When Yehudit Inbar was a child, she thought of the Holocaust as the 'big monster under her house'. Her parents, married in 1939 and escaped the Holocaust in Europe by settling in Palestine, which would eventually become Israel. But they would never talk about the Shoah. 'Nobody would talk about the Holocaust in the 1960s, but it was in the air. Sometimes it's worse with no words.'
Inbar, who has spent the past 11 years working towards establishing a new museum at the Yad Vashem complex in Jerusalem, describes the opening of the Holocaust History Museum last year as 'closing the circle'.
However, coming to terms with her past was not on Inbar's mind when she arrived as the director of the museums division of Yad Vashem in 1995. She had intended to create the model for the museum and then move on, but she became immersed in the subject and perhaps also needed to make sense of her family's experience.
The original museum at Yad Vashem was forged in the 1960s by Holocaust survivors and aimed to show what the Nazis and their collaborators did to them. 'They couldn't focus on the victims because they were the victims and it was too soon and too complicated,' says Inbar. The collection was mainly photographs, and victims were presented as objects in the photos - as sub-human, says Inbar.
So Inbar aimed to set the record straight with the new museum. Giving the Jews names and voices is at the heart of the museum. As well as the Holocaust History Museum there is also a tribute
to individuals called the Hall of Names. And there is a Museum of Holocaust Art, a temporary exhibition space and a film centre.
Inbar spent the first 18 months working on a concept for the museum. The remaining ten years were used to source material and work on the building. She brought out some of the stories told in the museum by researching the photographs and identifying people. But imagination had to kick in when the inevitable lack of artefacts emerged.
Finding artefacts is a problem faced by Jewish Holocaust museums all over the world. Suzanne Bardgett led the development of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. She and Inbar began searching for objects for their museums around the same time and struck up a firm friendship. But unlike Bardgett, who stopped after five years, Inbar continued, although both museums still collect artefacts.
Inbar says that as a result of the lack of objects, the museum's development was based on the practical criteria of finding suitable material. The experience of Jews based in the Warsaw ghetto - the largest housing of Jews (600,000) during the period - was unavoidable. But there were few artefacts.
'We used everything we could - quotes from a diary, letters, drawings made by Jews.' What was found, for example, were written experiences that had been hidden at the bottom of a milk vat. 'The fragments that have been found are symbolic,' says Inbar. 'They are like a trigger for the Jewish story.' Three other ghettos were chosen for exploration on the basis that they had a lot of accessible material.
Inbar and colleagues travelled extensively around eastern Europe looking for artefacts. She recalls visiting an area where 8,000 Jews were exterminated in a building that has since been replaced by a beautiful forest. But Inbar says she found it difficult to accept that there wasn't anything there. So she began digging up the earth with her fingers and, remarkably, she did find small items.
But with so few artefacts from that era, do museums compete to obtain them? Inbar says there is no climate of rivalry between those with an interest in collecting artefacts from the Holocaust. She says they share advice and contacts, and when Bardgett received some artefacts from Italy (both Yad Vashem and the Imperial War Museum were in talks over the objects) she was happy for her. 'It's important that they will be in a museum and they will be kept.'
As Yad Vashem was one of the first Holocaust museums, it undoubtedly made its mark on the ones that followed. Inbar says this may be true, but it is more the case that they were inspired by each other.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington collected segments of streets from Poland. And Yad Vashem recreated a street with cobbled stones and train tracks from the Warsaw ghetto called Leszno Street. Bardgett said she was wowed by Washington's version, and Inbar says when creating the new Yad Vashem she was influenced by the gallery at the Imperial War Museum.
Inbar believes that Europe has been slow in embracing the idea of setting up Holocaust museums. 'In Europe where it happened, you don't have the museum of the Holocaust.' She would like to see more governments taking responsibility for their histories. Last year, Paris opened a memorial led by the Jewish community, which was partly funded by the French government.
'There is not a museum in the whole of Europe that tells the story of what they did [to us]. It was not only the Nazis; it was the French, the Italians and the Dutch.' She says there is not even a Holocaust museum in Germany, only memorials on sites where atrocities happened.
When Inbar visited a museum in Nuremberg she says she was irate that it was an exploration of what happened to the Germans during the second world war. She says there was only one panel showing what happened to Jews and others. 'I was so angry, hysterical,' she says. 'People don't want to recognise they were cooperating. Even the Germans say it's not them, it's the Nazis, as if they were aliens.'
