Israel’s National Holocaust Museum Opens New Conservation Facility in Jerusalem

Israel’s national Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, has opened a new conservation facility in Jerusalem to preserve, restore, and store its more than 45,000 artifacts and works of art. The facility, named the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center, includes five floors of underground storage and state-of-the-art labs for conservation.

The museum, which serves as both a museum and a research institution, welcomes nearly a million visitors each year and hosts foreign dignitaries visiting Israel. Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan emphasized the importance of the new facility in allowing the museum to exhibit its treasures that were previously kept in secret.

One of the notable restoration projects at the facility involved a film canister that a family fleeing Austria in 1939 donated to the museum. The film had deteriorated significantly over the years but with the expertise of the conservators at Yad Vashem, some frames were able to be carefully unraveled and restored, revealing images of Europe before World War II.

The conservation of items from the Holocaust is crucial as the number of survivors dwindles. The new facility at Yad Vashem will ensure that these important artifacts are preserved for eternity, allowing future generations to learn from and remember the atrocities of the Holocaust.