Updating the Holocaust; Israel's Yad Vashem enters the multimedia age.(Holocaust History Museum)

Byline: Kevin Peraino (With Joanna Chen in Jerusalem)

Avner Shalev tried to keep it real. The director of Jerusalem's recently renovated Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, never liked the Disneyland feel of some rival exhibitions. Walking a reporter through the galleries, he gestures toward the authentic relics of a historical tragedy: documents, diaries--even lampposts recovered from the Warsaw ghetto. Toward the end of the tour, Shalev approaches a large beige model of the crematorium at Birkenau, by Polish sculptor Mieczyslaw Stobierski. It's powerful--but it also breaks Shalev's own rule about including reproductions. "Auschwitz has one," he says with a shrug. "Washington also commissioned one. I thought we should have one." Not even history, it seems, is free from the invisible hand of competition.

The tragedy of the Holocaust has never had a higher profile in the world's museums. At one time Yad Vashem, a sprawling compound on the outskirts of Israel's capital, was ground zero for remembrance. But in recent years museums commemorating the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, have sprung up all over the world. Paris recently renovated its Holocaust museum. Ukraine's is under construction. The United States is now home to more than 100. Compared with the newcomers, Yad Vashem soon seemed woefully outdated. So Shalev and his team spent $56 million to bring the museum into the Information Age. When the renovated space opens to the public later this month, guests will wander through a spectacle of multimedia storytelling designed to teach a new generation the heartbreaking lessons of a past one.

Yad Vashem opened in 1957--three years before the first televised presidential debate and decades before anyone had ever dreamed up a DVD. Now the museum has to compete for its guests' attention with the alluring distractions of the media age. The curators have done their best, installing more than 100 flat-screen TVs playing video clips of survivor stories. Life-size black-and-white photographs of the murdered are projected on a wall. Today's ...