In mid-March, 10 years in the making, Yad Vashem opens a new Holocaust History Museum, a $56 million project designed by Moshe Safdie, attempting to “tell the tale of the Jewish plight” and move the experience beyond that of mere artifact. NYT
THE Holocaust is the cornerstone of the Israeli state, and Yad Vashem is its guardian.

Soldiers and schoolchildren are bused here for a somber indoctrination; foreign dignitaries must pay a hushed visit and lay a wreath; Jews in the diaspora come in their thousands, to be reminded why a Jewish state exists.

"You leave daily life to come to this sacred site," said Moshe Safdie, the architect who designed the Children's Memorial here and whose career seems wrapped up in the place.

Established in 1953 to document and commemorate the victims and honor those who resisted, it was also charged with educating future generations, to impart the facts, legacy and meaning of the Holocaust. Formally known as the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, it built up an extraordinary archive, library and study center. And it created one of the world's first museums of the Holocaust, which opened in 1973.

However moving it may remain, the experience of Yad Vashem had become stale and fusty in recent years. Once remarkable, the museum had come to seem didactic and flat: strictly chronological, like a lesson plan, dependent on photographs and documents rather than displaying historical artifacts or telling individual stories. The collective tragedy was well known, historical knowledge had advanced, and a new generation was thought to require a more personal connection to what is quickly becoming history, as the last survivors of the death camps are dying.

In mid-March, 10 years in the making, Yad Vashem opens a new Holocaust History Museum, a $56 million project of unusual boldness that tries to tell the story of 6 million Jewish dead - the names of half of them still unknown - through the diaries, photographs, experiences and testimonies of 100 or so.

The goal is not just to show the artifact, but also to tell the tale of the person who owned it, and to try to tell the story of the Holocaust from the victim's point of view.

"The context is the big story of the Shoah, the Holocaust," said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem. "But the text must be the personal stories of the victims, the fate of this person, in this place, and their testimony. We want to try to answer why this girl from an island in the Mediterranean was taken and shipped two weeks in order to kill her in this factory of death."

Yad Vashem - literally, "a monument and a name" - will come closer than ever before to living up to its own name, restoring some individuality to the mass of the dead.

Mr. Safdie designed the building, an extraordinary triangle of concrete that cuts for nearly 200 yards through the Mount of Remembrance on which the Yad Vashem campus sits. The structure, mostly underground and topped by a skylight, houses an utterly modern museum that pulls a visitor deep into the abyss and then up again to view, from a balcony between huge cantilevered wings, the play of light on the new Israeli state and its capital, Jerusalem.

The new museum, at 45,200 square feet, is more than three times the size of the old one, and the experience is radically different. Visitors can see along the length of the building toward the light at the end, but are forced by fissures in the concrete floor to cut back and forth and to enter the galleries in strict order, much as the victims were forced along by history. Each of these trenches - Mr. Safdie calls them "seizures" - represents a historical turning point, and each gallery, designed by Dorit Harel, tries to personify the experience with testimonies and artifacts.

The diaries of Dawid Sierakowiak, a young man from Lodz, document the Nazi occupation of Poland: the looting, the shootings, the beginnings of forced labor, the move to the ghettos. The Warsaw ghetto is exemplified by the reconstruction of a single street, Ulica Leszno, with tram rails and street lamps, the interior of a house and a cafe, as documentary film of those dying from starvation is shown along the walls.

Mr. Shalev pointed to a photo from the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, where those in the picture, like Shabtai Friedman, are named in a caption, as is the photographer, Zvi Kadushin. "In the old museum, this picture would just say, 'The Ghetto,' " Mr. Shalev said. "Now, wherever we can, we try to give them back their names."

An exhibit about the Einzatsgruppen, the German military squads that traversed Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, killing up to 1.5 million Jews, follows the route of one, Einzatsgruppen C, displaying its daily reports and ending in the forest of Babi Yar. An exhibit on the killing fields in the Ponary forest embraces the testimony of those who were shot but later managed to crawl out of the pit, and cites a poem written in the Vilna ghetto in 1943 by Shmerl Kaczerjinsky:

"Let's be silent! Graves are growing here. Toward Ponary run roads aplenty. From Ponary not one."

There are about 100 video screens in the modern style where visitors can watch documentary film and the testimonies of survivors, hundreds of whom were interviewed by Yad Vashem researchers.

Even the stories of the perpetrators are told, in uniform black metal boxes that bear their pictures and histories.

