Former Chairmen of the Yad Vashem Directorate

Avner Shalev has dedicated his decades-long career to advancing basic Jewish-Zionist and universal values ​​in Israel and around the world. Throughout his past and present roles, he has had a formative influence on education and culture in the State of Israel.From the beginning of his tenure, Shalev pioneered the redefinition of Holocaust remembrance and education, planning and implementing a comprehensive multiyear redevelopment plan with the goal of preparing Yad Vashem to meet the challenges of relevant Holocaust remembrance in the 21st century. To that end, he placed education at the...

Dr. Arad was born Yitzhak Rudnicki in Święciany, Poland (now Svencionys, Lithuania) in November 1926. In his youth, he belonged to a Zionist youth movement and was educated in Hebrew schools. At the outbreak of WWII, he lived with his family in Warsaw. After three months of German occupation of the city, he fled with his sister back to Święciany. His parents were murdered during the Shoah. During the war, he managed to escape a murderous German aktion and sneak back into the town ghetto, where he was put to work in a munitions warehouse. He began to smuggle weaponry and help form a ghetto underground...