The Past That Does Not Pass - Israelis and Holocaust Memory - OFER Dalia 2009

Dalia Ofer
The Past That Does Not Pass:

Israelis and Holocaust Memory
ABSTR ACT
The article raises issues that relate to the centrality of the Holocaust in the
lives and imagination of many Israelis, and as a pivotal event that shapes
their Jewish-Israeli identity. It examines the positions held by Israelis on
the meaning of the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory, and asks
whether the presence of the Holocaust in our lives represents an honest,
unwavering effort to understand the Holocaust and its place in our world
as human beings, Jews, and Israelis, or is a result of manipulating forces that
use and abuse the memory of the Holocaust to advance unrelated political
or social causes. The article presents a profusion of voices in Holocaust dis-
course and asks whether these are complementary or conflicting messages.
It discusses the groups for whom the Holocaust was a personal experience,
their offspring, who experienced the Holocaust as a family memory, and
others whose memory of the Holocaust was shaped by survivors’ testimo-
nies, social processes, and the internalization of cultural messages. It focuses
on the contribution of these groups in Holocaust research and artistic
representation centering on literature, film, and music.
INTRODUCTION
A lthough the Holocaust occurred over sixty years ago, for

many Israelis it is still a vibrant force in their lives and imaginations, a
pivotal event that shapes their Jewish-Israeli identity.
While many agree with this statement, there is a sharp divergence of
opinion over its meaning. Does dealing with Holocaust memory reflect an
Israeli obsession or form of mental aberration, or does it express the success
1
2 • isr ael studies, volume 14, number 1
of the formal agents of memory in affixing an aura of hallowedness around

Holocaust memory and manipulating its uniqueness to advance political
goals?1 Perhaps the centrality of Holocaust memory is a testament to its
impact on lives of Israelis and their sincere, ceaseless effort to understand
the event for themselves as human beings, Jews, and Israelis.2 These are the
key issues addressed in the article.
The main argument is that the Holocaust discourse stems from the
multi-directional dialogue between Israelis and Holocaust events that began
at the end of WW II. One aspect of this dialogue deals with the histori-
cal event and its main themes, another addresses the representation of the
Holocaust in Israeli culture and society and the shaping of memory and
commemorative patterns by official and non-official agencies.
The intensity and richness of the ongoing, pluralistic (multifaceted)
discourse between the past and its meaning stems from the ability to argue,
disagree, and compromise over the content and patterns of Holocaust
memory, and express a wide range of critical views in line with the public’s
consensus on the Holocaust’s centrality in Jewish history. The article focuses
on whether this diversity of voices sends complementary or contradictory
messages, and how the Holocaust can be understood in light of the vari-
ous ways that have been proposed for shaping its memory for Israelis who
themselves have a wide range of views and biographies.3
The orchestra of consenting and objecting voices paradoxically reflects
the ways the multi-directional discourse has developed and expanded its
thematic and biographical dimensions. Similarly, we observe the shift of
concepts and discourses between the center and the periphery, all of which
is instructive regarding the spiral development of Holocaust discourse in
which Israeli society is still engaged.
The discussion focuses on the groups participating in the multi-
directional discourse in Israel and their effort to understand the mean-
ing of the Holocaust through the survivors as teachers, scholars, and
artists who have helped clarify its significance. We also focus on their
offspring—the “second generation”—and Israelis who grew up in the
country from the 1930s to the first decade of statehood. These groups
and contributions to the general discourse on the Holocaust in Israel
have been chosen because the Holocaust and its significance is a central
part of their lives and work.
The chronological framework is not the key feature of the article;
instead it accompanies the different themes that have emerged in the course
of Israel’s 60 years. We refer mainly to the work and artistic productions of
these people; however, their reception and impact will not occupy a central
The Past That Does Not Pass • 3
theme in the discussion. A comprehensive survey of the Holocaust should

include the ultra-orthodox community and Arab intellectuals, but limited
space excludes these two important sectors.
Extensive research has been carried out on Holocaust survivors in
Israel, Holocaust representation, the preservation of its memory, and its
commemoration. Studies have been conducted on the survivors and their
absorption, attitudes toward them, and the connection between the terms
“Holocaust and rebirth”, “Holocaust and heroism”, and “Holocaust and
the establishment of the State of Israel”. These studies have also investi-
gated memorial institutes and the development of Holocaust research and
teaching in various institutions. The research has explored creative works
in literature, cinema, and the visual and performing arts, and has devoted
considerable space to the psychological impact of the Holocaust on the
survivors and their families. Although this article is largely based on research
findings, it does not summarize the current state of research on the memory
of the Holocaust.
For most Israelis the Holocaust is not part of their living memory. It is
an experience acquired through learning, absorbing the texts (and subtexts)
of Holocaust Day ceremonies, reading, and the arts, and by actively being
part of daily life in Israel. Also involved in forging this experience are state
institutions and agents of memory, such as Yad Vashem, the Ghetto Fight-
ers’ Museum, Yad Mordechai, and the Masua and Moreshet (Heritage)
Archives affiliated with the kibbutz movement.4
Although the patterns of Holocaust commemoration were established
in the first decade of the state, in the various ceremonies in the education
system and memorial centers a rote form for observing the event can be
seen. The Holocaust’s presence goes far beyond the mere ticking off of dates
on the Hebrew calendar.
Extensive articles have been published on the Holocaust dealing with
Jews abroad, the distribution of money by the Claims Conference, and
manifestations of anti-Semitism in Europe. The Holocaust has frequently
become a political tool for attacking the opposition, whether on the right
or left. Expressions such as “Auschwitz borders” and “Judenrat govern-
ment” (administrative bodies that the Nazis forced Jews to set up in occu-
pied Poland and Soviet Union) appear in political harangues and publicist
writings, and are often heard in the public discourse.5
However, the centrality of memorial and commemorative ceremo-
nies for the Holocaust would not have been preserved had the public not
been willing to participate in them and in shaping the messages that they
represent.
Almost immediately after independence, many leading Israeli intel-

lectuals and politicians debated the proper form of Holocaust commemo-
ration, its meaning in Jewish history, and how it should be presented. No
consensus was reached on “how much” Holocaust memory should be
preserved.
Some religious Zionists of the ultra-religious Agudat Israel Party totally
rejected any form of memory preservation that did not correspond strictly
to Jewish tradition. They opposed assigning a date for Holocaust Memorial
Day that was not taken from the religious calendar of mourning days. Reli-
gious Zionists and “Agudists” opposed the customs adopted by the Knesset
law of 1959 for this day, regarding them as foreign intrusions designed to
ape other nations, and violations of memorial ritual as observed by Jews
who fast on those days, study texts from the Mishna, and read portions
from the Book of Psalms. Religious Zionism notes two days for the Holo-
caust—the 10th of Tevet and the 27th of Nisan (which Agudat Israel and
ultra-orthodox Jews refused to observe).
The Labor Movements and affiliated groups’ interpretation of Remem-
brance Day also reflects a number of political and ideological views. The
same holds for representatives of centralist and right-wing Zionist parties.
A major issue that spurred contention was the name of the day. The Knes-
set decided in 1951 on “A Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and the
Uprising”, but two years later a law was submitted to establish a Memorial
Authority—Yad Vashem, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance
Authority” (omitting the word “uprising”).6
Even in the Yishuv and first decade of statehood when the memorial
institutions and patterns of Holocaust commemoration were established,
there were major disagreements. It was used and abused in Knesset debates,
party forums, and public disputations. A consensus was never attained.
Various ways for observing Holocaust day were voiced on political, social,
and cultural platforms and in private homes.
These activities, in addition to political events, the 1952 Reparations
Agreement or the 1954 Gruenwald-Kasztner Trial for example, are expres-
sions of the “ongoing dialogue” with the Holocaust and its meaning in
Israel. The multifaceted dialogue takes place between “here” (Israel) and
“there” (the Diaspora), and in the souls of many Israelis, where it also
diverges. The main differences in the content of these dialogues stemmed
from developments in Israeli culture and society, and from the integration
of Holocaust research findings into the public discourse.
PARTNERS IN A MULTIFACETED DISCOURSE
For the survivors, the Holocaust is a personal, family experience that accom-
panies them day and night and influences their approach to Jewish life and
universal values. This is also true for their offspring (second generation), but
the difference between their experiences and those of their parents should
be discerned. The number of living Holocaust survivors is diminishing,
most were children or in their teens when WW II broke out. Since the
1980s the second generation has become very active in shaping Holocaust
memory, and is currently a major participant in the public discourse.
Another group is made up of Israelis who came from Europe before
the war and who lost most of their families and communities during the
Holocaust. Here too the numbers are receding, but their offspring, now in
their 60s and 70s, went through an intense personal experience in which the
Holocaust became a pivotal event in their lives. They grew up in Israel in the
1950s and 1960s, the years of mass immigration that witnessed the influx of
tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors. Most felt their parents’ tension
when family members arrived from “there”. The radio program “Looking
for Lost Relatives” was broadcast twice daily. Many of these children still
recall the silence that engulfed the house as the names were announced of
people looking for relatives. They also remember that their role was to write
down the names, as their parents were not fluent in Hebrew and found it
difficult to follow the announcements and jot down the names at the same
time. For these youngsters, the names and places were simultaneously
strange-sounding and familiar, and awakened a deep emotion. Many heard
their parents, relatives, and family friends talking, and they imbibed the
excitement, sadness, guilt, and criticism.
Apartments in the 1950s were tiny and cramped. Going out for “a good
time” meant holding evening chats with the neighbors over a cup of tea and
a sugar cube, or engaging in time-stretching card games spiced with gab in
the mother tongue. From their bedrooms children listened to the adults’
kitchen chat, and colored them with their own interpretations, feelings of
proximity, estrangement, and mystery toward the subjects. The language
was not always coherent, but this was often one of the ways that they
acquired their knowledge of the parents’ spoken tongue. Each experience
was different and thus it is impossible to create identical mental constructs
among the offspring of “veteran” Israelis in the 1950s.7
During their childhood, complex images were formed of the European
Jews who had perished. Meeting the relatives who survived sharpened the
contrasting, though not necessarily conflicting, sense of proximity and
estrangement. These images accompanied them into adulthood and became

