communities, resistance, survival, and renewal.

From a memorial vision to a national institution

The idea of creating a national memorial in the Jewish homeland emerged during the Holocaust. In 1942, Mordecai Shenhavi of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek proposed an institution that would preserve the names of the murdered and commemorate Jewish life, heroism, and destruction. The name Yad Vashem comes from Isaiah: “I will give them in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name... an everlasting name.”

After discussions within the Zionist movement and the Jewish institutions in Palestine, the Yad Vashem project began operating in 1946. On 19 August 1953, the Knesset passed the Yad Vashem Law, establishing the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority as an official institution of the State of Israel. This decision made Holocaust remembrance a permanent national responsibility and an integral part of Israel’s public life and Jewish consciousness.

Archives, collections, and the recovery of lives

One of Yad Vashem’s central tasks is to preserve every possible trace of Jewish life and of the destruction of European Jewry. Its archive, founded in 1946, contains official and personal documents, diaries, letters, photographs, films, deportation and extermination records, community records, and survivor testimonies. The collections document not only persecution and murder, but also Jewish life before the Holocaust and the experiences of survivors after the war.

The Yad Vashem Library holds more than 167,000 books and article reprints in 64 languages, as well as more than 4,000 newspapers and periodicals. It serves researchers, educators, families, and anyone seeking to understand the Holocaust within Jewish and European history. A new archive and library building opened in 2000, and in 2011 Yad Vashem launched an online archive, making historical materials accessible to users around the world.

Opened in 2024, the Collections Center provides advanced conditions for the preservation of millions of documents, photographs, artifacts, works of art, and testimonies. It also allows visitors to see the work of collecting, conserving, cataloging, and researching historical materials—work that ensures that future generations will encounter primary sources rather than only later summaries.

Every person has a name

Yad Vashem’s collection of victims’ names is among its most powerful achievements. Through Pages of Testimony, archival documents, historical lists, and survivor accounts, the institution seeks to restore each victim’s name, identity, family, and community. The Hall of Names combines a memorial space with a research resource, bringing together photographs, Pages of Testimony, and a searchable database.

The online database, launched in 2004, enables families around the world to search for relatives, add information, and reconnect broken branches of family history. Alongside national and public remembrance, this work returns the Holocaust to its most human dimension: the victims were not an abstract number, but millions of people with names, faces, homes, and lives.

Education for Israel and the world

Yad Vashem’s educational work reaches far beyond its Jerusalem campus. Its education division trains teachers, guides, soldiers, students, and young people in Israel and abroad. Hundreds of thousands of learners and thousands of educators participate in its activities each year. Courses, seminars, and online resources are adapted for different audiences and are also delivered through educational institutions outside Israel.

This work translates historical scholarship into practical teaching: how to present Jewish life before the Holocaust, how to use testimony responsibly, and how to explain persecution, ghettos, camps, resistance, liberation, and survival. Yad Vashem’s websites and educational materials in languages including Arabic, Persian, Russian, French, Spanish, German, and English broaden access to Holocaust history beyond Israeli and Jewish audiences.

Research and publishing

The International Institute for Holocaust Research, founded in 1993, supports historical research, collaborative projects with institutions worldwide, conferences, and scholarly seminars. It publishes research, documents, monographs, and the journal Yad Vashem Studies, and provides academic and financial support to researchers and students. These activities helped establish Holocaust studies in Israel and internationally as a field grounded in evidence, testimony, and historical analysis.

Among Yad Vashem’s major publishing projects is the Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, which records the lives and destruction of Jewish communities throughout Europe. The project preserves more than the history of persecution: it documents the Jewish world that existed before the Holocaust—its institutions, culture, religious life, languages, and everyday experience.

Museums, art, and memorial sites

The Holocaust History Museum, opened in 2005 and designed by Moshe Safdie, presents the history of the Holocaust through documents, artifacts, artwork, films, letters, and testimonies. Its ten exhibition halls guide visitors from Jewish life and antisemitism through the rise of Nazism, the ghettos and camps, resistance, liberation, and the lives of survivors. The prism-shaped structure, cut into the mountain and opened toward daylight, makes architecture part of the historical and human experience.

The Yad Vashem Art Museum holds one of the world’s largest collections of art created by Jews and others during the Holocaust period. Its approximately 10,000 works show how artists continued to create under conditions of persecution, hunger, and imprisonment. The Visual Center collects and catalogs films about the Holocaust and provides access to filmed survivor testimonies.

The campus also includes the Hall of Remembrance, the Hall of Names, the Children’s Memorial, the Valley of the Communities, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial, the Deportees Memorial, the Partisans’ Panorama, the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, and a synagogue containing Jewish ritual objects that survived the Holocaust. Each site emphasizes a different dimension of memory: victims, communities, children, resistance fighters, rescuers, and a spiritual world that was attacked but not erased.

Righteous Among the Nations

Under its founding mandate, Yad Vashem honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. An independent public commission examines testimonies and documentation, while survivors, relatives, and researchers may submit cases for consideration. Those recognized are commemorated in the Avenue and Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations on Mount of Remembrance.

This undertaking adds a vital moral dimension to Holocaust remembrance. It records the choices made by individuals who acted under extraordinary danger and demonstrates that even amid mass murder, some people accepted personal risk in defense of human life.

An Israeli institution with global importance

Yad Vashem is a regular destination for state visits to Israel, where leaders from around the world lay wreaths in memory of the victims. In 2020, it hosted the main gathering of the Fifth World Holocaust Forum, attended by numerous international leaders. Its global standing rests not only on its location in Jerusalem, but on the combination of extensive collections, serious research, education, commemoration, and public access.

Yad Vashem received the Israel Prize twice: in 1973 for the Pinkas HaKehillot project, the encyclopedia of Jewish communities, and in 2003 for lifetime achievement and a special contribution to society and the State. In 2007 it received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord. These honors reflect the institution’s contribution to Jewish heritage and its influence on global discussions of memory, racism, persecution, and genocide.

Why this legacy belongs in Moreshet

Yad Vashem belongs in Moreshet because it has turned Holocaust remembrance into a living, continuing public mission. It collects testimony, preserves documents and artifacts, restores names to families, records destroyed communities, educates hundreds of thousands of learners, and provides a foundation for historical research. Its contribution to Jewish life and to Israel is visible both in national memory and in the ability of people around the world to recover their family histories and understand the Jewish world that was lost.

Yad Vashem’s importance extends beyond the memorial site itself. It offers an enduring institutional model for preserving a heritage threatened with disappearance and for joining memory to knowledge, responsibility, and education. For that reason, it has a natural place in the archive of Moreshet.com, which records the institutions and achievements that shaped Jewish and Israeli life. Yad Vashem continues to ensure that names, voices, communities, and works of art do not disappear—and that the history of the Holocaust remains a living part of Jewish memory and human history.