by Jean-Luc Renaudie
JERUSALEM - Israel on Tuesday formally opened the world's largest Holocaust museum built to commemorate the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, in the presence of scores of foreign leaders and dignitaries.
President Moshe Katsav cut the ribbon on the new museum and attached a traditional Jewish mezzuza (religious text inscribed on parchment) to its main door on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Former chief rabbi Meir Lau, himself a survivor of the World War II Nazi extermination camps, blessed the new premises at the Yad Vashem memorial as a girls' choir sang a hymn.
The hundreds of guests, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, nine heads of state, six prime ministers and four foreign ministers, most of them from Europe, poured into the museum for its official opening ceremony.
Described as the biggest international occasion in Israel since the 1995 funeral of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, security was razor-tight in Jerusalem with police on high alert and a helicopter circulating overhead.
The Yad Vashem memorial, dedicated to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II, has spent the last 10 years creating the museum to keep alive the tragedy of the past.
Among those attending were the presidents of Poland and Switzerland, the premiers of Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Romania and Sweden, and the German, Norwegian and Spanish foreign ministers.
British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Russian security council chief Igor Ivanov, Vatican representative Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel are also in Jerusalem for the event.
The gathering, set to continue with a roundtable discussion on Wednesday, comes two months after international leaders gathered in Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Traffic was gridlocked in parts of Jerusalem with the main King David boulevard closed and all roads sealed off from the edge of the city up to the memorial on Mount Herzl.
Ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers vehemently opposed to the government's plan to evacuate the occupied Gaza Strip later this year had threatened to block off roads following a protest late Monday in Tel Aviv.
Around 1,500 policemen, backed up by outside reinforcements, deployed across the city in a huge show of force to forestall any trouble, said a spokeswoman.
Yad Vashem -- the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority -- was built in 1953 five years after the creation of the state of Israel as a reminder of the unimaginable horrors that European Jews endured under the Nazi regime.
The new museum encompasses the individual tragedies of Holocaust victims, laid bare beneath a vast concrete archway sunk into the stony hillsides of west Jerusalem where the new museum has been constructed.
Like other Holocaust memorials overseas, it attempts to convey the message, both "Jewish and universal" about the horrors which can result from anti-Semitism and other racial hatred.
The names, and sometimes photos of victims, documented in nearly three million Pages of Testimony that have been painstakingly compiled over years, are displayed on a vast, high conical structure in the Hall of Names.
Several rooms are dedicated to the Jewish partisans and to the non-Jews who risked their own lives trying to protect the Jewish people from death, who are honoured as "the righteous among the nations".
There is also a chamber dedicated to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 which provided a refuge for those who escaped the Holocaust, although representation of this chapter of Jewish history is modest.
Yad Vashem also includes a centre for Holocaust research, an international school for Holocaust studies and a vast database collating the names and details of each victim.
03/15/2005 15:00 GMT