their basic starting point for dealing with particular public events in Israel,
e.g., the Eichmann Trial in 1961 or the three-week “Waiting Period” prior
to the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War.
Israelis whose memory of the Holocaust was founded on direct or
indirect family talks, though not direct experience of the Holocaust, has yet
to be systematically researched (in a number of years such research will be
impossible). The “veterans” together with the survivors and their children
made up over one-third of Israel’s Jewish population in the 1950s and 1960s,
numbering 2,383,600 in 1961.8
The majority of Israelis come from backgrounds not included in any
of the abovementioned groups, but still they are culture consumers and
active participants in Israel’s social and political mainstream. Their attitude
toward the Holocaust is influenced by the state’s commemorative patterns
and national memorial days, and the media’s information on legal, financial,
and other aspects of the Holocaust. In a society of immigrants the long-
time residents played a major role in forming social values and the national
ethos. The voices of the immigrants (including Holocaust survivors) were
often swallowed up in the chorus of opinion on Holocaust commemora-
tion, particularly among immigrants from Islamic countries whose voices
were almost entirely muted in the Holocaust discourse. However, since
the 1980s the voices of Israelis from Islamic countries have been integrated
into the general symphony, where they express agreement, reservations, and
criticism of Holocaust memory and commemoration patterns. It is difficult
to ascertain their strength and influence. Their absence in the following
picture is conspicuous.9 Immigrants to Israel from the FSU, who arrived
in the past two decades, are beginning to add their unique voices to WW
II and Holocaust commemoration.
SURVIVORS, HISTORIANS, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS:

THE GENER ATION THAT SHAPED HOLOCAUST
RESEARCH AND TEACHING
In Israel the survivors played a major role in shaping and laying the ground-
work of Holocaust research. They set up archives and data bases, and
determined the research agenda. Major issues concerning the Jews and their
communities during the Holocaust posited the Jews not as objects of the mur-
derers and their henchmen, but as subjects of research who should be stud-
ied in the broader view of prewar Jewish life.10 The research of these scholars
(as well as those who did not experience the Holocaust) and the establish-
ment of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry (hereafter: ICJ) at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (hereafter: HUJ) in 1959, and the Chair of Holo-
caust Research at Bar-Ilan University in the same year, created the academic
basis for integrating Holocaust studies into the university program.
In the first and second decades of the ICJ, survivors attended lectures
alongside young students, the former recognizable by their advanced age
compared to younger Israelis going on to graduate school.11 This encounter
triggered a broader bi-generational discourse that commenced at the time
of the Eichmann Trial and afterwards permeated university and educational
institutions. The special contribution of Holocaust survivor students with
their intimate knowledge of the destroyed communities, their mental ter-
rain, and familiarity with local languages was gratefully and eagerly received
by their younger counterparts who lacked first-hand knowledge of the
subject.
These encounters developed into networks for educational activity
in high schools on memorial days and for special projects in educational
institutions before the Holocaust became a compulsory subject. As wit-
nesses who related their stories to the younger generation and as partners
in a discourse with them, the survivors’ role and stature grew. Throughout
the 1960s and 1970s communities of students and scholars were formed in
various areas of Holocaust studies. The ICJ initiated a project on Jewish
resistance that became the stage on which the concepts of Jewish resistance
and confrontation (amida) and their similarities and differences were dis-
cussed, and a broad survey was made of armed resistance and fighting in
the ghettos and forests.
These efforts created a fascinating and impassioned academic discourse
that survivor-scholars such as Israel Gutman, Shalom Cholawsky, and
Aharon Weiss took part in, alongside students (Dalia Ofer, Nili Keren, and
Avital Saf )—children of “veteran” Israelis and of survivors whose personal
backgrounds were far removed from these areas.12 This group of scholars
and teachers became the focal point for the questions and challenges awak-
ened through Holocaust research and should be seen against the backdrop
of political events and two wars (1967, 1973) that proved Israel still faced
existential dangers.13
In the 1970s, before the Ministry of Education (hereafter: MoE)
decided the Holocaust would be a required part of the school curriculum,
the universities began preparing a syllabus and textbook for high schools.
This was the response of Haim Schatzker, from the School of Education at
the HUJ to the high school teachers’ demands. Schatzker, who arrived in
Eretz-Israel in 1941 with Youth Aliya (established in 1933 to assist German

youth and others to immigrate to Palestine in the wake of growing anti-
Semitic persecutions), lost his mother and the rest of his family in the
Holocaust. He developed a program called “Anti-Semitism and Holocaust”
(1974). His students from the HUJ’s School of Education and History
Department took part in drafting the program. Schatzker emphasized the
need to understand the Holocaust in a broad historical context and not to
turn it into a myth of victimization and heroism.14
In 1980 Arye Carmon proposed another curriculum that stressed moral
lessons to be gained from studying the Holocaust: the obligation to life in
the Israeli-Jewish context, and the importance of democracy and tolerance
in a pluralistic society in both the Israeli and universal contexts.15 The study
programs discussed in research and teaching teams in the universities and
the schools reflect the sense of responsibility felt by scholars and educators
(some of whom were Holocaust survivors) toward Holocaust instruction
and study.
The first MoE-approved textbook for high schools—The Holocaust and
its Meaning (1982)—was a joint effort by Israel Gutman and Haim Schatz-
ker, Holocaust survivors from different backgrounds. This became the
standard school textbook for over 20 years. These are examples of the trends
and networks that developed among scholars, teachers, and students.16
These networks expanded beyond the university, from the teachers and
the teachers’ professors to the pupils in the schools. The survivors’ involve-
ment in creating the Israeli Holocaust narrative also increased. In 1979 the
MoE announced that the Holocaust would be a mandatory subject in high
schools and a special unit in the matriculation examinations.
Most of the learning was done in history class, but emphasis was placed
on the multi-disciplinary approach that included Holocaust literature as an
integral part of literature lessons. Holocaust studies also entered the junior
high school via history lessons (which spanned the gamut from ancient his-
tory to the founding of Israel). Some junior high schools had special study
programs aimed to bring pupils closer to the world of children who lived
in Nazi-occupied Europe.17
Elementary pupils learned about the Holocaust through Jewish holi-
days and children’s literature in the form of stories, poems, eye-witness
accounts, and diaries.18 Some school teachers (at all levels) received train-
ing in Holocaust instruction, while others were unsure how to convey
the subject and invited survivors to the classroom to relate their personal
stories. Others took their students to visit one of the memorial institutes,
museums, attend a few lectures, and meet with a Holocaust survivor—the

