Israel’s Holocaust memorial opens a conservation facility to store artifacts, photos and more

Israel’s Holocaust memorial opens a conservation facility to store artifacts, photos and more
Exterior of The David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center on the he Moshal Shoah Legacy Campus, at Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, Monday, July 8, 2024. Israel's national Holocaust museum opened a new conservation facility in Jerusalem, which will preserve, restore, and store the more than 45,000 artifacts and works of art in a vast new building, including five floors of underground storage. (AP)
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Updated 09 July 2024
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Israel’s Holocaust memorial opens a conservation facility to store artifacts, photos and more

Israel’s Holocaust memorial opens a conservation facility to store artifacts, photos and more
  • Conservation of items from the Holocaust is an expensive, painstaking process that has taken on greater importance as the number of survivors dwindles

JERUSALEM: Israel’s national Holocaust museum opened a new conservation facility in Jerusalem on Monday that will preserve, restore and store its more than 45,000 artifacts and works of art in a vast new building, including five floors of underground storage.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, serves as both a museum and a research institution. It welcomes nearly a million visitors each year, leads the country’s annual Holocaust memorial day and hosts nearly all foreign dignitaries visiting Israel.
“Before we opened this building, it was very difficult to exhibit our treasures that were kept in our vaults. They were kind of secret,” said Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan. “Now there’s a state-of-the-art installation (that) will help us to exhibit 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 kept in a facility that preserves them in optimal temperatures and conditions.
“Yad Vashem has the largest collections in the world of materials related to the Holocaust,” Dayan said. “We will make sure that these treasures are kept for eternity.”
The new facility includes advanced, high-tech labs for conservation, enabling experts to revisit some of the museum’s trickier items, such as a film canister that a family who fled Austria in 1939 brought with them. It was donated to the museum but arrived in an advanced state of decay.
“The film arrived in the worst state it could. It smelled really bad,” said Reut Ilan-Shafik, a photography conservator at Yad Vashem. Over the years, the film had congealed into a solid piece of plastic, making it impossible to be scanned.
Using organic solvents, conservators were able to restore some of the film’s flexibility, allowing them to carefully unravel pieces of it. Using a microscope, Ilan-Shafik was able to see a few frames in their entirety, including one showing a couple kissing on a bench in a park and other snapshots of Europe before World War II.
“It is unbelievable to know that the images of the film that we otherwise thought lost to time” have been recovered, said Orit Feldberg, granddaughter of Hans and Klara Lebel, the couple featured in the film reel.
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 their unique story but also keep their memory vibrantly alive,” Feldberg said.
Conservation of items from the Holocaust is an expensive, painstaking process that has taken on greater importance as the number of survivors dwindles.
Last month, the Auschwitz Memorial announced it had finished a half-million-dollar project to conserve 3,000 of the 8,000 pairs of children’s shoes that are on display at the Nazi concentration camp in Poland.


Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Updated 4 sec ago
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Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon
Beirut: In a south Lebanon hospital, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert peered out of the window after bombardment near the Israeli border, four decades after he first worked in the country.
“It’s a horrible experience,” he said in a video call from the southern town of Nabatiyeh.
“It’s been 42 years and nothing has changed,” said Gilbert, who first saw war treating patients during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut.
Below the window paramedics were on standby next to parked ambulances at the hospital behind the front line.
The anaesthetist and emergency medicine specialist said he had seen just a few cases since arriving on Tuesday.
“Most of the cases have been south of us and they have not been able to evacuate them because the attacks have been so vicious,” Gilbert said.
Israel has increased its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since September 23, pounding the south of the country and later staging what it called “limited operations” across the border.
On Thursday the Israeli army warned residents to leave Nabatiyeh.
The escalation has killed more than 1,100 people and wounded at least another 3,600, and pushed upwards of a million people to flee their homes, according to government figures.
Official media have reported some Israeli strikes killing entire families, and AFP has spoken to two people who lost 17 relatives and 10 family members respectively.
Israel’s military “can do whatever they want to health care, to ambulances, to churches, to mosques, to universities, as they’ve been doing in Gaza,” said Gilbert, who has repeatedly volunteered in the Palestinian territory during past conflicts.
“And now we see the same repeat itself in Lebanon in 2024.”
A hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil closer to the border on Saturday said it was hit by heavy overnight Israeli strikes, wounding nine medical and nursing staff, most seriously.
At least four hospitals said they had suspended work amid ongoing Israeli bombardment on Friday, and Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics said 11 personnel were killed in Israeli raids in south Lebanon.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s health minister said more than 40 paramedics and firefighters had been killed by Israeli fire in three days.
UN official Imran Riza on X on Saturday spoke of “an alarming increase in attacks against health care in Lebanon.”
Britain said reports that Israeli strikes had hit “health facilities and support personnel” in Lebanon were “deeply disturbing.”
Israel has claimed Hezbollah uses ambulances for “terrorist purposes.”
In the capital Beirut, British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah said he also saw parallels with the conflict in Gaza.
Abu-Sittah has tirelessly campaigned for “justice” since spending weeks in the besieged Palestinian territory treating the wounded at the start of the war.
Now in Lebanon, the plastic and reconstructive surgeon described seeing “kids, families whose houses have been targeted” with blast injuries in the past few weeks.
There were “kids with blast injuries to the face, to the torso, amputated limbs,” he said outside the American University of Beirut’s Medical Center.
Abu-Sittah estimated that more than a quarter of the wounded he had seen in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were minors.
“I have a girl upstairs who is 13, who had a blast injury to the face, needed reconstruction of her jaw, will need several surgeries,” he said.
“Children who are injured in war need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re adult age.”
According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 690 children in Lebanon have been wounded in recent weeks.
It said doctors had reported most suffered from “concussions and traumatic brain injuries from the impact of blasts, shrapnel wounds and limb injuries.”
“It’s just so reminiscent of what was happening in Gaza,” said Abu-Sittah.
“The heartbreaking thing is that this could all have been stopped if they stopped the war in Gaza,” he added.

