‘Crown Jewels of the Jewish People’: Preserving Memories of the Holocaust

The photographs are haunting: black-and-white shots of a snow-covered barracks and paintings surrounded by barbed wire and bare trees. They are stark images of a camp in France during World War II, where Jews were interned before being transported to concentration camps.

The artist, Jacques Gotko, made one painting with a background of pulverized eggshells glued to a wooden board; for others he used a piece of old tire as a printing block. These were just some of the few materials he had at his disposal in the camp where he was held before being transported in 1943 to Drancy, another camp in France, and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

These fragile and rarely exhibited works are part of a vast collection of artifacts related to the Holocaust. They include millions of pages of documents, tens of thousands of pages of testimonies, artworks and personal belongings, and more than half a million photographs, collected over the years by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Most of the artifacts were scattered across Yad Vashem’s vast campus, but they are now being housed in a new center that will provide researchers with easier access and the most advanced technological conditions to protect them for future generations. The center was recently completed and opened on Monday.

The task of preserving the artifacts has become all the more urgent as the Holocaust seems increasingly distant and the number of survivors steadily declines. At the same time, anti-Semitism and extremism are on the rise around the world, Yad Vashem officials said.

“These are the crown jewels of the Jewish people,” Yad Vashem President Dani Dayan said of the collections. “There is no Judaism without historical memory.”

The new David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center is located across from the Hall of Remembrance, which was established more than six decades ago at the heart of the campus. Here, an eternal flame burns above a stone crypt containing the ashes of Holocaust victims from the death camps in Europe.

It is largely underground, with a depth of five stories. It is one with the landscape and the artefacts are kept in a protected space.

More than 150 staff members will work on the site, collecting more names of victims and artifacts, and conserving and cataloging the objects. A video installation along the wall of the entrance hall will run in a 44-minute loop, showing thousands of fragments of documents and objects held in the center’s vaults.

“We’re not looking for a Mona Lisa,” said Medy Shvide, director of Yad Vashem’s archives, museums and collections. “We’re looking for things that tell the story of the people of that time — who this family was and what happened to them.” Those relics, or clues, can be as seemingly inconspicuous as a hairbrush or a glove.

Advanced laboratories are improving the process for digitizing and treating documents and other paper artifacts; textiles, such as decorative ritual garments; and oil paintings.

Many objects are not intentionally restored to their former state. Yad Vashem curators say that imperfections, or damage such as charring from fire, often best convey the stories of Jewish communities decimated in the Holocaust, Jewish life before World War II, or survivors.

The art collection is housed in a vault with a low-oxygen atmosphere to prevent fire. Most of the works created during the Holocaust were on paper and are kept in boxes. Many are not by famous artists. “It is our duty to remember them,” said Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, director of Yad Vashem’s art collections, otherwise “they will be forgotten.”

A number of works from the art vault are exhibited as part of a changing exhibition in the Yad Vashem gallery.

Since the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7, Israelis have been grappling with a new tragedy and questions about remembrance and commemoration. Some 1,200 people were killed that day, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities, making it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem’s mission is to emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a unique historical event and to inform the world about it. Mr. Dayan, the chairman, disagrees with direct comparisons between the terrorism of October 7 and the Nazi genocide and says a distinction must be made.

“October 7 was not the Shoah,” he said, referring to the Holocaust by its Hebrew name, adding that modern Israel has a strong military that can take a toll on its enemies.

Still, for many people, the associations were unavoidable, he said: mothers shushing their babies and trying to keep them quiet as they hid in their safe rooms while gunmen tracked them down and set fire to their homes. They remembered Jews hiding from the Nazis in barns, basements or attics in Europe.

In the years leading up to the October 7 attack, anti-Semitic incidents had been on the rise around the world. The October 2018 shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 worshippers was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. In Europe, synagogues in Germany and France have been targeted in attacks, sometimes fueled by anger over the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

After the October 7 attack, Israel’s devastating offensive in Gaza sparked mass protests in foreign capitals and on university campuses, sometimes with anti-Semitic undertones.

Israel has been accused of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza — where more than 38,000 people have been killed in the war, according to Gaza health officials, who make no distinction between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel denies committing genocide.

For Mr. Dayan, preserving Yad Vashem’s collections is critical to building a solid, authoritative foundation of evidence, data and knowledge to counter Holocaust deniers and distorters as the older generation of Holocaust survivors fades away.

That means we must remember artists whose creations became their last will and testament, such as Jacques Gotko, who died of typhus in Auschwitz-Birkenau, he said.

Using the piece of tape, Gotko made a series of linocuts of the barracks where Jews were held at the Nazi transit camp in Compiègne, France. The signed works are numbered and labeled Front Stalag 122, as the camp was called, and dated 1942.

Born Jakow Gotkowski in Odessa, in what is now Ukraine, Gotko moved to Paris with his family as a child in 1905. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and his paintings were exhibited in prestigious Parisian art salons.

He continued to paint after he was taken to the transit camp with other Jews in 1941. In the camp he made, among other things, a still life that is now preserved in the new facility.

In a departure from the traditions of the old masters, instead of lush displays of exotic fruits and vibrant flowers, the still life he painted featured a crust of bread, a spoon, a tin cup, and a matchbox. His background was a barbed-wire fence and trees, some bare and skeletal, some leafy, in the world outside the camp.

Mr. Dayan has a quote etched on his office wall by Gela Seksztajn, a Polish artist who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. Knowing she was doomed, she wrote: “I leave my works to the Jewish museum to be built after the war.”

Many of her works were hidden in a secret archive in the ghetto and survived the war. Most are now kept at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. A few are in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and one is at Yad Vashem.

“We are approaching a turning point in Holocaust remembrance,” Mr. Dayan said. “We are entering the post-survivor era, where we will be the messengers.”