culmination of the study program.
Taking the Holocaust out of the standard teaching environment was a
solution for teachers who felt incapable of teaching the subject. Memory of
survivors became the key element in Holocaust instruction at the primary
and upper levels, and the survivors themselves the personification of Jewish
history of the Holocaust. The centrality of the survivors’ accounts created
some confusion between personal and collective memory, and disciplinary
learning of Holocaust history.
The same phenomenon appeared in memorial ceremonies. Since the
later 1960s the stories of Aharon Appelfeld, Uri Orlev, and Shamai Golan,
and the poetry of Dan Pagis, Avraham Sutzkever, Tuvia Rübner, and others
have become an integeral part of Memorial Day programs. The poets Avra-
ham Shlonsky (Oath), Nathan Alterman (The Child Avram), Hanna Senesh
(God God), and Haim Gouri created powerful images and arrays of char-
acters appear in their works. Alongside Shlonsky’s pathos and Alterman’s
lyricism, the lesser stories of Appelfeld (The Seagull) and Orlev’s imaginative
works based on personal memories were read at the ceremonies.19
Tova Perlmutter notes that in the 1990s and at the turn of the 21st
century, the survivors attained a paramount position in classroom literature
and teacher training programs. The terminology has changed. They are no
longer called “heroic fighters” and “rebels”, but “survivors”, a term that epit-
omizes their life story, replacing the concepts of heroism that held center
stage in the first two decades and thus expands the idea of resistance.20
Naima Barzel analyzes the integration of memory and testimony on
Holocaust research in Israel, concluding that, “From the outset the culture
of Holocaust memory has integrated the historical story, which serves more
faithfully the conclusion or requisite ‘historical lesson’ of the Holocaust,
and thus grants authenticity to the historical interpretation.”21 The survi-
vors’ preeminent role in building a Holocaust research infrastructure, and
the multifaceted discourse that developed between the survivors, scholars
and teachers for whom the Holocaust was not part of their biographies,
and the national experiences in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that conjured
up memories and lessons of the Holocaust, created public discussion on the
concept, periodization, and interpretation of the historical documentation.
Survivors are active in the fields of history, literature, and culture
regarding the efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, its place in the iden-
tity of Israelis as Jews and human beings and its ever-expanding dis-
course. They relate their personal narratives in the schools and memorial
institutions, within the broad networks that they formed, and are repre-
sentatives of Israelis whose identities have been profoundly affected by the
Holocaust. Their biographies, professional lives, and contacts with other
groups through the educational system transformed them into pioneers in
Holocaust research and teaching.
WHOSE HOLOCAUST IS THIS? THE SECOND

GENER ATION IN THE ARTS AND RESEARCH
Since the 1980s a new voice on the Holocaust is being heard in literature,
theater, dance, cinema, and the visual arts—the voice of survivors’ off-
spring. The second generation has joined the survivors engaged in the arts
and Israeli artists who did not personally experience the Holocaust.
The term “second generation” for the children of the survivors appeared
in psychological literature dealing with the survivors’ post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) and its transfer to their offspring. Iris Milner, an expert
on second generation literature, notes that, “The Holocaust continues to
be part of the lives of the survivors and their family members not as an
historical event, but as a traumatic experience, and that despite the passage
of time its malignant influences have not abated.”22
The term was first used in clinical psychology research on the survivors
and their families, but in recent years the discussion also relates to survivors
and their families who did not require psychological counseling. The devel-
opment of narrative analysis research, which discusses the construction of
identity through the study of life stories, has been used to understand the
influence of the Holocaust on the survivors’ return to their lives and on
their offspring.23
In the early postwar years the survivors concentrated on returning to
a “normal routine” and building their future. The mourning and longing
for family, friends, and community that had perished remained silent,
locked within their hearts. The process of “working through” the trauma
that was supposed to help them come to terms with the immensity of the
loss did not occur.24 They drew on their inner strengths in their hopes for
the future and security.
Many children of survivors, who experienced their parents’ silence
and avoidance of discussing the past and their family’s fate, felt this as a
personal threat. Zahava Solomon, a social psychologist, researched survivors
and their offspring and notes in “The Inter-Generational Influences of the
Holocaust: As Mirrored in Research in Israel” that:
. . . Israel gave the survivors a Jewish national home where they could live
amongst their people. The survivors were asked to take an active part in the
monumental project of nation building that was in full sway at the time.
Their motivation and need to rehabilitate and establish new families and com-
munity in the aftermath of the Holocaust’s devastation coincided with the
national effort to build a Jewish state. Furthermore, many survivors saw the
establishment of Israel as proof that the Nazis failed in their goal to destroy
the Jewish people.25
She does not gloss over the survivors’ difficulties in their absorption,
made all the more challenging given their backgrounds, economic auster-
ity in the early 1950s, the waves of new immigrants, and the bereavement
over the large number of dead and wounded in the War of Independence.
Research points to the influence of these hardships on the survivors in their
attempt to build a family. Nevertheless, Solomon concludes that in general:
. . . the second generation, the offspring of Holocaust survivors in Israel, is

healthy and fully functioning for the most part, despite certain difficulties
that seem to stem from their parents’ oppressive experiences. The research has
revealed that the second generation in Israel is no more inclined to psychopa-
thology than the rest of the population, but that it does suffer from definite
psychological problems. This correlates with the fact that the studies point to
a pattern of strong family ties characterized by obligation and devotion toward
the original family [that perished] and the newly established ones, and on the
other hand [the research points to] considerable tension and crises. [. . .] On
the cognitive level it is obvious that the survivors’ experience did not bequeath
to their children a pessimistic or skeptical worldview. On the contrary, if
any difference exists [between the two generations], it is that the survivors’
children demonstrated ‘too-much’ optimism and political views that are more
accommodating than those of other Israelis in their peer group.”26
Carol Kidron’s research on the second generation’s social construct

emphasizes the integration of close family ties, the parents’ Holocaust
trauma, and public patterns of commemoration on shaping the identity
of the second generation. The survivors accepted the role of authentic
Holocaust witnesses that Israeli society has assigned to them. Society also
sees the survivors’ offspring as authentic witnesses of the Holocaust legacy
after their parents pass away. Kidron studied the second generation support
group “Amcha”, an institute that provides the survivors and their families
with psychological support. Moderators of discussion groups reinforced
the second generation’s sense of obligation to convey the Holocaust legacy

