Valentines and Yad Vashem

Happy Valentines Day from Israel!

 

These are our mail boxes at the Center. They are full from all the Valentines that everyone wrote. I seriously felt like I was in 5th grade again!

Me at the Garden Tomb. This is where they think the tomb of Josephus was. It is also the place that has a picture in the quad. Look at photo 14 behind the Bible Dictionary. Yeah, I'm standing right there!

View of the Old City

The view from the Center! It is so amazing to be here!

 Our field trip this week was to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum here in Israel. Photos were forbidden inside the museum proper, but here are some pictures of the memorials on the outside.

The pillar of Heroism.

 

  All around Yad Vashem there are groves of trees. It is called the avenue of the Righteous among the nations. Every tree is planted in memorial or memory of a gentile who sheltered and helped Jews during World War II. There are people in there that helped thousands of people and there are some that helped only one. There are so many trees there, it is amazing.

One of the girls here found out that she had a relative that had a tree planted at Yad Vashem. His name was Jan Giliam. He lived in Holland and was a member of the police force there. He helped many families find shelter and hide from the Nazis all through the war. He was eventually captured and taken to a camp where he was tortured and interrogated for their whereabouts. It was only after he received word that the families had moved and were safe that he gave in to the torture and said where they had been. By some miracle, he was released instead of being killed like so many others. He immediately went back and continued helping those Jewish families until the war was over. He is so cool, and it was amazing to be told the story by one of his relatives!

One of the most special parts was going to the childrens memorial. We couldn't take pictures inside, but it was an incredible experience. There are two rooms inside the memorial. The first room is very dark, and there are pictures of children who had died projected on one wall. There are mirrors or something embedded on the walls, so you can see the same photo four or five times as you walk through the room. The second room was so beautiful. It was really dark, and as you walked in, it looked like millions of starts were all over the walls and ceiling. There were three or four candles placed on the floor and the light from the candles was reflected all around the room, making it look like there were stars everywhere. As you walked through the room, you could hear a woman's voice reading a child's name, their age and their place of birth. I learned after getting out that they say one child's name every ten seconds around the clock. Even doing that, it takes six months to read all one and a half million names. It is so sobering. The memorial is so beautiful, but I wish that there wasn't a reason that it is there.

Going to Yad Vashem was such a good experience for me. I cried pretty much the entire time we were in the museum, but it was so special to learn and experience what had happened. It was horrible, but we have those museums so that we can remember. I will always remember.