Hundreds of guests gathered for a full-scale evening ceremony of dedication complete with moving Yiddish lullabies and speeches at the sprawling Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial compound on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
"When you leave this museum you see the sky of Jerusalem. I know how a Jew feels when he breathes the air of Jerusalem. He feels free, he feels at home," said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"He knows Israel is the only place in the world where Jews have the right to defend themselves, and that proves the Jewish people will never know another Shoah," he added.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that the United Nations, like Israel, rose up from the ashes of the Holocaust and the systematic murder of 6 million Jews was a "driving force" behind the universal declaration of human rights.
"Today we remember those who perished ... to ensure that their fate is recorded and never forgotten. It is also to ensure that such horror never happens again anywhere," he said.
Described as the biggest international event in Israel since the 1995 funeral of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, nine heads of state, six prime ministers and four foreign ministers were among the audience.
The Yad Vashem memorial, dedicated to the millions of European 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.
"This is a holy place and the biggest hope for the future," said Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
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.
At a dinner for the guests at the Israeli parliament, President Moshe Katsav said that the world was facing the worst anti-Semitism in 60 years, but offered praise to European leaders who stand up to the menace.
"Today we are facing a wave of anti-Semitism such that we have not seen since World War II," Katsav said.
"We had thought that anti-Semitism would never raise its head again. We had thought it was a phenomenon of an old world and an old Europe," he said.
"Once against we are witness to attacks on synagogues, desecrations in cemeteries and slander written on walls."
But he also offered his congratulations to European leaders.
"I congratulate the European leaders who react against anti-Semitism ... and denounce attacks against Israel ... Europe is now another Europe," he added.
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.
Auschwitz survivor and writer Lucie Cytryn Bialer, 82, said that she was deeply moved. The museum "will allow young people to understand that we were not just identity numbers as the Nazis wanted, but human beings", she said.
Photocopies of diaries written by her brother - killed in the genocide - and written in 24 exercise books are in the museum.
Security was razor tight in Jerusalem for the event, with the main roads leading up to Mount Herzl sealed off and around 1,500 policemen on the streets after ultranationalist Jews threatened to protest against the Gaza pullout plan.
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 of 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 that can result from anti-Semitism and other racial hatred.
The names, and sometimes photos of victims, documented in nearly 3 million Pages of Testimony that have been painstakingly compiled over the 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 honored as "the righteous among the nations".
© 2005 Agence France-Presse
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