The specter of the Holocaust haunts the Israeli psyche, a reality made tangible by the multitude of Holocaust museums and memorials scattered around Jerusalem and the rest of the country. While the massive and labyrinthine Yad Vashem attracts most tourist attention (and rightly so), a visit to one of the many more modest memorials can prove just as moving. Immediately outside the walls of the Old City, atop Mount Zion – the focal point of 2,000 years of Jewish longing – is the Chamber of the Holocaust, a small museum and memorial housed inside the Diaspora Yeshiva.
The main memorial is composed of tablets and plaques, each in memory of one of the thousands of European Jewish communities utterly shattered by Nazi hatred and aggression. Dozens of other memorials, monuments and salvaged artifacts, including a jacket sewn out of Torah scrolls commissioned by a Nazi officer, fill out the exhibitions. Unsurprisingly, given its location, the museum focuses more strongly on the religious aspect of Holocaust remembrance than does Yad Vashem.
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