9/11 Living Memorial Plaza

I have mentioned the 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza in a blog post before, but we took a visitor to see it a good few weeks ago and I decided that the beautiful memorial warranted a blog post of its own.

The 9/11 Living Memorial is a cenotaph located on a hill in the Arazim Valley, just north of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. The Hebrew word arazim means cedars, but if you look around, there are no cedar trees here. The name was given to the valley in 1923. It seems that the early Zionist pioneers who first settled this region mistook cypress trees for cedar trees.
The 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza, built on 5 acres of hillside, remembers and honours the victims of the September 11 attacks. The cenotaph is made of granite, bronze and aluminium and is in the shape of an American flag, waving and transforming into a memorial flame 6 metres high that reaches for the sky. The folded part of the flag is reminiscent of the collapse of the towers in a cloud of dust. In a glass window at the base of the cenotaph there is a metal shard from the foundation of one of the fallen Twin Towers. It is inscribed with these words in English and Hebrew: "This metal piece, like the entire monument, is a manifestation of the special relationship between New York and Jerusalem."

Memorial plaques on the wall around the plaza commemorate the names of the 2,779 victims who perished in the disaster, including five Israelis. The names of the victims are embedded on metal plates and placed on the circular wall.  It is the first and only monument outside of the United States which lists the names of all the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The plaza is intended to be a diplomatic stop for visiting prime ministers and ambassadors and can comfortably hold 300 people for ceremonies. It was designed to echo the shape of the Pentagon and has an indentation in the floor that represents the rut created in the land where one of the planes crashed in rural Pennsylvania. 

The 9/11 Living Memorial was planned and designed over the course of eight years by landscape architect Yehiel Cohen and the award-winning artist Eliezer Weishoff, an Israeli multidisciplinary artist who has designed logos, posters and postage stamps to mark many of Israel's historic events. Other designs by Weishoff include the "Bird" sculpture for the Jewish National Fund, which can be seen at the entrance to forests and national parks, and coins for the Bank of Israel and the Israel Government Coins and Medals Corporation. This memorial was commissioned by the Jewish National Fund at a cost of ₪10 million ($2 million). The inauguration ceremony was held on 12th November 2009 with representation from the US Ambassador to Israel, James B. Cunningham, members of the Israeli Cabinet and legislature, family of victims and others.

The plaza is strategically located within view of Jerusalem's main cemetery, Har HaMenuchot. The seating is amphitheatre style and the location of the memorial, amid the Arazim Valley, is fittingly contemplative. While official ceremonies are occasionally held here, the handicapped-accessible site is free and open to tourists and locals. Israeli school children often visit the site on school trips to learn more about the terrorist tragedy that took place on American soil.

The Arazim Valley is part of Jerusalem Metropolitan Park, a 43-kilometre park being developed around the city of Jerusalem. 100 years ago the Jerusalem hills were the exclusive province of nature, which surrounded the Old City and the new city that had just begun to grow on its outskirts. Today there are still foxes prowling on the edges of Jerusalem, as well as jackals, rodents and all kinds of birds. When we visited the 9/11 Living Memorial the spring flowers were still in bloom. We spotted beautiful Pink Butterfly Orchid, or Orchis papilionacea, among the more usual collection of cyclamen, anemone and asphodels. Green organisations succeeded in halting a building development project which threatened to bury all this beauty under concrete and cement. Subsequently, an alternate plan was conceived, to develop the Jerusalem Metropolitan Park on the outskirts of the city.
The memorial to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York fits in beautifully with the Jerusalem landscape and its location in Arazim Valley, at the approach to Jerusalem, is a very moving way to express Israel's and the United State's shared battle against terrorism.

Photo credit: Gadi Isaacs

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