Jerusalem- A notebook with the cramped, meticulous handwriting of Adolf Eichmann, the man who oversaw the mass murder of the Jews in World War II, written in an Israeli prison cell 15 years after the end of the war.

A sheet with the blood of Yitzhak Rabin staining the lyrics of an iconic Israeli song which urges the active pursuit of peace - sung by the Israeli premier on the night he was assassinated for doing just that.

Pages from the diary of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, which survived an explosion of hundreds if not thousands of degrees Celcius, a 70-kilometre plunge to earth from the fringes of space, and two months in a Texas field.

These are some of a series of original documents illustrating defining moments in Israel's tumultuous history, which are on public display for the first time as part of an Israeli exhibition which opened this week.

The display, at Jerusalem's Israel Museum, is to last until early next year and is part of the country's 60th anniversary celebrations.

"As a human child I entered life on 19 March 1906," Eichmann opens his memoirs. "I was born in Solingen, in the Rheinland, as the first son of the married couple Adolf and Maria Eichmann."

The handwriting is pressed and hard to read to the point of almost being unintelligible at times.

The Israeli government had kept the manuscript under lock and key for 40 years, until releasing a typed transcript in March 2000 - at the request of lawyers involved in the libel trial brought by the British David Irving against American historian Deborah Liptstadt, who had called him a Holocaust denier.

The original has since been accessible at the State Archives. "But this is the first time they display the manuscript itself," explains Dr. Yehoshua Freundlich, who heads the Israeli government-kept archives. Eichmann's family is claiming ownership of the memoirs and Israel, adamant to prevent their handover, is careful not to make any commercial use of them, he tells Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Unlike the notorious "Hitler Diaries," there is no doubt the Eichmann diaries, written under the watchful eyes of his Israeli prison guards, are genuine. Eichmann also made a point of signing each page for authentication.

The top SS official in charge of transporting the Jews of Europe to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps was intercepted by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires in 1960. The only person to ever have been sentenced to death in Israel, he was hung two years later.

Despite their significance as an authentic account of the Holocaust by a perpetrator who played a leading part in it, Freundlich calls the content of the memoirs "disappointing."

His "very dry" and "uninspired" writing reveals that "Eichmann wasn't a very talented man," says Freundlich.

In complete contrast are the poetic words of the Song for Peace, which since it was first performed by Israeli military song troupes in the early 1970s has become associated with the Israeli peace camp.

Rabin bashfully sang along with leading Israeli artists at a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995, minutes before he left the podium to be fatally shot by a fanatic religious Jew opposed to the Oslo peace process he had launched with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The copy of the song was found in Rabin's jacket pocket.

"Neither the joy of victory, nor songs of glory" can bring back Israel's fallen soldiers. Therefore, don't whisper a prayer, but cry out for peace, symbolically read the lyrics covered by a large stain of reddish-brown blood.

Two pages recovered from the flight log kept by Israel's first ever astronaut, who perished in the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, also feature in the exhibition.

They were found - "uncanningly" as museum Director James Snyder puts it - near Palestine, Texas, two months after the space shuttle disintegrated on entering the earth's atmosphere.

More pages were found, but Ramon's widow authorized the museum to display only two, because large parts of the diary "are very personal," says exhibition curator Ido Bruno.

One page contains the Jewish blessing for the Sabbath meal, written down by Ramon for use on board the shuttle, the other an entry on the sixth day of the mission, which describes how life away from Earth was slowly becoming, for as much as possible, a routine:

"Today was perhaps the first day I really felt I live in space. I've become a man who lives and works in space, just like in the movies. You wake up in the morning floating lightly and in a (...) motion to the 'family room': mid-deck. To the laboratory, teeth, face and on to work. A little bit of coffee you 'grab on the way'."

Other crucial documents include the original peace treaties Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan, and a September 9, 1993 letter to Rabin by Arafat, in which he became the first Palestinian leader to recognize Israel's right to exist. (dpa)