to their own children and the general public. They constructed the groups’
life stories, which endowed the participants with a new personal narra-
tive, “. . . an all-embracing meta-identity in which various aspects of their
inter-family relations and their own feelings are described in an ongoing
narrative ‘relative to the Holocaust’ . . . After internalizing the lessons of
each meeting, the group members construct a new meta-identity as an
all-embracing profile of a second generation.”27 The offspring learned to
become witnesses to the witnesses.
Kidron’s research presents one way that the second generation’s per-
sonal processes intersect with collective processes in Israeli society where
the Holocaust is one of the main components of identity.
One may argue that the vulnerability of this group to social manipula-
tion made it the “victim” of the social, political approach that transformed
the Holocaust into the central pillar of Israeli identity. However, the ques-
tion arises as to why members of the group willingly accepted the role of
witness; was it possible to relieve them of the obligation to carry the torch
of memory?
Dina Wardi, in an important study titled “Memorial Candles”, tries
to clarify the complex picture of reciprocal relations between need and
demand, between ambivalence over the desire (and unwillingness) to “bear
the weight of family memory”. She discusses the link between Jewish social
codes and Israeli cultural productions in the construction of the identity
of the second generation. An examination of the creativity of the second
generation in Israeli culture may extend our understanding of this subject.28
The most comprehensive study on second generation literature is
that of Iris Milner’s Past Present: Biography, Identity and Memory in Second
Generation Literature.29 She delineates the characteristics of second genera-
tion literature and underlines the interpretation that this literature suggests
about the influence of their parents’ Holocaust experience on their lives.
She sees the connection between psychological interpretations of family
and identity for the second generation and the centrality of these issues in
their writings.
Milner views second generation literature as the epitome of social and
cultural trends in Israeli society, dealing with the psychological dilemmas
of the survivors and the second generation, and the influences of Israeli
society. It is an authentic expression of the biographical void and a search
for the family that was eradicated, reflecting the sadness of a family without
grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and the attempt to turn neighbors
and friends (also survivors) into a surrogate extended family.
This literature also expresses the pain and tension of the survivors’
offspring in their hunt for details to assist in reconstructing their parents’
concealed, hushed story that defies verbal narrative, but may provide the
offspring with glimpses of the past through family photographs, a letter, a
piece of clothing, etc. Tracking down lost family members in a journey to
the “Old Country”—as a symbolic or real quest—has been the theme of
many stories. This journey is always anxiety-ridden.
On the one hand, the literature reflects the tension created by the
rift with the past and the deep connection to the past, and on the other
hand, the desire to preserve continuity, which is a form of condolence to
the parents on their loss and mirrors the numerous deliberations over the
meaning and price of the effort to create this connection. The children
of the survivors felt their parents’ estrangement in Israel with respect to
language, clothing, hairstyle, and manners. Their difficulty in coping with
this foreignness was accompanied by ambivalence toward the home and its
customs, and conformism toward their peer group as children and teens.
The parents’ foreignness at times awakened a sense of alienation even
toward one’s own family.30
Literature, cinema, theater, and other artistic media describe Holocaust
survivors’ thundering silence or, vice versa, their compulsive loquaciousness.
This is how survivor-parents were depicted in Orna Ben-Dor’s film Because
of that War. Yehuda Poliker’s father was intensely reticent, while Yaakov
Gilad’s mother constantly shared her stories with her son. Both silence and
compulsive talk were hard on the children.
The main motifs in second generation literature are a profound iden-
tification with the survivor parents, the fear of disappointing them, the
desire to protect them, and apprehension that the parents’ experiences will
carry them back to “there”, from where they will not be able to return.31
The protagonists in this literature feel that they bear a heavy burden as the
representatives, sole survivors of their parents’ lost families. Despite their
affinity with the parents, and the latter’s concern for their welfare, parents
and children did not always have a close relationship.32 In this sense the lit-
erature expropriates the Holocaust from the collective sphere and conveys it
to the personal domain—that of the family and individual—and expresses
the children’s pain and love toward their parents. Sometimes criticism of
their parents ignites an explosive response, caused by a seemingly trivial
event that triggers suppressed memories. The writers use these events to cast
themselves and their parents as defenseless victims.
Savyon Lieberecht’s “Cutting Off” is an excellent example;33 the story
accurately reflects the vulnerability of the survivors and their family in daily
life. The protagonists are the grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, her son
(the husband, father), his wife (the daughter-in-law), and the granddaugh-
ter. The story takes place within a few-hour timeframe, beginning when the
granddaughter comes home from kindergarten and finds her grandmother
waiting for her. The story depicts a seemingly banal incident—the kinder-
garten teacher sent a note to the parents that their daughter has lice that
must be treated—and the grandmother’s unexpected reaction from a recol-
lection of the horrors of Auschwitz. The note catapulted the grandmother
back to her struggle for survival. She is overcome by an uncontrollable urge
to save the child, which compels her to cut off the child’s beautiful, flow-
ing hair. The little girl does not comprehend what is happening but senses
violent behavior in her grandmother despite her murmurings of love and
tenderness.
“We’ll do this properly,” Henya whispered lovingly into the pale, slen-
der nape exposed to the light. “We’ll leave nothing on your sweet head, all
the dirty stuff will drop off.” Her left hand burrowed into the small child’s
exceptionally long hair, and her right hand quickly manipulated the scis-
sors; her body was arched like a bow over her grandchild’s head. Thus she
worked with a frozen gaze, like a woman possessed.”
This was not a routine haircut; this was “cutting off” as the title of the
story implies. The “cutting” image goes much deeper and symbolizes the
grandmother’s extreme detachment from reality because of an everyday
school note about lice treatment (extermination).
The father-son, Zvi, returns home and is perplexed and angry at his
mother’s behavior. He tries to bring her back to reality where lice are merely
an obnoxious, infectious pest in the schools and a routine matter, but
Henya is locked in her own world and cannot fathom her son’s response
and granddaughter’s tears.
Zvika, listen to me. I know what’s good for my children. I’ve been through a
lot and I know. When you’ve got lice, no chemical and no washing will do.
The best thing is to crop the hair right at once, down to the roots. Every hour
there are more and more eggs; every minute counts.
Obviously Henya is somewhere else when she battles the lice and
admits that she is fighting for the only things of meaning in her life: her
son and granddaughter. “You know that in the whole world I have only
Zvika and Miri.”
When Ziva, the child’s mother returns after ordering a birthday cake
for her four-year-old daughter, Zvika tries to explain why his mother acted
as she did and how the kindergarten teacher’s note excited the old fears.
Ziva is shocked by her daughter’s shorn hair and refuses to understand. An
abyss has been created between Ziva and her mother-in-law. She believes
her mother-in-law is crazy and dangerous, and should not be allowed to
look after her granddaughter. She speaks abrasively to her husband, lashing
out against his mother:
. . . So what if that’s what they used to do in the camps forty-five years ago. The
world has advanced a little since then, and we’re not in the camps now. [. . .]
Her hands should be broken so she’ll never touch a pair of scissors again! Get
that woman out of here or I’ll kill her myself. And tell her never to set foot
in here again. I never want to see her face. Never again for the rest of my life!
Henya hears her granddaughter’s weeping and the raucous argument

between the parents. This completes her return to “there”. She sinks into a
reverie of memories and sees before her eyes lice crawling out of the body
of a boy who was shot in Auschwitz.
Henya’s memory remains muted and untold because of its repulsive-
ness and horror, but it is present in the family’s life because of its deafening
silence. When Ziva discovers that Henya told her granddaughter why she
cut her hair, her anger rekindles:
Do you hear what your child is saying? She knows what the lice did when
people died in the camps. Does a four-year-old have to hear such things? Is
such a story fit for her someone her age, I ask you? I want my child to hear
stories about Cinderella, not about Auschwitz.34
In an interview with Moshe Granot in Conversations with Writers,

Savion Liberecht refutes Granot’s assertion that she depicts Holocaust sur-
vivors as insane. In “Cutting Off” he claims, the grandmother cuts off all
her granddaughter’s hair because of morbid memories from the Holocaust,
“The impression one gets is that your solution, ironically implied, is to
distance oneself from the insane world because it’s as infectious as a disease.
Ka-Tzetnik, Chetnik and Imre Kertész 35 claim that it really is similar to a
contagious disease. So, is this the message?”
Lieberecht rejects this view and explains her outlook:
No! I oppose the label ‘madmen’ when speaking of the heroic Holocaust sur-
vivors . . . You’re right though, the borders of normalcy have a new definition
for Holocaust survivors. For people who have experienced such an anomaly
as [the Holocaust] so intensely, it’s only natural that its influence on the rest
of their lives and their outlook on life has been profound; but I wouldn’t call
them ‘crazy.’ . . . in their world [the abnormal] appears as entirely normal.
“Cutting Off” was taught in schools. I met the pupils who were studying
it, and was delighted to hear their depth of understanding of the Holocaust
survivor despite what she did: shaving off her granddaughter’s hair. What
pleased me was not whether they comprehended the story, but their openness
toward the survivors.36
She describes the gap between the survivors’ world and their children’s
world, a gap that is a form of rejection. An opposite view is expressed by
David Grossman, whose parents were not Holocaust survivors (his father
arrived in Eretz-Israel before the war). As a child growing up in Jerusalem,
he lived close to the survivors and their way of life. Momik, the child
protagonist of the first part of See Under: Love, tries to approach the silent
world of his parents. Their reticence roars in his ears. He sees them in their
daily routine, but senses that they are imprisoned in the neighborhood
glass kiosk where they sell lottery tickets. At mealtimes, their behavior
reminds him of a struggle against an enemy that must be vanquished.
Momik tries to capture “the Nazi beast” and raise him in the basement.
The boy develops strange behaviors, phobias, and anxieties that alienate
him from his environment and transform him into a stranger and weirdo
in the neighborhood. Momik’s parents, who perceive his odd behavior, do
not want him to be different like them. Fearing that he will contract their
“disease”, they move away from the neighborhood where many Holocaust
survivors reside.37
The main domain of the second generation’s remarkable cultural
output is literature (also the medium for the plays and films). In their
literary works the Holocaust stands outside the historical framework and
becomes an event with flexible borders, an experience cemented into daily
life. It is not the “Holocaust” that appears in abstract academic discourse.
The title of Amir Guttfreund’s Our Holocaust epitomizes this position.38
The highly praised work is an example of the degree of intimacy that second
generation youngsters developed toward the Holocaust, born of curiosity
about their parents’ uncommunicativeness. According to him, small-sized
families were expanded or “were compressed” by circles of neighbors and
acquaintances who were also Holocaust survivors.
For the second generation they became extended families and a fresh
source for obtaining information and explanations that could shed light
on the world that was destroyed. The two children, Amir and Effie, the
main characters in Our Holocaust, develop a sense of intimacy and imme-

diacy toward the survivors’ stories and Holocaust events. This feeling is
accompanied by attempts to learn what really happened. It also reflects
the complex link between the formal programs (such as commemorating
Holocaust Day at school) and the personal experiences of the survivors
and their offspring. Guttfreund’s title is neither subversive nor cynical. It
expresses the innocence of children, even though the book spares no criti-
cism of the standard patterns of Holocaust commemoration, and many of
the residents of the neighborhood in the story (which combines memory,
testimony, and imagination) have not internalized Israeli social codes but
live in the country as “aliens.”39
MORE THAN JUST WORDS