In the mid-1980s Inbar initiated Israel's first museology course, which is still taught at the Tel Aviv University. She had been mentored by a chief curator at Jerusalem's Israel Museum, but others had no one to learn from. She recognised that although museums were being built in the country, there was little knowledge or expertise about how they should be run or how their collections should be cared for.
Her early working life was spent at the Ministry of Education and Culture in Jerusalem, first in the art department and then 16 years in the museums department, latterly as the director. After this, she decided to go freelance, conceiving museum programmes for cultural institutions such as the archaeology pavilion at the Israel Museum.
Inbar says because Yad Vashem is a national museum, she was not constrained in the way she wanted to present the material. But she did have to stay within the 'main narrative'. As a result, she wants to broaden the story through the temporary displays to include the voices of women and children too. 'They were not part of the big narrative. Women were not part of the Jewish leadership. It was a patriarchy,' she explains.
Inbar is resolute that Yad Vashem presents the Jewish story from 1933-45. Although it features the history of others who suffered under the Nazis, it does so in passing and wider human rights issues are ignored. Inbar says the next generation will probably look at the issue differently and may include human rights abuses alongside the story of the Holocaust.
I ask her if being in the Middle East with its ongoing conflict affects her experience at the museum. She tells me that the fact that the museum is in the Middle East hardly influenced the narrative. She says it is a museum that is relevant and representative of all the Jews in the world. 'Put it in Europe, and it will be the same museum,' she says. But the finale of the museum is the proclamation of an independent Israel.
The stories of the Shoah that Inbar has researched hit her harder as she gets older. 'I stop breathing every time I read about it,' she says. And she believes in giving audiences a chance to avoid the more horrific material by positioning it around a corner within the gallery.
'It's a problem to show horrors to visitors. They cannot stand such evil, so they build a mental defence,' she says. 'We cannot exaggerate the horrors because it's bad for the museum.' She says people will turn away if it becomes too much. The museum doesn't allow the under-tens in and recommends children should be over 14 years old.
She reveals that she has lived through eight wars and has lost her best friend in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Her experience tells her that we all have the capacity for evil.
'Each one of us, no matter who he is, has to ask each day what sort of person he is. Democracy is very fragile and one cannot push it too hard.' She continues: 'Evil is inside each one of us and we have to fight it and this is what makes [this story] so human.'
She says people ask her how she works with this material. There are tears in her eyes now. She says her reply is always: 'I am grateful I had a chance to work on this material and to be their voices.' For her, 'It's like opening the big secret'.
Inbar, who has spent the past 11 years working towards establishing a new museum at the Yad Vashem complex in Jerusalem, describes the opening of the Holocaust History Museum last year as 'closing the circle'.
However, coming to terms with her past was not on Inbar's mind when she arrived as the director of the museums division of Yad Vashem in 1995. She had intended to create the model for the museum and then move on, but she became immersed in the subject and perhaps also needed to make sense of her family's experience.
The original museum at Yad Vashem was forged in the 1960s by Holocaust survivors and aimed to show what the Nazis and their collaborators did to them. 'They couldn't focus on the victims because they were the victims and it was too soon and too complicated,' says Inbar. The collection was mainly photographs, and victims were presented as objects in the photos - as sub-human, says Inbar.
So Inbar aimed to set the record straight with the new museum. Giving the Jews names and voices is at the heart of the museum. As well as the Holocaust History Museum there is also a tribute
to individuals called the Hall of Names. And there is a Museum of Holocaust Art, a temporary exhibition space and a film centre.
Inbar spent the first 18 months working on a concept for the museum. The remaining ten years were used to source material and work on the building. She brought out some of the stories told in the museum by researching the photographs and identifying people. But imagination had to kick in when the inevitable lack of artefacts emerged.
Finding artefacts is a problem faced by Jewish Holocaust museums all over the world. Suzanne Bardgett led the development of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. She and Inbar began searching for objects for their museums around the same time and struck up a firm friendship. But unlike Bardgett, who stopped after five years, Inbar continued, although both museums still collect artefacts.
Inbar says that as a result of the lack of objects, the museum's development was based on the practical criteria of finding suitable material. The experience of Jews based in the Warsaw ghetto - the largest housing of Jews (600,000) during the period - was unavoidable. But there were few artefacts.
'We used everything we could - quotes from a diary, letters, drawings made by Jews.' What was found, for example, were written experiences that had been hidden at the bottom of a milk vat. 'The fragments that have been found are symbolic,' says Inbar. 'They are like a trigger for the Jewish story.' Three other ghettos were chosen for exploration on the basis that they had a lot of accessible material.