Lebanon postpones start of school year, as Israel steps up strikes

Lebanon postpones start of school year, as Israel steps up strikes
Updated 17 min 56 sec ago
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Lebanon postpones start of school year, as Israel steps up strikes

Lebanon postpones start of school year, as Israel steps up strikes

BEIRUT: Lebanon on Sunday said the country would be postponing the start of the school year as Israel escalates its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Education Minister Abbas Halabi said the new start date for more than one million students would be November 4, because of “security risks.”


Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears

Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears
Updated 06 October 2024
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Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears

Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears

TEHRAN: Iran’s Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad landed on Kharg island, the oil ministry’s news website Shana reported on Sunday, amid concerns that Israel could target Iran’s largest oil terminal there.
An Israeli military spokesman said on Saturday that Israel would retaliate, following last week’s missile attack by Tehran, “when the time is right.”
Following Iran’s attack, Axios cited Israeli officials as saying that Iran’s oil facilities could be hit in response. US President Joe Biden said on Friday that he did not think Israel had yet concluded how to respond.
“Paknejad arrived this morning in order to visit the oil facilities and meet operational staff located on Kharg island,” Shana reported, adding that the oil terminal there has the capacity to store 23 million barrels of crude.
China, which does not recognize US sanctions, is Tehran’s main client and according to analysts imported 1.2 to 1.4 million barrels per day from Iran in the first half of 2024.


Israel army encircles Gaza’s Jabaliya as Hamas rebuilds

Israel army encircles Gaza’s Jabaliya as Hamas rebuilds
Updated 06 October 2024
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Israel army encircles Gaza’s Jabaliya as Hamas rebuilds

Israel army encircles Gaza’s Jabaliya as Hamas rebuilds
  • Israeli forces have bombarded Jabaliya regularly since the war in Gaza started, displacing almost all of its residents

GAZA: The Israeli military said Sunday its forces surrounded the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza in response to indications Hamas was rebuilding despite nearly a year of strikes and fighting.
“The troops of the 401st Brigade and the 460th Brigade have successfully encircled the area and are currently continuing to operate in the area,” the military said in a statement.
The military said it had intelligence indicating the “presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure in the area of Jabaliya... as well as efforts by Hamas to rebuild its operational capabilities in the area.”
“Prior to and during the operation, the IAF (air force) struck dozens of military targets in the area to assist IDF (army) ground troops,” the military said, adding targets hit were weapons storage facilities, underground infrastructure sites and other militant infrastructure sites.
Gaza civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that multiple strikes rocked Jabaliya through the night and there were many casualties.
Israeli forces have bombarded Jabaliya regularly since the war in Gaza started, displacing almost all of its residents.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel.


UAE delivers $100 mln humanitarian aid for Lebanon

UAE delivers $100 mln humanitarian aid for Lebanon
Updated 06 October 2024
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UAE delivers $100 mln humanitarian aid for Lebanon

UAE delivers $100 mln humanitarian aid for Lebanon
  • UAE dispatches aircraft carrying 40 tonnes of urgent medical aid to Lebanon
  • Aid campaign held in collaboration with WHO

DUBAI: The UAE has launched a $100 million relief campaign to support the people of Lebanon amid the ongoing Israeli escalation, state news agency WAM reported. 

Under the name “UAE stands with Lebanon”, the country, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), dispatched on Friday an aircraft carrying 40 tonnes of urgent medical aid to Lebanon.

Reem bint Ebrahim Al Hashimy, Minister of State for International Cooperation, said the flight reflects UAE’s commitment to support the war-impacted communities. 

She highlighted the UAE’s vision to provide all possible humanitarian aid to meet critical needs of the most vulnerable. 

Meanwhile, the UAE has continued to provide humanitarian and relief assistance to residents of the Gaza Strip as part of “Operation Chivalrous Knight 3”.

On Friday, it secured shelter tents and essential supplies for displaced families in Gaza.

As part of the relief campaign, the UAE has also set up a floating hospital in Egypt’s Al-Arish and another field hospital in Rafah to provide medical services for the injured Palestinians amid the war on Gaza.