Documentary films
The thoughts of the second generation about their families reached a
wider public via television interviews and documentaries and feature films.
Through the media the cultural dialogue expanded the borders of the liter-
ary discourse to include broader groups of the population and cemented
the Holocaust into the collective memory.
With the rapidly disappearing generation of survivors, electronic
media and video interviews are becoming the ‘guardians’ of Holocaust com-
memoration and a reservoir of memories and images, which together with
traditional archives document and ensure that their memories are preserved.
Roni Perchik, a film researcher,40 claims that films by Israeli second
generation express the filmmakers’ objection to the nationalization of the
Holocaust and its transformation into a collective asset. The filmmakers
want to restore the personal dimension to the Holocaust by depicting it as
a sui generis event. Film and cinematic photography play a major role in the
process that begins with the return to the personal and culminates in the
realization that what is intimate is also collective. The camera establishes
the family, the language, the inter-generational encounter, and in the end
widens the definition of the second generation to include a shared destiny
and perpetual status as well as the audience.
Paradoxically, as the camera zooms in on the personal aspect of the
Holocaust, revealing it as a one-time event, the opposite tendency emerges.
The presence of the movie camera as the driving force behind the exposure
of the discourse and inter-generational encounter can only take place pub-
licly. Thus the dimension of intimacy actually creates a collective experience
for those who have not experienced it personally. He argues that at the end
of the 20th century the Holocaust shifted from individual to collective
memory. Many documentaries and fictional films (amateur and profes-
sional), abundant television series and dramas on the subject testify to this.
Liat Steir-Livny produced a comprehensive, penetrating study on
Israeli Holocaust films from the 1940s to the turn of the 21st century,
showing that the films themselves reflect the changes that Israeli society has
undergone. She examined the themes and characters in both fictionalized
and documentary films and found that since the 1980s and 1990s most
documentaries were produced by the offspring of Holocaust survivors and
reflect this special, intimate relationship. They relate the stories of their
parents who were eye-witnesses, but their perspective is that of the second
generation, whose interpretation of their parents’ lives forms the nucleus
of the film.
The documentaries illustrate the complex relationship between survi-
vor parents and their children, and the tension between the parents’ need
to divulge their experiences from a point of remoteness and dispassion, on
the one hand, and their emotional outbursts that obscure the borderline
between past and present, on the other. This is most conspicuous in films
dealing with “journeys back” such as Nitza Gonen’s Daddy Comes to Luna
Park (1994) that traces the journey of Shmuel Vilozni and his father to
Poland, or the documentary by Mica Schagrir (who came to Eretz-Israel
in 1938 as a baby with his parents), On Bishop Street (2006), in which the
director returns, without his parents, to Linz (Austria), the city of his birth.
Equally important are the films that depict the survivors’ daily lives
(Tzipi Reibenbach, Choice and Destiny, 1993; Three Mothers, 1998) in a
vicious cycle in which places and incidents of the past and present are
intertwined. Liat Steir-Livny describes the survivors as people who had to
cope with endless problems during the Holocaust and who still cope with
memories that left their mark on every aspect of their lives, including their
relations with their children. According to Steier-Livny:
Documentary films expand the changes that began to appear in the sixties
and seventies and present Israeli society with a highly complex picture of the
Holocaust experience, the life of the survivors and today’s second generation.
Most of the directors are second and third generation offspring of Holo-
caust survivors. Their personal link to the subject is manifest in the films.
They focus at length on Holocaust stories, and marginalize the narrative
of national redemption. The protagonists are the survivors—not those [in
Israel] who received them. The filmmakers do not seek out tales of valor but
prefer, interestingly, to hone in on the “little guy,” not the person who took
up the armed struggle, but the person who tells of the daily effort at survival,
and who often chokes up, halts, and sheds tears. The filmmakers believe that
the survivors’ memories are alive in the present and never leave them. The
films deconstruct the Holocaust survivors’ unity by describing them in detail
exactly as they are: the mainstay of society, people who contribute and influ-
ence it, but at the same time are sunk in irremediable memories. The film-
makers present a mosaic of characters and diverse levels of reality: the past, the
present, and the past as alive in the present. They introduce an admixture of
traumas in the present alongside attempts to create a partition between past
and present. They depict survivors who are silent but who thirst to speak and
share their experiences; survivors who spew out fragmented tales, and others
who try to convey what befell them in a coherent narrative.41
Music
One of the most outstanding artists of the second generation is Ella Sharif.
In “Writing Poetry after Auschwitz: Expressions of the Holocaust in Israeli
Music in Three Works on the Subject”,42 she recalls her experience as the
daughter of survivors and especially her music composition on Holocaust
subjects.
Ella Sharif is the daughter of Baruch Milch, the author of the diary
Can Heaven Be Void.43 Written during the war, the diary describes Milch’s
tribulations and struggle for survival, and records life under the Russian
and German occupation in eastern Galicia and the murder of his family,
including his wife and son. Milch left the diary with a Polish farmer but
searched in vain for it after the war. Later he returned to his city of birth,
Tluste, and discovered that none of his extended family survived. He later
married a woman from Tluste, and together they made their way to Israel.
Their two daughters are Shosh Abigail, a well-known literary critic, and Ella
Sharif, a musician and composer. Before his death, Milch penned his mem-
oirs and asked in his will that his daughters publish it. At first they found
the task too daunting, but a few years later they learned that the original
diary had turned up in Warsaw’s “Jewish Institute”. Shosh began editing
the memoirs, translated by her mother from Polish into Hebrew, and added
details missing in the original. The diary opened a new window into the
life of their late father. Ella complied with their father’s wishes in two ways.
First, they published the diary. Then, Ella wrote a musical composition to
accompany readings from the diary and poetry selections of Paul Celan, a
famous Jewish poet who survived Transnisteria.44
The vocalist concludes Sharif ’s Can Heaven Be Void (the title of the
diary):
On Friday, September 1, 1939 the end of real life began.

Only after I read my father’s manuscript did I understand.
I was raised in the house of a dead man, a strong man, but dead man.
He taught me to manage without emotional support,
Not to cry in public,
The revelation of sentimentality before strangers was considered a weakness,
Only the strong survive,
This is how he casted me into a figure, just a figure.
I kept my promise Father, I finished your book.

From the book I learned to forgive, to miss you.
Rest at last.
Farewell to your ashes.”45
Recited by the singer to Ella’s music, these words transcend the Sharif ’s
individuality, which can be seen as the second generation’s manifest (dec-
laration). The music tells of a daughter’s interpretation of her father’s pain
and expresses her feelings toward her late father’s demanding text. Ella
admits, “There were moments when I felt that I couldn’t continue. Things
were described that were too horrible and shocking, and they didn’t happen
to an unknown person but to my dad, it was very difficult, but I managed
somehow to maintain the necessary distance and finish the work.”46 Ella
acknowledges that she did not compose a text or music easy for the audi-
ence. The production includes a series of gruesome tales describing her
father’s efforts to survive while he was losing all that was dearest to him.
She notes that
The Israeli audience’s response in all five performances was beyond belief.
When the music ended with a pianissimo, the audience remained seated
in complete silence, not uttering a sound. Some people could not bring
themselves to applaud; others needed some time before they could clap and
express their feelings. Most people exited the theater quickly; they wanted
to be alone and contemplate what they had just experienced. I saw that the
power of the personal story when integrated with music was exactly as I
hoped—tremendous.47
The critics also expressed this sentiment.

Ella initiated another innovative musical piece on the Holocaust.

