Fire service spokesman Boaz Rakia said the memorial, Yad Vashem, was not in any danger. Fire officials said they were making progress but the blaze was not under control by Sunday evening. They did not know what caused it, although weather in the area has been hot and dry.
Estee Yaari, a spokeswoman for Yad Vashem, said the 45-acre (18 hectare) campus was evacuated as the blaze approached. Police said the fire was a few hundred yards (meters) from the memorial.
“Everybody was evacuated calmly,” Yaari said. “There was a lot of smoke on campus.”
Two people required medical treatment, she added.
Yad Vashem is one of Israel’s national treasures, home to a museum and memorials for the victims of the Holocaust. Foreign dignitaries routinely stop at Yad Vashem when visiting the country.
The memorial holds some 140 million pages of Holocaust documentation, the world’s largest such collection. It also exhibits artifacts, such as shoes, photographs, suitcases and recorded testimonies of Holocaust victims and survivors.
It also has an eternal flame in its “Hall of Remembrance,” as well as the “Hall of Names,” where it is collecting the identities of the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers during World War II.
The fire broke out Sunday in the Jerusalem Forest, a patch of hilly terrain covered by pine trees on the western edge of the city.
The blaze brought back memories of a devastating fire that killed 42 people last December in a forest in northern Israel. Most of the victims were prison guards who were helping in the rescue efforts. Their bus was engulfed in flames, killing them.
That fire burned out of control for four days and was extinguished only after firefighting aircraft from as far away as the US came in to bring it under control.
After that disaster, Israel overhauled its firefighting service and bought firefighting aircraft. Some of them could be seen circling over the Jerusalem fire.
