For a sense of this political shift, one need only look at the guest book at Yad Vashem. The memorial is an important stop on the tour for visiting dignitaries, and in the past half-year they have included the nationalist Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, one of the most prominent faces of the new political wave, which Mr. Orban calls “illiberal democracy.” Another was President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who once compared himself to Hitler and meant it as a compliment to Hitler and to himself . Brazil’s new populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, has said on e of his first foreign trips will be to Israel, which means that Yad Vashem can expect him soon. Matteo Salvini, the nationalist deputy prime minister of Italy, is expected in Jerusalem this month.

Employees at Yad Vashem aren’t allowed to speak to the media without permission, and permission to discuss these sensitive matters hasn’t been forthcoming. One senior researcher cut off our conversation as soon as I explained what interested me. The institution’s chairman was not made available for an interview and a spokeswoman simply emailed: “Yad Vashem is not party to the formulation or implementation of Israeli’s foreign policy.”

But inside the offices and archives at Yad Vashem, the argument is getting louder.

“There is distress here, and even anger,” a staff member told me, “because many of us see a collision between what we believe are the lessons of the Holocaust and what we see as our job, and between the way Yad Vashem is being abused for political purposes.”

Staffers at Yad Vashem, which receives 40 percent of its budget from the government, are asking themselves and each other questions like: What role should they be playing in the realpolitik practiced by their state? At what point does that role damage their other roles in commemorating and teaching the Holocaust? And how should a memorial to the devastation wrought in part by ethnic supremacism, a cult of personality and a disregard for law handle governments flirting with the same ideas?

The tension inside Yad Vashem broke into public view in June, in the part of the memorial known as the Valley of the Communities, where stone walls commemorate towns whose Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz , was passing the names of Austria’s lost communities when his guide mentioned that some of these very places had recently seen anti-Jewish incidents involving members of the Austrian Freedom Party. That party, whose first two leaders were former S.S. officers, is a coalition partner in Mr. Kurz’ s own government.