#WorldBicycleDay
Righteous Among The Nations Gino Bartali was a champion Italian cyclist who won the @LeTour de France in 1938 & 1948.
During the Holocaust, Bartali helped rescue Jews by transferring forged documents for them hidden in his bike's handlebar & seat.
This is his story: https://t.co/UYx5NNxvJz
In 1942, Jan Karski entered the Warsaw Ghetto twice to witness what was happening to Jews.
He brought the testimony to Roosevelt. To Frankfurter. To Allied leaders.
His warnings went unheeded.
On June 2, 1982, Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations, not for saving individual lives, but for risking his own to make sure the truth could not be ignored.
At Yad Vashem, bearing witness is also an act of rescue.
"I myself became a Jew. So have all the Jews who were slaughtered become my family."
87 years ago this week, the MS St. Louis was denied refuge with 937 mostly Jewish refugees aboard.
They had escaped Nazi Germany. Cuba, the U.S., and Canada refused them.
Captain Gustav Schröder refused to return them to Germany. Later, Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations.
254 passengers were later murdered in the Holocaust.
This is why we name them.
On the eve of World War II, approximately 1300 Jews lived in Moletai, Lithuania, comprising 75% of the town’s population. Most of the Jews in the town worked in trade and various crafts.
This photograph of the eleventh graduating class of the school along with their teachers was taken towards the end of the school year #OTD 2 June 1936.
In August 1941, most of the town's Jews were murdered by the Germans.
Learn more: https://t.co/olOpFdAXhI
Significant news coming from Berlin today: a prominent street near the Reichstag will be officially renamed Yad Vashem Street, symbolizing the importance of Holocaust remembrance and sending a strong message against antisemitism.
Read the press release (in German) from the Friends of Yad Vashem Association: https://t.co/LVQ0eksKZA
Yaffa Eliach, a hidden-child survivor, spent 15 years gathering more than 6,000 prewar photographs of her destroyed hometown, Eishyshok.
Those images became the Tower of Faces at USHMM.
“Don’t teach about dead Jews. Bring the Jews back to life.”
Heritage is what you bring back to life.
Righteous Friday: Varian Fry
In 1940, American journalist Varian Fry went to Marseille with $3,000 and a list of names.
He stayed 13 months and helped thousands seek escape from Nazi Europe.
“I felt obliged to help.”
In 1994, Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations.
Yad Vashem will open its first Holocaust Education Center outside of Israel, in Munich, Germany. The birthplace of the Nazi Party.
The center will be located in central Munich, with an extension in Leipzig. Supported by the German federal government.
"Confronting this history where it began." — Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan
@yadvashem
Behind every number is a name. Behind every name is a life.
Yad Vashem's ongoing series draws from Yad Vashem's Pages of Testimony to restore the individual identities of those who perished.
Today we remember Avraham David Shabat from Sofia, Bulgaria.
The Nazis planned to build a museum of the "extinct Jewish people."
They looted Torah scrolls, manuscripts, and Judaica to exhibit a civilization they intended to erase.
The museum was never built. The Jewish people were not extinct.
New from the Yad Vashem blog: https://t.co/b4WBcxVAOy
Warsaw Ghetto, 1942.
Artist Gela Seksztajn-Lichtenstein left her paintings to a future museum for the Jewish people.
Today, Yad Vashem carries that wish forward.
Still Life with Self-Portrait
Gela Seksztajn-Lichtenstein, 1907 to 1943
For Jewish American Heritage Month, we remember Henri Landwirth.
A Holocaust survivor from Belgium, he came to America with $20 and rebuilt his life. He founded Give Kids The World Village, which has hosted more than 165,000 families of critically ill children, free of charge.
Heritage is what you build.
On Yom Yerushalayim, we reflect on one hillside in western Jerusalem.
Mount Herzl holds Israel’s national cemetery and Yad Vashem, where memory, loss, and renewal exist side by side.
The landscape itself becomes part of remembrance.
A future without Holocaust survivors is approaching.
Preserving their stories through testimony, artifacts, and technology is more important than ever.
Very sad news. My friend and mentor Abe Foxman passed away this morning. A Holocaust survivor, a staunch Zionist, a proud Jew. I learned so much from him. @FoxmanAbraham יהי זכרו ברוך
This Jewish American Heritage Month, we honor Jewish life in America by carrying forward what nearly wasn't.
Yad Vashem fulfills the last will and testament of the six million, spoken and unspoken.
Follow us to support this mission.
#JewishAmericanHeritageMonth#YadVashem
Senior Historian Dr. David Silberklang of @yadvashem answers one of the most-searched questions about the Holocaust and explains why it began earlier than most people think.
A process that began in 1933. A history we must never misunderstand.
At Yad Vashem, one memorial can only be entered by descending into it.
The Valley of the Communities is carved from Jerusalem bedrock and holds the names of more than 5,000 Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust.
Nothing rises above ground. The names remain.