As you follow history toward Auschwitz, the floor pitches slightly downward, so "you feel you're getting deeper into the earth," Mr. Safdie says. The architectural concrete - used with special dispensation from the city of Jerusalem, which normally demands that all buildings be clad in Jerusalem stone - deepens the palette of the black-and-white photographs and documentary films. The unfinished surfaces - walls and floors with no cladding or insulation - stir a dreadful sense of normal life dehumanized, of metal, bone and ash.

The new Hall of Names, an integral part of the new building, is circular, with shelves along the circumference for the files of the known dead and room for a total of six million. Above, inside a cone, Ms. Harel has placed photos and names of nearly 600 of the dead, in rows, their eyes compelling, staring down at the visitor. Below, there is an excavation through the bedrock, deep into the earth, that mirrors the cone above and ends with a pool of water, which reflects the faces from above. If the faces represent the known dead, the abyss represents the three million more Jewish dead whose names are not known, or not yet.

After the somberness of the hall, there is the light of the viewing balcony, the pine forests and cityscape of Jerusalem. "The two cantilevered concrete walls frame the city," Mr. Safdie said. "After death, there is the affirmation of life."

Still, even these concrete wings of which Mr. Safdie is so proud were a source of controversy. In his original design, the wings were huge fingers of two huge hands, extending farther out over the valley. The design troubled Mr. Shalev and others at Yad Vashem as too figurative, too large, too, dare they say it, fascist. After considerable debate, Mr. Safdie chopped the fingers for these arching, solid curves.

There were also debates about how to use the enormous triangular space, and how to open and close an exhibition here of such emotional power. The old museum had a large, rather haphazard display of Jewish life in Europe before the war; now, a video-art presentation by the artist Michal Rovner will try to encapsulate that experience for visitors. But it may be hard to hold their attention: after they pass through the door, the temptation, is to turn right toward the long axis and the light at the end. There is a similar video-art display by Uri Tzaig that closes the exhibition, like an epilogue; it tries to provide a space for contemplation, with projected excerpts of diary entries and quotations from survivors as music plays.

Once out of the earth, the path takes a visitor through a new complex devoted to a museum of Holocaust art; a synagogue, which can also be used for lectures; and a large gallery for temporary exhibitions.

The renovation of Yad Vashem began in the 1990's, after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993, reset the bar for museums of its kind. Using modern techniques to pull a visitor into history, the American museum displayed artifacts instead of photographs: not just a picture of the calipers the Nazis used to measure Jewish earlobes and nostrils, but the calipers themselves. The Americans also made significant efforts to personalize the experience.

In response, Yad Vashem retouched its museum that same year, which is when Mr. Shalev took over, and began the long process of rethinking itself, putting the main emphasis on education and relevance for future generations.

A long-range plan, nearly complete, includes an International School for Holocaust Studies, which trains educators; the computerization of Yad Vashem's archive; and the opening of a Web site for the database of victims (www.yadvashem.org); a new entrance; and the art and history museums.

The new entrance encompasses an arched stone wall that marks a border - buses and taxis will not cross it - and a clean new visitors' center, with ticket desks, a cafe and a bookshop. The center uses Jerusalem stone, but also beige granite from India that looks familiar. In fact, it is left over from the new Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, which Mr. Safdie also designed.

"Why not put it to use?" he said. "The local stone is too soft for so many visitors."

More visitors is the hope. In 1999, the year before the latest intifada began, more than two million visitors came to Yad Vashem. In 2002, the height of the intifada, fewer than 570,000 came. Last year, the figure was nearly 800,000. The death of Yasir Arafat and the election of Mahmoud Abbas has inspired hope for a revival of tourism, even at Yad Vashem.

Mr. Shalev, a former chief of the Israeli Army's educational division and an aide in the culture ministry, is, in his way, wholly unromantic. He becomes angry at efforts to use the Holocaust or make propaganda with it, especially to buttress antagonists in the internal Israeli political debate over dismantling settlements in Gaza.

But Mr. Shalev is obsessed with making the Holocaust relevant to the young, to providing an experience that he hopes will inspire visitors to make moral choices in their lives.

"We conclude with the establishment of the Jewish state, and that's it," he said. "We don't have any messages to sell you. We won't tell you that Zionism is the only answer to the Holocaust. We just want to give you, as objectively as we can, the history, the context and the real stories of people who tried to keep their human dignity, and their human values, and what they did and built along the way."

He stopped, looking out toward the city, and then grew more passionate. "You'll take your own lessons away," he said. "If it's relevant to you, you'll do something with it. And perhaps think about the nature of human beings or the meaning of democracy and how to protect human values and freedoms and basic rights of the human being - of any human being."

Then he broke off, and we walked in silence for some time.