Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion - the oldest museum in the world dedicated to the genocide of Jews during World War II. It is small, you can even say - modest, not as widely known as the memorial Yad Vashem. But tourists will not miss it, if you want to know more about one of the greatest catastrophes of the XX century.

The museum was opened almost immediately after the war, in 1948. Point to its location was not chosen by chance: on the sacred Mount Zion for the Jews, right next to the tomb of King David. The Chamber did not immediately became a museum - it was conceived as a place of symbolic burial of the Nazis exterminated the Jewish community, but later it became clear: the tragic artifacts collected here is to see as many as possible. Controls museum orthodox yeshiva (religious school).

Several rooms that make up the House of the Holocaust, located in the basement. Dark, gloomy room lit candles that immediately creates the appropriate atmosphere. Among the exhibits - a bloody Torah scroll from Poland; handwritten prayer book of the Buchenwald concentration camp; homemade tefillin (prayer of the clothing) is very small, just a tiny, that it did not notice the guard; made from the sacred to the Jews the Torah scrolls handbags, wallets, soles, even the jacket, which went to a German officer. This jacket is clearly forced to sew tailor-Jew, and he did what he could: select a page from the book of Leviticus chapter 26 with the warnings and curses the wicked.

Many can bring tears to the photographs taken by an American soldier in liberated Buchenwald. Deeply shocking model of the gas chambers, urns with the ashes of burnt prisoners 36 Nazi death camps and, finally, soap, apparently brewed from human fat.

Still, the central element of the House of the Holocaust - not the individual exhibits, and the set of tablets on the walls of the courtyard, rooms, corridors. This keeps the memory of the more than two thousand Jewish communities destroyed - it is written on each label, and the community where she lived when she was killed, are given words of prayer. Survivors of the Holocaust memorial service is held here on the day of the death of his community.

Perhaps it is this, not the size of the premises, - the main difference between the museum on Mount Zion from the later of the memorial Yad Vashem. While Yad Vashem tries to show the tragedy of the individual, the Chamber of the Holocaust focuses on the destruction of communities and the religious collective memory. The visitor did not read Hebrew or Yiddish, he looks at signs and understands that a huge part of people disappeared, and it is irreparable.