She and Nava Semel translated Semel’s book, And the Rat Laughed, into a
libretto for Cameri Opera with the musical composition written by Ella.
The opera directed by Oded Kotler opened in April 2005.48
This production, too, was received enthusiastically by packed crowds
wherever it played in Israel.49 It tells the story of survival and suffering of
a little girl whose parents handed her over to a Ukrainian peasant family
in order to save her. The story was written and put to music by two second
generation women, and is narrated by a 60–year-old grandmother to her
granddaughter. The opera is about the encounter between survivors and
the “third generation”.50
Ella contrasts her musical productions (written with her sister and
Semel) with the “Resurrection of the Dead”, a symphony for tenor, bari-
tone, children’s and male choir, and symphony orchestra (1985) written by
her husband, the famous Israeli composer, Noam Sharif.
A Dutch Jew, Bernard Brunkhorst, commissioned Noam Sharif to
write the work in memory of his father who was a cantor and perished in
the Holocaust. Brunkhorst outlined his expectations to Sharif: “[I want]
you to compose a piece that conveys the horrors of the Holocaust and cre-
ates a musical testimonial to the Jewish people who died in the Holocaust
and returned to life from the ashes.”51 Noam Sharif, who was born in Israel,
experienced the Holocaust as the son of veteran settlers who lost their fami-
lies in the war. The work expressed his feelings and impressions of death and
destruction, and life and regeneration in the Israeli cultural environment.
A comparison of the works of a second generation composer (Ella Sharif )
and an Israeli who grew up in pre-state Israel (Noam Sharif ) shows that
neither disaffirms the other: Milch’s story, which was put to music by his
daughter, awakens and perhaps even complements Noam Sharif ’s work,
which is based on Jewish tradition and Israeli music. According to Ella
Sharif: “This is how Noam Sharif, a Tel-Aviv–born Israeli whose parents
arrived in Eretz-Israel in the 1920s, a secular Jew with strong ties to Jewish
culture has lovingly linked his music to Jewish sources, Yiddish, Ashkenazi
Hebrew, the Holocaust, and prayers.”52
The critics lauded it to the hilt. Particularly poignant was Michael
Handelzatz’s article in Ha’aretz (13 February 1987):
. . . A fascinating socio-musical phenomenon was observed at the end of

the concert: the Israeli audience, which is generally considered sparing in
applauding artists who are not exceptionally charismatic, rose to its feet in
the Cultural Hall and cheered loudly for several minutes. Such applause has
recently been accorded only to such artists as Bernstein and Barenboim—

certainly not to modern composers and pieces.53
These two examples of responses by Israeli audiences (few had either

experienced the Holocaust or lost families in it) to performances dealing
with the Holocaust, and written and produced by contemporary artists,
reflect the willingness of Israelis to candidly relate to this most painful
chapter in Jewish history. The reception of these performances by the
concert-going public and to research and teaching reflects the reciprocal
relationship between the artists and the public with whom it engages in a
kind of negotiation.
The title “Whose holocaust is this?” can be applied to every area of
Israeli creative work: the visual arts, dance, television, documentaries, and
others. Dance performances such as “Aid Memoir” (1994) by the dancer
and choreographer Rami Be’er (son of Holocaust survivors) or Naphtali
Bezem’s visual art work “A Laborer Who Survived Auschwitz”, are deserving
of in-depth treatment and are part of the large cultural corpus in the Israeli
multisided discourse with the Holocaust.54
Another group of scholars has made an entirely different contribution
to the discourse. It represents the radical criticism of the shaping of Holo-
caust memory in Israel, which it views mainly as pernicious exploitation by
the political establishment and agents of memory affiliated with it (memo-
rial sites, commemorative institutes, the education system, etc.). In light
of the political establishment’s success in this area, radical critics claim that
Israeli society has developed an obsession with the Holocaust.
Has Holocaust Memory Been Exploited—
How and Why?
The main argument of the radical critics (Adi Ophir, Idit Zertal, Yosef
Gruzhinsky, Moshe Zukerman, and others) is the instrumentalization of
the Holocaust by the Israeli political establishment in order to justify the
abuses of Israel’s Palestinian policy, especially after the Six-Day War.55 They
charge that the Holocaust has been detestably used to base Israeli identity
on the negation of Jewish life in the Diaspora, and create a consensus that
the catastrophes of the Holocaust and WW II transformed the Jews into
the ultimate victim. The world that supported or stood by indifferently to
the disaster befalling the Jews owes Israel an incalculable debt that it can
repay by unconditionally backing its existence and its policies. Thus, the
Holocaust is increasingly in demand and Israelis miss the paramount mes-
sage: the universal meaning of the catastrophe and the moral threat to a
society that makes wide-scale use of force in its political relations toward
the “other”, whether a minority group or an enemy.
In Victory over Hitler, former Israeli minister Avraham Burg conveys
the same ideas in a highly graphic style:
. . . the state deals with an obsessive memorial [Holocaust] trip on the assump-
tion that the deeper and bloodier the Holocaust scab, the stronger the world’s
obligation to Israel and Israel’s justification for its existence. Like the street
beggar who exhibits his wounds, stumps, and blotches in order to arouse
generosity in the hearts of the passersby.56
This accusation, coming from a former politician who was actively involved
in shaping Israeli policy, added greater impetus to his views.
In 1988, Ophir, a renowned Israeli philosopher, was one of the first
intellectuals to criticize the shaping of Holocaust memory and its implica-
tions. In “Reviving God: The Holocaust as an Anti-Theological Show”,57
in the journal Politika of the left-wing political party Meretz, he suggests
turning Holocaust memory into universal lessons. He offered to form it as a
kind of “New Ten Commandments” based on the ethics of an all-embracing
humanism.
Thou shalt not experience another Holocaust: in contrast to the Israeli
interpretation of “thou” intended only for the Jewish people, he urges that
every effort must be made to prevent another Holocaust from re-occurring.
Thou shalt not make for thyself an idol or mask: in contrast to the approach
that claims that the Holocaust defies literary or artistic representation.
Ophir prefers “Do everything thou canst, illustrate the horror, honor its
details, describe the cowering before the outburst, portray the culmination
of the event, its infinite faces.”
As opposed to the injunction: do not take its name in vain, “Take it
in vain as much as you can, look for it everywhere but always be sure to
cast your gaze in a line extending from the imagination that is not some-
thing total—all or nothing—but something comprised of nuances and a
multitude of viewpoints, because imagination will help you understand
contemporary reality, its tendencies and dangers, therefore do not fear
comparisons, only make them with utmost prudence and responsibility.”
Memory is important but its essence is: “Above all, endeavor to under-
stand, remember in order to understand the technology of force and the rhe-
torical patterns that enabled the Holocaust to take place, the discourse that
made it possible to remove one group of human beings from the domain
of humankind, and the technology that enabled their mass liquidation.”
Ophir contends that the alternative commandments will save human-

kind from another conflagration. Their “gospel is the humanization of the
horror”, because Israel’s way of presenting the Holocaust has created “the
politicization of the collective national memory and the borders of the
modern Jew’s self-awareness and Jewry’s self-identity in the post-Holocaust
world.” His article generates a sweeping, prolific discussion on the forging
of Holocaust memory in Israel. It cannot be denied that the Holocaust
has shaped Israeli and Jewish memory, therefore it is extremely important
to find the proper way of constructing the memory from an ethical point
of view. He maintains that Holocaust memory must not be “an ember
plucked from the fire, an ember whose living presence is a reminder of the
destruction that continues to accuse, pass verdict on others, and vow that
we will never again be a victim.” Instead we should aspire to completely
change this trend: “Today the Jew’s ethical handling of Holocaust means
the humanization of the execution of annihilation and the universalization
of its possibilities; today the universalization of the Holocaust is a key ele-
ment in the Jew’s self-awareness, one generation after Auschwitz, and a sine
qua non for moral existence.”58
In Speaking Evil: Towards an Ontology of Morals published many years
after his article in Politika, Ophir elaborated on his criticism of the exploita-
tion of the Holocaust, charging that the Holocaust had become a kind of
“new religion in Israel” with a pilgrimage to its holy site (Auschwitz) and a
hierarchical “religious establishment” (Yad Vashem) that deals with memory
and immortalization for political purposes.59
The response of Israeli discourse to this charge is connected to the rela-
tive weight of the universal and particular in understanding the meaning of
the Holocaust for Jews. The question raised in this discourse was whether
a contradiction exists between the universal and particular, or whether the
first stems from the other.
Does the Holocaust’s universal meaning stem from its Jewish unique-
ness? The focus of German policy from the 1930s until the end of WW II
was the “Jewish Question”. The destruction of the Jews became one of the
main war aims, and was implemented with catastrophic success. This fact
is irrefutable, and although decades had passed since European countries
emancipated the Jews and integrated them into the national framework,
many people continued to see them as “the other”. This “otherness” was
rooted in centuries of Jewish–Christian relations in Europe. Unless this
political and cultural reality is addressed, it is impossible to comprehend the
large-scale enlistment of people from diverse social strata, and various back-
grounds and ideologies to perpetrate the annihilation of the Jewish people.
The Holocaust cannot be explained without understanding the role

