Leaders from around the world gathered in the Israeli capital of Jerusalem today for the opening of the revised and modernized Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem. The $56 million renovation pays more attention to the plight of individuals and makes use of computers and other modern technology to tell the story.

Among those in attendance were United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The new museum is four times larger than the previous one and attempts to examine the individual lives of the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis.

'Every artifact, document, story and picture that would give the visitor a sense of what the Shoah [Holocaust] was and who the people were who experienced it was carefully considered,' Avner Shalev, chief curator of the museum told the CBC.

'The approach is very personal,' Shalev added. 'We put the individual at the center. We're telling the story through the eyes, the mouths, the feelings of the individual. Eye to eye, person to person. We believe that if you get some human pieces of experiences, you can build your own empathy, you can think 'what is my responsibility? Where am I in this story? What does it mean to me?''

The videotaped testimonies of thousands of survivors are also available for visitors to watch and hear and experience. They demonstrate that even years later, the horrors of the camps and ghettos still linger in the memory of those that managed to emerge from them alive.

The museum stands out from the rest of Jerusalem as it is not made of the bright Jerusalem stone that the rest of the city is built with. Instead, it is made of a cold, gray slate color which brings immediate attention to the structure.

The museum's message is 'remembering the past, shaping the future.' It is a difficult yet worthwhile mission and one done accomplished by the new Yad Vashem.