For the ‘Destroyed Communities,’ a Monument : Israel: Yad Vashem lists 5,000 prewar Jewish settlements in Europe. Holocaust wiped out many..

Korycin. Sidra. Dabrowa. Kuznica. Odelsk. Kolizaka. Krynki. Goniadz. Trzcianne.

The list is almost a gazetteer for Poland before World War II. Occasionally, there is a bigger name--Warszawa (Warsaw), Czestochowa, Krakow--but mostly these are the small towns and villages that dotted the map of prewar Central Europe.

Together, they were home to 3.5 million Polish Jews, only half a million of whom survived the war and the Nazi death camps.

Carved into massive blocks of white stone, piled one upon another, the list of names goes on, increasingly a litany of remembrance of a world now gone.

Tarnobrzeg. Grebow. Roznadov. Radomysl. Nisko. Jezowe.

Across into Germany, the Netherlands and France, over into Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia, down to Ukraine, the list continues.

Radomishl. Zhitomir. Gorodnista. Korosten. Krasnoarmeysk. Kiev. Babi Yar.

Altogether, 5,000 prewar villages, towns, cities and shtetlach from Europe and North Africa where Jews had lived are remembered in a new section, dedicated Thursday, at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem memorial to the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.

“Communities, whole communities, died in the Holocaust,” Yitzhak Arad, director of Yad Vashem, said in an interview. “Some of these places still exist, of course, but with only a handful of Jews; others are gone, wiped off the map, wiped off the Earth. But they all should be remembered as places where Jews had lived for generations, where Jews preserved and practiced their religion and where they, in fact, managed to remain Jewish.”

“The Valley of the Destroyed Communities,” as the new section is called, is a four-acre map of continental Europe before the outbreak in 1939 of World War II.

Sunk into the rocky, wooded hillside below Yad Vashem’s solemn Hall of Remembrance, the interconnected series of 22 courtyards is formed by the rough-hewn walls of Jerusalem stone that rise starkly 20 to 30 feet above the red gravel floor.

Each courtyard represents one or two countries--from France, Belgium and the Netherlands across to Russia, from Denmark and Norway down to Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia. While the geographic relationships are preserved, the countries have been drawn in a scale that reflects the number of Jews killed there, so Poland is the largest and occupies the center of the complex.

On the walls of each “country” are carved--in Roman, Hebrew and sometimes Cyrillic letters--the names of the communities where Jews had lived--and died.

“This site, which is carved from the stones of the Judean Mountains, has the strength of an everlasting tribute and a memorial to the communities that were destroyed and are no longer,” President Chaim Herzog said Thursday at the dedication ceremony.

“But it is also a monument that says to all the nations of the earth, ‘See how deep is the degradation, this pit of heedlessness, into which man’s soul slid. See the extent of man’s cruelty when he loses sight of the image (of God), how powerful is the hatred, racism and murderousness when a person loses sight of that image in which he was created.’ ”

The exit from Valley of the Destroyed Communities, however, takes visitors out through a “garden of resurrection” with a view of Jerusalem’s breathtaking skyline.

“This is not just a heap of stones or ‘yet another memorial,’ as some people have called it,” said Marc Palmer, a Holocaust survivor and Chicago businessman who raised funds for the project, at the dedication. “Here are inscribed every town, city and shtetl where at least 100 Jews lived. . . . In every community lived nice, honest, hard-working people who cared for one another.”

As Palmer continued, speaking of the gatherings for prayers each Sabbath, the weddings and the funerals and the schools of Jewish studies, the faces in an audience of Holocaust survivors from the United States, Canada and Western Europe, as well as Israel, were transformed by their own memories, and tears rolled down their cheeks. Their recollections may be romanticized, idealizing what were often impoverished ghettos, but for many these communities remain “home.”

Arad, who has been at work on the $12-million project since 1979, said Yad Vashem had wanted to “find a way to express the destruction but in a simple way, one that would speak to future generations as well as commemorate the past.”

Designed by landscape architects Dan Zur and Lipa Yahalom of Tel Aviv, the exhibit is intended, in Zur’s words, to be “a terrifying, towering labyrinth threatening to collapse on visitors, but culminating in the garden of resurrection with its view overlooking Jerusalem.”

When asked more than a decade ago to submit a design, Zur said he and Yahalom had decided against “a regular stone monument or garden. Instead we wanted to portray a destroyed world, but parallel with the ruins there would be resurrection.”

The project has proved controversial, first because of the cost, which was financed by donations from Jews around the world, but, secondly, as a result of questions among Israelis about whether they concentrate too much on the Holocaust in educating their youth.

“The past is the roots of any people and their property,” Arad said in rebuttal. “Without understanding the past, we can’t build the future.”