of modern anti-Semitism, which showed that Jews could be deprived of
their civilian and political rights. Anti-Semitism was not the only factor in
the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy and the Final Solution. There is a well-known
truism: anti-Semitism is a problem for Jews no less than for non-Jews. The
Jewish facet in Holocaust analysis is essentially universal.60
Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira, in Post Zionism—Post Holocaust,
criticizes the inability of Ophir and others to perceive the right of Israe-
lis to view the Holocaust mainly from the Jewish perspective because of
their historical experience. He argues that the negation of the particularist
approach to the Holocaust is immoral. It is unethical to assert that a person
who has been the victim of an evil act does not have the right to remember
the distinctiveness of the evil and its perpetrator.61
There is much to be said for Ophir’s criticism of the over-emphasis on
the Jews’ fate. This is expressed in the paucity or absence in Israeli Holocaust
textbooks, and in Israeli research and academic instruction, of the fate of
other minority groups that suffered mass destruction. It is difficult to offer
a single explanation for this omission, but I believe that Israelis’ indiffer-
ence to the fate and suffering of other victims of Nazi atrocities, such as the
Roma and Sinti or homosexuals, is linked to the preoccupation of having
Holocaust memory so integral a part of their own identity.
Grodzinski and Zertal berate the exploitation of the Holocaust by
Zionist and Israeli statesmen. Israeli politicians from Ben-Gurion’s time
have plundered Holocaust memory in order to sow existential fear as
the basis of support for Zionism, and as the raison d’être for rejecting
any approach other than immigration to Eretz-Israel as a solution to the
Jewish refugee question in Europe after the Holocaust. After statehood was
attained, Holocaust memory and the ethos of “nation and death” became
an element that demanded political support of the force that Israel wielded
against the Palestinians and that had led to their expulsion from their land.
Israeli politicians hoped to strengthen the view that the whole world “was
against us”, and that the helplessness of the Jewish people was the result of
being a stateless nation.
These ideas were disseminated through commemoration patterns and
reinforced in Holocaust research, which the establishment’s voice domi-
nated, along with all areas of culture, Holocaust research, the educational
system, and the media. The chief message conveyed was that Israel is the
only guarantee for the Jewish people’s security and must always be militar-
ily powerful in order to deter those who wish to destroy it. Whether or not
one agrees with this ideological position, it cannot be substantiated through
research. Zertal, for example, regards the Eichmann Trial as a spectacular

showcase for political expediencies, a claim uncorroborated in any major
research on the trial.62
Regardless of Ophir’s views, Zertal and others in the radical critics’
group are actively involved in the multifaceted discourse on the meaning of
the Holocaust and its representation in Israel. To a considerable degree their
sharp criticism and incisive language have stimulated a wider discussion and
more comprehensive examination of the Holocaust’s place in Israel’s ethos
and its exploitation by certain political circles.
Thus the discussion on Holocaust memory and its meaning returns
to the cornerstones of Israeli society and the way the national project has
been implemented. We return to basic questions of national identity, the
connection between the Holocaust and the founding of the State, Israeli
society and its obligation to Holocaust memory, and the moral conclusions
to be drawn.
All that has been discussed to this point reflects the connection
between the handed-down, internalized Gordian knot of personal-family
memory and collective memory. Scholars, authors, members of the first
and second generations of Holocaust survivors, and Israelis who do not
have direct family links to the event have one thing in common: they are
culture consumers who participate in the cultural-social discourse on the
shaping of Holocaust memory.
Where Has The Honor Gone?
Hanoch Bartov’s Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street (2006) brings us
full circle to the “Eretz-Israel generation” that grew up before and during
WW II and became the Yishuv’s crowning pride and hope for the future.63
These youth included writers such as Dan Ben-Amotz, Yoram Kaniuk,
and Bartov who built strong ties after the war with the survivors in the DP
camps in Germany, Italy, and East European countries. As with many of the
survivors, they too fought in the War of Independence and later contributed
to building the new society.64
Bartov writes in a particular biographical genre because it explains
the way the Holocaust was internalized by the generation that was born or
grew up in the country.65 He presents the history of a family of survivors,
Rabinovich-Elhanan, and demonstrates the complex link between “here”
(Israel) and “there” (the Diaspora). A part of the story begins in pre-war
Germany and Kovno, and continues in the same places during and after the
Holocaust; another part deals with “the other side of the street” in Tel-Aviv
which is simultaneously near to the writer and very far away. He describes
how as a young man, as a sabra, he looked on in amazement at the young

survivors who enlisted in the Palmach with him, and the survivors in his
neighborhood who waited in line with him in the local grocery store.
The story is a biographical saga of the Rabinovich-Elhanan family and
Bartov’s attempt to reveal their lives. Much of the writing is rough, heavy,
and repetitive, which reflects the writer’s burden. He does not want to end
the story in order to be free of the burden or absolve himself from confront-
ing questions arising from the history of this family. On the contrary, he is
prepared to delve into the complexity of their lives. He shares his feelings
and insights about the different periods of this family, which helps readers
understand their complex, tragic, yet heroic story.
Again I stood at Shulamit and Yitzhak Elhanan’s “cottage” door on Katowitz

Street. In my hand a tape recorder, in my head much turbulence, I was drawn
to the conversations with the parents of Rabi’s brother [Rabi is a nickname of
one of the Rabinovich-Elhanan sons, who was killed in the War of Indepen-
dence—D.O], not out of petty curiosity. Here I discovered something that
in the past was self-evident but now gushes forth like a long-forgotten secret.
The Elhanan family story, which is torn between ‘there’ and ‘here’, confirms
with tragic lucidity what had been awakened in me in the summer of 1945
in the first meetings between us on both sides of the Italian-Austrian border.
[Between] the volunteers of the Jewish Brigade, whose symbol, a yellow Star
of David against a blue and white background, was sewn on the sleeve of every
soldier and officer, and the survivors of the European Diaspora.66
The power of the book lies in the portrayal of its characters, the mother,
father, three children, and the grandfather, Rosenblum, the mother’s father.
All are powerfully sketched characters whose story leads from Germany,
Kovna, and the Yishuv, prior to and during the war, to the State of Israel.
Bartov relates their stories through conversations with Yitzhak and
Shulamit and their son Shmuel, and ends with letters and accounts he
received from them. Some interviews flow freely, others limp; the transi-
tions in Yitzhak’s and Shulamit’s associational style of thinking jump from
subject to subject revealing the complexities of a Jew’s life and the seeming
unbridgeable gap between “there” and “here”. The reader is left with many
unanswered questions and a desire to continue reading.
Bartov shares his feelings with the reader, and expounds his biases and
views on a variety of aspects of ghetto life, such as membership in the Juden-
rat. Yitzhak Elhanan tells of his role in the Judenrat and the ghetto’s labor
brigade. Bartov writes “This was the first time that I saw another face in
the mild, old intellectual who always reminded me of my father (who died
between our meetings) and an electric current rippled under my skin.”67
Yet he is not captivated by this inner storm. The reader learns that Yitzhak
wrote immediately after the war of the limitations of our understanding
and the need to be wary of our judgments.
Bartov describes the attitudes of sabras toward the survivors as an
emotion-laden encounter between the soldiers of brigade (himself included)
and the survivors, the ambivalence that such meetings awakened, and the
simplistic, stereotypical images held by many members of the brigade.
Even I, the young one, had a hard time in the initial spontaneous meetings
to feel a sense of brotherhood toward these youngsters and adults who had
just returned, God knows how, from a world where everyone was doomed,
and here they were, in the midst of innocent soldier-children who hadn’t a
clue about the nature of the life “on the brink of the abyss”. . . Slowly I shed
my sabari [Eretz-Israeli] sense of superiority. . . . I found myself searching for
faces that I used to look at in the far-away family album, faces I had never
seen, but in my childhood I would go back and look at myself when I was
told that they were my grandmother and grandfather, uncles and cousins, all
of them there; and now, on both sides of the Italian-Austrian border I sud-
denly felt that I had been divested of my life’s ideology that I belonged to a
different nation, a new race, that with the wave of a magic wand I had been
transformed from a Jew into a Hebrew.”68
OVER BUT NOT COMPLETE
The article has examined the different positions held by Israelis on the
meaning of the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory. It asked whether
the presence of the Holocaust in our lives represents an honest, unwavering
effort to understand the event and its place in our world as human beings,
Jews, and Israelis, and whether the profusion of voices in the Holocaust
discourse sends complementary or conflicting messages. It has discussed the
groups for whom the Holocaust was a personal experience, their offspring,
who experienced the Holocaust as a family memory, and others whose
memory of the Holocaust was shaped by social processes and the internal-
ization of cultural messages. It focused on the contribution of these groups
in Holocaust research and artistic representation that has been relayed to
broader secondary groups. It presented the main ways that the survivors
have dealt with the trauma while they involved themselves in state building
and fitting Holocaust memory to the Israeli ethos. The second generation
has tried to fill in the lacunae with the questions and answers that abound
in their works. Whether this effort will lead to a calming of the angst, no
one can say.
Holocaust memory in Israel surfaces in numerous contexts, including
political ones. Some of them really attempt to understand the meaning of
the historical event, while others manipulate its use, thus demeaning the
memory. We learned that there is no one way to remember and pay tribute
to its victims.
Despite the establishment of Yad Vashem in 1953 as the official memo-
rial institute, and the MoE’s decision to make the Holocaust a compulsory
subject in high school, Holocaust memory is not something manufactured
but a long drawn-out story. Its source is the ever-changing perspectives
in the cycles of life of the survivors, and their personal memories. For
the second generation the internalization of their parents’ experience and
their ability to express their feelings are part of this dynamic process. New
research notes that interest a large public and the changes in political, social,
and cultural self-understanding of Israelis who face a reality filled with
contradictions and head-on clashes, have all kept the Holocaust a living
memory. All of this creates an ongoing multisided discourse based on an
honest effort to understand the meaning of the most tragic and devastating
period in modern Jewish history.
The tension between the desire to shape memory and the diverse voices
interpreting the Holocaust come to expression in various cultural milieus
and the public discourse. The same is true for the tensions between cultural
and political groups, such as the ultra-orthodox, religious nationalists,
and secular, non-observant Israelis. The competition between these groups
ensures that memory and memorialization patterns do not stagnate.
I believe that the claims of radical critics that the Holocaust has become
a kind of sacred cow that Israelis wield in order to block any attempts to
crystallize moderate positions in the Palestinian conflict or exhibit com-
passion for their suffering is refuted by the sources on which this article is
based. There is no doubt that the manipulation by these critics is similar
to that of those who speak of “Auschwitz borders”, who compare Israel’s
governments to the “Judenrat government”, and refer to the disengagement
from Gaza as the expulsion of Jews, and who sewed the Star of David on
their clothes as an analogy to the Nazis’ deportation of Jews.69
Notes
This article was translated by Moshe Tlamim

