Jerusalem (AFP)

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, welcomes nearly 40 leaders from around the world on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camp at Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews were murdered.

The memorial created in 1953 is a state institution whose main objective is to perpetuate the memory of the genocide of the Jewish people during the Second World War which killed six million people, mainly in Europe.

At the heart of the 20-hectare complex set in a forest, the museum welcomes nearly one million annual visitors, according to Iris Rosenberg, its spokesperson.

"Yad Vashem is the biggest Holocaust memorial in the world," she told AFP. In addition to tourists, "researchers and historians come to learn about this genocide and the international school of teaching the Holocaust receives hundreds of teachers and students from around the world".

Reconstruction of part of the Warsaw ghetto, model of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, photos of survivors taken by the Allied soldiers during the liberation of the camps: in the museum, free, visitors follow a journey retracing with the help of images, films and period objects, the history of the Shoah, from the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s to the liberation of the camps in 1945.

The tour ends with an outing on a large esplanade overlooking Jerusalem, offering a feeling of freedom after the visit which can be trying.

- Research work -

Since 1963, Yad Vashem has set himself the task of demonstrating the recognition of the State of Israel towards those who saved Jews from the clutches of the Nazis at the risk of their own lives.

These heroes receive the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" and their names, more than 40,000 in 2019, are inscribed on stone walls in the forest adjoining the memorial, surrounded by trees planted in their memory.

Yad Vashem's other mission is to find the names of all the victims of the Shoah.

In the Hall of Names, binders containing the identities of the millions of victims of the genocide are displayed under a large dome lined with photos. In the park, candles are lined up in an underground cave in tribute to the murdered Jewish children.

More than a million victims remain unknown and Yad Vashem continues to search the available archives to complete his database.

The institution has published hundreds of testimonies of survivors and also books on the different Jewish communities affected by the genocide.

The memorial library houses nearly 120,000 titles in 54 languages, according to its website.

Yad Vashem is an almost essential passage for foreign leaders visiting Jerusalem.

But for Ms. Rosenberg, Thursday's ceremony is an "unprecedented event, which affirms our message to the world: anti-Semitism is not only the problem of the Jews but that of the whole of society and when the Jews are in danger, the societies are in danger. "

© 2020 AFP