Inbar and colleagues travelled extensively around eastern Europe looking for artefacts. She recalls visiting an area where 8,000 Jews were exterminated in a building that has since been replaced by a beautiful forest. But Inbar says she found it difficult to accept that there wasn't anything there. So she began digging up the earth with her fingers and, remarkably, she did find small items.
But with so few artefacts from that era, do museums compete to obtain them? Inbar says there is no climate of rivalry between those with an interest in collecting artefacts from the Holocaust. She says they share advice and contacts, and when Bardgett received some artefacts from Italy (both Yad Vashem and the Imperial War Museum were in talks over the objects) she was happy for her. 'It's important that they will be in a museum and they will be kept.'
As Yad Vashem was one of the first Holocaust museums, it undoubtedly made its mark on the ones that followed. Inbar says this may be true, but it is more the case that they were inspired by each other.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington collected segments of streets from Poland. And Yad Vashem recreated a street with cobbled stones and train tracks from the Warsaw ghetto called Leszno Street. Bardgett said she was wowed by Washington's version, and Inbar says when creating the new Yad Vashem she was influenced by the gallery at the Imperial War Museum.
Inbar believes that Europe has been slow in embracing the idea of setting up Holocaust museums. 'In Europe where it happened, you don't have the museum of the Holocaust.' She would like to see more governments taking responsibility for their histories. Last year, Paris opened a memorial led by the Jewish community, which was partly funded by the French government.
'There is not a museum in the whole of Europe that tells the story of what they did [to us]. It was not only the Nazis; it was the French, the Italians and the Dutch.' She says there is not even a Holocaust museum in Germany, only memorials on sites where atrocities happened.
When Inbar visited a museum in Nuremberg she says she was irate that it was an exploration of what happened to the Germans during the second world war. She says there was only one panel showing what happened to Jews and others. 'I was so angry, hysterical,' she says. 'People don't want to recognise they were cooperating. Even the Germans say it's not them, it's the Nazis, as if they were aliens.'
In the mid-1980s Inbar initiated Israel's first museology course, which is still taught at the Tel Aviv University. She had been mentored by a chief curator at Jerusalem's Israel Museum, but others had no one to learn from. She recognised that although museums were being built in the country, there was little knowledge or expertise about how they should be run or how their collections should be cared for.
Her early working life was spent at the Ministry of Education and Culture in Jerusalem, first in the art department and then 16 years in the museums department, latterly as the director. After this, she decided to go freelance, conceiving museum programmes for cultural institutions such as the archaeology pavilion at the Israel Museum.
Inbar says because Yad Vashem is a national museum, she was not constrained in the way she wanted to present the material. But she did have to stay within the 'main narrative'. As a result, she wants to broaden the story through the temporary displays to include the voices of women and children too. 'They were not part of the big narrative. Women were not part of the Jewish leadership. It was a patriarchy,' she explains.
Inbar is resolute that Yad Vashem presents the Jewish story from 1933-45. Although it features the history of others who suffered under the Nazis, it does so in passing and wider human rights issues are ignored. Inbar says the next generation will probably look at the issue differently and may include human rights abuses alongside the story of the Holocaust.
I ask her if being in the Middle East with its ongoing conflict affects her experience at the museum. She tells me that the fact that the museum is in the Middle East hardly influenced the narrative. She says it is a museum that is relevant and representative of all the Jews in the world. 'Put it in Europe, and it will be the same museum,' she says. But the finale of the museum is the proclamation of an independent Israel.
The stories of the Shoah that Inbar has researched hit her harder as she gets older. 'I stop breathing every time I read about it,' she says. And she believes in giving audiences a chance to avoid the more horrific material by positioning it around a corner within the gallery.
'It's a problem to show horrors to visitors. They cannot stand such evil, so they build a mental defence,' she says. 'We cannot exaggerate the horrors because it's bad for the museum.' She says people will turn away if it becomes too much. The museum doesn't allow the under-tens in and recommends children should be over 14 years old.
She reveals that she has lived through eight wars and has lost her best friend in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Her experience tells her that we all have the capacity for evil.
'Each one of us, no matter who he is, has to ask each day what sort of person he is. Democracy is very fragile and one cannot push it too hard.' She continues: 'Evil is inside each one of us and we have to fight it and this is what makes [this story] so human.'
She says people ask her how she works with this material. There are tears in her eyes now. She says her reply is always: 'I am grateful I had a chance to work on this material and to be their voices.' For her, 'It's like opening the big secret'.
