The museum was opened by the Israeli President, Moshe Katsav.
Also present at the ceremony were UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the presidents of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Montenegro and Switzerland, the prime ministers od France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Romania and ministers of another dozen countries.
The new Holocaust museum, worth 100 million dollars, is four times bigger than the old museum which was founded in 1953 following a decision of the Knesset.
The new centre has a holocaust history museum, the hall of names and an exhibition pavilion. It stretches on 4,200 square metres.
According to officials of the Yad Vashem memorial museum, the objective of the new memorial centre is to document research and cherish the memories of the killings of six million Jews in World War II. The centre marked a record-high number of visits in 1999 when a total of 2,057,793 people toured the place.
The museum archive includes 62 million pages of documents, 2,675,000 photographs, thousands of films and video recordings with the testimonies of survivors.
A session called "Remembering The Past, Forming The Future" will be held on Wednesday on the occasion of the opening of the new museum.
President Mesic is scheduled to give a talk at the session. He is also scheduled to meet his Israeli counterpart Katsav, PM Shimon Peres and the head of the Opposition in the Knesset Tommy Lapid.