Israel’s Holocaust memorial launches new conservation facility

JERUSALEM — Israel’s National Holocaust Museum on Monday opened a new conservation facility in Jerusalem that will preserve, restore and store its more than 45,000 artifacts and works of art in a massive new building, including five floors of underground storage.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, serves as a museum and research institution. It welcomes nearly a million visitors each year, celebrates the country’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day, and hosts nearly all foreign dignitaries who visit Israel.

“Before opening this building, it was very difficult to display the treasures that were kept in our vaults. They were kind of a secret,” he said. Dani Dayan, president of Yad Vashem. “There is now a state-of-the-art facility that will help us showcase them.”

The David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center, located at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, will also provide organization and storage for the museum’s 225 million pages of documents and half a million photographs.

Dayan said the materials will now be stored in a facility that keeps them at optimal temperatures and conditions.

“Yad Vashem has the world’s largest collections of Holocaust-related materials,” Dayan said. “We will ensure that these treasures are preserved for eternity.”

The new facility includes advanced, high-tech conservation laboratories, allowing experts to revisit some of the museum’s most complicated items, such as a film canister brought with them by a family fleeing Austria in 1939. It was donated to the museum but arrived in an advanced state of decomposition.

“The film arrived in the worst possible condition. It smelled very bad,” said Reut Ilan-Shafik, curator of photography at Yad Vashem. Over the years, the film had solidified into a solid piece of plastic, making it impossible to scan.

Using organic solvents, conservators were able to restore some of the film’s flexibility, allowing them to carefully untangle its pieces. Using a microscope, Ilan-Shafik was able to view some frames in their entirety, including one showing a couple kissing on a park bench and other snapshots of Europe before World War II.

“It’s incredible to know that images from the film that we otherwise thought were lost in time have been recovered,” said Orit Feldberg, granddaughter of Hans and Klara Lebel, the couple featured in the film.

Feldberg’s mother donated the film canister, one of the few things the Lebels were able to take with them when they fled Austria.

“These photographs not only tell his unique story, but also keep his memory alive,” Feldberg said.

Preserving Holocaust artifacts is an expensive and painstaking process that has become increasingly important as the number of survivors declines.

Last month, the Auschwitz Memorial announced it had completed a half-million-dollar project to preserve 3,000 of the 8,000 pairs of children’s shoes displayed in the Nazi concentration camp in Poland.