Jerusalem

Libraries and Museums

With some 2,500,000 volumes, the Jewish National and University Library is the largest in the country and has the world's premier collection of Judaica. It also has excellent collections in archaeology and Oriental studies. Jerusalem's other major libraries are the library of the Knesset, the State Archives, and the Municipal Library, which has multiple branches.

The Israel Museum, located in Jerusalem, is the country's national museum. Its holdings include some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, an extensive collection of archaeological artifacts from the Middle East, Jewish ritual art, Jewish ethnography, and sculpture. Archaeological exhibits are also found in the Rockefeller Museum, the Bible Lands Museum, and the Citadel Museum of the History of Jerusalem. Museums focusing on Arabic art, culture, and history include the Islamic Museum, the Islamic Art Museum, the L. A. Mayer Memorial Institute for Islamic Art, and the Palestinian Arab Folklore Centre.

Specialized museums include Ammunition Hill Museum, commemorating the 1967 Six Day War; the Armenian Art and History Museum in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City; the Bloomfield Science Museum; the Burnt house of Kathros, the reconstructed home of a Jewish family during the era of the Second Temple; and the Second Temple model, a scale model of Jerusalem before the destruction of the Second Temple.

Yad Vashem, in the Ein Kerem district, is both a museum of the Holocaust and a memorial to those who perished in it. The Historical Museum portion documents the Holocaust from the rise of Nazism through World War II. The Hall of Members Cemetery con tains ashes brought from Europe's concentration camps, an eternal flame, and pillars symbolizing the chimneys of the crematoria in which the bodies of victims were incinerated. Also included in Yad Vashem are the Garden of Righteous Gentiles and a Children's Memorial.