Yad Vashem Packs Emotion Into 30-Minute Trump Stop — With One Young Victim’s Tale

By Andrew Tobin May 23, 2017

JERUSALEM (JTA) — President Donald Trump will spend just 30 minutes at Yad Vashem on the second and last day of his visit to Israel, but the leadership of the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem plans to use the brief time to deliver a powerful message.

Rather than bombarding Trump with facts or analysis, they will tell him the story of one German Jewish girl, Ester Goldstein, who was murdered by the Nazis.

“The story of a child touches everyone, not only the president,” Yona Kobo, researcher of online exhibitions at Yad Vashem, told JTA.

During his Tuesday afternoon stop at Yad Vashem, Trump will be presented with a replica of a personal album that belonged to Ester. While most of the Jews who contributed photographs and handwritten messages were killed in the Holocaust, Ester’s older sister, Margot Herschenbaum, 91, is still alive and will meet the president.

Ester’s parents and younger brother were killed in Nazi death camps. But Herschenbaum was rescued by a Kindertransport operation to Australia in June 1939, when she was 9. After the war she moved to the United States, where she was sent Ester’s album. She later donated it to Yad Vashem’s collection of 30,000 such artifacts.

“I hope that the President will appreciate the uniqueness of this item and realize its true meaning.”

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