A New Yad Vashem

My pictures of Yad Vashem taken in 1993 are stirring, but Yad Vashem has undergone a major renovation and expansion due to a $56 million project on the 60th Anniversary of the founding.

Beginning Tuesday evening, hundreds of dignitaries from 35 countries – including nine presidents, seven prime ministers, a Vatican representative, four foreign ministers and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan – will gather in Israel's capital for the opening of the new Holocaust History Museum of Yad Vashem.

The impetus for the larger, $56-million edifice, designed by Moshe Safdie, was competition from abroad, where elaborate, sometimes government-funded, state-of-the-art museums had supplanted Israel's in telling the Holocaust narrative.