{"id":454,"date":"2013-03-22T14:37:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-22T14:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2013\/03\/22\/yad-vashem-stands-as-testament-to-human-cruelty"},"modified":"2013-03-22T14:37:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T14:37:00","slug":"yad-vashem-stands-as-testament-to-human-cruelty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"Yad Vashem stands as testament to human cruelty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

\u201cWe could come here a thousand times, and each time our hearts would break.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

So said President Barack Obama today as he toured what must be considered the world\u2019s pre-eminent memorial to human cruelty. Yad Vashem sits on the outskirts of Jerusalem and it remembers the tragedy of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/thehill.com\/blogs\/global-affairs\/middle-east-north-africa\/289763-obama-places-stones-from-mlk-memorial-at-key-israeli-site<\/a><\/p>\n

The Yad Vashem visit brings the president\u2019s visit to Israel to a close. He also laid a stone from Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s memorial at the grave of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But it\u2019s the Yad Vashem tour that got my attention today.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had the honor of visiting that place. It was nearly four years ago that I toured Israel with four of my best friends. We were there on Rotary International Group Study Exchange. We had toured the country from top to bottom, from Nahariyah, to Eilat, Ashkelon, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Nazareth, Caeserea, Golan Heights, Sderot, Be\u2019er Sheva and the outskirts of Gaza City.<\/p>\n

Our four-week journey concluded with a Rotary district conference in Jerusalem. But as we arrived in that holiest of cities, our hosts took us to Yad Vashem, where we saw in graphic detail what had happened to Jews in Europe preceding and during World War II. <\/p>\n

Yad Vashem is the most somber place imaginable. Photos, artifacts \u2013 such as shoes and articles of clothing \u2013 taken from death camps, text taken from letters written by Holocaust victims to loved ones, all of it told the story of the worst kind of inhumanity imaginable.<\/p>\n

Israelis make a point of teaching the Holocaust to their children. They want younger generations to understand what happened to their people. In Eilat, we met a Dutch-born Israeli professor who takes high school students on pilgrimages to tour the death camps in Poland, Hungary and Germany where these unspeakable atrocities occurred. <\/p>\n

Yad Vashem brings it all home to the descendants of that horror.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad the president went there. Indeed, a tour of Yad Vashem ought to be required of every head of state who takes an oath to preserve the peace.<\/p>\n\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe could come here a thousand times, and each time our hearts would break.\u201d So said President Barack Obama today as he toured what must be considered the world\u2019s pre-eminent memorial to human cruelty. Yad Vashem sits on the outskirts of Jerusalem and it remembers the tragedy of the Holocaust. http:\/\/thehill.com\/blogs\/global-affairs\/middle-east-north-africa\/289763-obama-places-stones-from-mlk-memorial-at-key-israeli-site The Yad Vashem visit … Continue reading Yad Vashem stands as testament to human cruelty<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}