INT'L HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
As 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation approaches, Yad Vashem prepares for the ‘day after’ survivors
Dani Dayan, chair of the Jerusalem Holocaust center, describes the steps that his organization is taking to prepare for a day without living witnesses

Alex Kolomois/Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem Chair Dani Dayan in his office in Jerusalem.
The first decision Dani Dayan made when he was appointed chairman of Yad Vashem in August 2021 was to have the words Jewish Polish painter Gela Seksztajn wrote in her last will 79 years earlier on Aug. 1, 1942, painted on the wall behind his desk.
Acknowledging that she would most likely not survive, she handwrote in Yiddish: “I wish to take leave from my friends and my works… My works I bequeath to the Jewish museum to be built after the war. Fare well my friends, fare well the Jewish people. Never again allow such a catastrophe.”
“She was referring to Yad Vashem, that’s clear. I mean, she didn’t know it will be called Yad Vashem — she probably couldn’t imagine there would be an independent Jewish state although she was a Zionist — but she was talking about Yad Vashem,” said Dayan, as he glanced at the mural during an interview this week with eJewishPhilanthropy. “At that moment [I read the words] I understood the responsibility that Yad Vashem has on its shoulders, and that I have as chairman. So my first responsibility is to fulfill 6 million written and unwritten last wills.”
As the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russian army is commemorated on Jan. 27, that responsibility looms even heavier as fewer survivors are left to bear witness to the Nazi atrocities, said Dayan, who outlined in the interview with eJP a series of new steps to expand the museum’s reach in a time of rampant Holocaust denialism. He will lead a large Israeli delegation including former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, to the central commemoration, which will take place in Poland at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not attend despite assurances by the Polish government that he and other high-ranking government officials would not be arrested for alleged war crimes in Gaza following a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
Also, for the first time, political and world leaders will not be given a place to make speeches, Piotr Cywi?ski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum told The Guardian newspaper, noting that the organizers want the main focus of the ceremony this year, which may be the last one where survivors will be physically able to attend, to be on the survivors, so they can speak about their experiences and trauma, and have their way of presenting some “difficult moral obligations” for the present.
“Eighty years since the liberation basically means that we are rapidly approaching the unfortunate, but also inevitable, world without witnesses,” Dayan said. “That will make our mission more challenging, more difficult, but even more important and more vital. There are alternatives to the witnesses, to that formative experience of Holocaust remembrance that most of us had… sitting in front of a survivor and hearing, listening, usually with tears in our eyes, his or her story. But there is no replacement for them. We will obviously find other ways to do it, but there won’t be a replacement for sure.”
However, he said, while others may tout the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence, he does not believe that going blindly down the rabbit hole chasing after AI technology to tell survivors’ stories will provide the proper solution or replacement, and can in fact be “extremely dangerous.”
“I think that the key word we should base ourselves on is authenticity: authentic testimonies, authentic stories, authentic artifacts, authentic photographs and not try to build a new world even as tempting as it may be with the modern technology and the new tools that AI [provides],” Dayan said. “On the other hand, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use AI…we should be very careful in [how] and what we use it.”
Still, he said, as the “crossroad of generations” is reached, he is convinced that denialists and distortionists will begin having a field day and in order to combat that, it is vital to continue growing the body of over 200 million pages of documentation in Yad Vashem’s holdings with ever more authentic artifacts, photos and documents, he said.
“I never forget that 6 million Jews never had the opportunity, the privilege, to sit in front of a camera or a laptop or even a sheet of paper and record their testimony. And those documents, those artifacts, those photographs, those film footages [are] the witnesses of those 6 million that never gave testimony. And since we are approaching the era of no witnesses, they become even more important,” said Dayan.
In order to have greater educational outreach Yad Vashem has started to decentralize its educational programs and has already opened an educational center in the Ariel Sharon army training base in the south for soldiers and is currently working on building a second center in Nof HaGalil. Its first educational center abroad will be in Germany, he said.
This summer Yad Vashem opened the Moshal Shoah Legacy Campus, which covers 5,880 square meters of the Mount of Remembrance and includes The David and Fela Shapell Collection Center, The Joseph Wilf Curatorial Center and a Video Art Wall. Yad Vashem declined to disclose the amounts donated respectively by the Moshal and Shapell families.
The five-story subterranean Collection Center, which opened last year, sits at the heart of the Yad Vashem campus. It is the world’s most advanced repository for the collection, preservation, restoration and storage of Holocaust-related materials, including the Pages of Testimony collection. It also features a video art installation, entitled “122,499 Files,” which is sponsored by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. Created by artist Ran Slavin and curated by Medy Schwed, Yad Vashem’s director of museums collections and archives, the installation showcases over 100,000 artifacts, artworks, photographs and documents from Yad Vashem’s collections, many of which are too delicate and fragile to be displayed.
An exhibition planned for later this year will display some of the items that have never been exhibited publicly, said Dayan.
“There are three levels [to Holocaust preservation at Yad Vashem],” he said. “The basic one is the data, then the research that converts the data into knowledge and then we have to spread that knowledge through multiple ways and means to do it, education, exhibitions, lectures, films, social media. It’s very clear for us that we have to change our modus operandi.”
One such new, two-stage project aims to highlight the Jewish communal life that was destroyed in the Shoah. The first stage includes an immersive audio-visual experience that will be screened at the central courtyard of the Valley of Communities, where the names of 5,000 Jewish communities are commemorated on boulders; the second will include an educational center about the communities. The inauguration of the audio-visual experience will take place this spring as weather permits, said Dayan.
Both the center and the audio-visual were financed in part by the European Union, he added. Yad Vashem declined to disclose the amount of the aid.
Another project being advanced is called “Touching Memory,” which involves dramatizing stories of objects in the Yad Vashem collection onstage in a theater that will be built for that purpose.
“We cannot evade the fact that the Shoah is an integral part of Jewish history,” said Dayan. “Almost every day we have dignitaries from all over the world…coming to Yad Vashem as guests of the State of Israel. And I am very glad they come to Yad Vashem, I would prefer that it would be a two station visit: Mount Herzl, the grave of Theodor Herzl and then Yad Vashem. But I don’t think it’s about glorifying victimization. It’s about remembrance and… unfortunately, it’s all too relevant to the present and the future with the rising antisemitism all over the world.”
The fact that Yad Vashem is dedicated to the Shoah and not about genocide in general is sometimes misunderstood to mean that the museum is not sensitive to other genocides, said Dayan, who took part last August in the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Gypsy camp in Auschwitz. He also noted the role Yad Vashem played in advising Rwanda in the commemoration of its genocide.
“We are very sensitive [to other genocides] and we believe that the lessons from the Shoah should apply universally,” he said. “But we made the decision… that those 6 million Jews deserve a place that is dedicated exclusively to them.”