Yad Lashiryon, Israel’s official memorial for soldiers from the Armored Corps who fell in combat, also happens to be one of the largest and most diverse tank museums in the world. Yad Lashiryon is located at Latrun, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Latrun was selected for the memorial because it was the site of a bloody battle during the 1948 War of Independence, one of the first to introduce Israel’s newly established Armored Corps.
The memorial’s main building is a British Mandate-era fortress, which houses an archive of the fallen soldiers, a synagogue and a library. Yad Lashiryon’s most famous landmark (and its logo) is an American M4 Sherman tank mounted on top of a tower. But besides the M4, the memorial’s adjoining museum houses a huge collection of tanks including the Israeli Merkava marks I through IV, and hundreds of models from the US, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union, among other countries, as well as some that Israel captured from enemy forces in wartime.
The Allied Forces Monument pays tribute to the armies that fought the Nazis in World War II, led by the US, Britain and the USSR.