1. Avraham Burg, Victory over Hitler (Tel-Aviv, 2007) [Hebrew]; Daniel Bartal,
Living with the Conflict: A Psychological Analysis of Jewish Society in Israel ( Jerusa-
lem, 2007) especially chapters 3 and 4; Idit Zertal, The Nation and Death: History,
Memory, and Politics (Tel-Aviv, 2002) [Hebrew].
2. Dalia Ofer, “Israel,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust (ed), David Wyman
(Baltimore, 1996) 839–923.
3. Dalia Ofer, “The Strength of Remembrance: Commemoration of the
Holocaust during the First Decade of Israel,” Jewish Social Studies, 6.2 (2000) 24–55.
4. Judith Tydor Baumel, “In Everlasting Memory: Individual and Communal
Holocaust Commemoration in Israel,” in The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth,
Memory and Trauma (eds), Robert Wistrich and David Ohana (London, 1995)
146–170; Michal Balf, A Voice not Silenced: Holocaust Commemoration in the Kib-
butz Movement (Tel-Aviv, 2008) [Hebrew]; Mooli Brog, “The Stone will Scream
from the Wall: Holocaust Commemorative Monuments in the Israeli Landscape,”
Masua, 33 (2005) 93–109 [Hebrew].
5. Dalia Ofer, “Fifty Years of Israeli Discourse on the Holocaust: Characteris-
tics and Dilemmas,” in Israeli Identity in Transition (ed), Anita Shapira (London,
2004) 137–162.
6. Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: Ideology
and Memory (London, 2007); “The Debate in the 1950s between Religious Zion-
ism and the Zionist Left over the Date for a Memorial Day of the Holocaust”:
http://lib.toldot.cet.ac.il/didact/pages/item.asp?item=16341&author=2438; Ofer,
“Israel,” 854–864.
7. These statements, which have not been substantiated in research, are from
my personal recollections from lengthy conversations with peers with whom I
grew up in the postwar years and in the period of mass immigration, when their
relatives and parents’ friends arrived in Israel. Hanna Yablonka, Foreign Brothers:
Holocaust Survivors in Israel ( Jerusalem, 1994) [Hebrew] largely concurs with the
above statement. The English translation: Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the
War (New York, 1999).
8. There is no consensus on the definition of Holocaust survivors. I accept
the broad definition suggested by Hanna Yablonka, Yehuda Bauer, and others
to include any Jew who lived under Nazi occupation or in areas of the German
Reich during some stage of the war. Dalia Ofer, “The Holocaust Survivors in Israeli
Historiography,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, 17 (2007) 465–511 [Hebrew]; the source
of the numbers is Moshe Sikron, Immigration to Israel ( Jerusalem, 1957); Statistical
Abstract of Israel, 40 ( Jerusalem, 1990) 1989 [Hebrew].
9. Sami Michael, Pigeons in Trafalgar Square, (Tel-Aviv, 2005) [Hebrew]; Gulie
Ne’eman Arad, “Israel and the Shoah: A Tale of Multifarious Taboos,” New German
Critique, 90 (2003) 5–26; Hanna Yablonka, Off the Beaten Track—The Mizrhahim
and the Shoah (Tel-Aviv, 2008) [Hebrew].
10. Shaul Asch, Yosef Michman (director of Yad Vashem, May 1957 to 1960),
Dov Kulka, Israel Gutman, Aharon Weiss, Livia Rothkirchen, Shmuel Spector,
Mark Dvorjeski Haim Litai Lazar, Zvi Bachrach, and others on the beginning of
Holocaust research in Israel; Boaz Cohen, “Holocaust Research in Israel 1945–1980:
Trends, Characteristics, Developments” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2004)
[Hebrew]; “Holocaust Instruction and Research in Israeli Universities, 1947–1967,”
Yad Vashem Institute News, 5 (December 2004); Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli
Public Debate in the 1950s.
11. Many Holocaust survivors went on to study at university after years of
labor. They wanted to conduct research on their destroyed communities and other
subjects of the same period. Many already published their memoirs and wanted
to gain an academic background in order to make an academic contribution to
the research.
12. Boaz Cohen, 2004. One expression of this was the research project on
Jewish resistance at the ICF at the HUJ under the directorship of Yehuda Bauer
that produced a number of doctorate dissertations, some by survivors who came to
academic studies at a relatively advanced age. For example, the Hebrew PhD disser-
tations of Shalom Cholawsky, “The Jewish Underground in the Western Belorus-
sian Ghettos during the Holocaust,” (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1975); and
Israel Gutman, “Ghetto Warsaw,” (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1975); Books
(Hebrew) after their doctoral theses, Shalom Cholawsky, City and Forest under Siege
(Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, 1973); On the Neiman and Dnieper Rivers: Jews in Western
Belorussia in World War Two ( Jerusalem, 1982); Israel Gutman, Warsaw: Ghetto
Uprising, ( Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Lochamei Ha’ghettaot, 1976); Shalom Cholawsky,
In the Storm of Annihilation: Eastern Belorussia Jews in World War Two ( Jerusalem,
Tel-Aviv, 1988).
13. Ofer, “Israel”; Roni Stauber and Philip Friedman, “And the Beginning of
Holocaust Research,” Galed, 21 (2007) 1–46 [Hebrew].
14. Ofer, “Israel,” 889–894; Haim Schatzker, “Trends in Understanding the
Holocaust in Israeli Society,” Ha’aretz, 1 May 1970, 22; “Didactic Issues in Teaching
the Holocaust,” Massuah, 1 (1973) 18–26 [Hebrew].
15. Arie Carmon, Hashah, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem, 1980); “Teaching the Holocaust
as a Means for Fostering Values,” Curriculum Inquiry, 9.3 (1979) 209–228.
16. Ofer, “Israel,” 889–894.
17. Nili Keren, “The Impact of Public Opinion on the One Hand, and Histori-
cal Research on the Other Hand, on the Development of Holocaust Teaching in
High-Schools and in Informal Education in Israel (1948–1981)” (PhD diss., Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, 1985) [Hebrew]. This was the first academic research on
the subject.
18. Tova Perlmutter, “Teaching the Holocaust, Research on the Educational

Policy and its Application at Beit Berl College,” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, 2004) [Hebrew].
19. Holocaust Day Program in the Liyad Ha’universita High School in the
1960s and 1970s.
20. Perlmutter, “Teaching the Holocaust, Research on the Educational Policy
and its Application at Beit Berl College”.
21. Naima Barzel, “The Concept of Heroism in Holocaust Research,” Pages in
Holocaust Research, Ma’asaf, 16 (2001) 88 [Hebrew].
22. Iris Milner, Past Present: Biography, Identity and Memory in Second Generation
Literature (Tel-Aviv, 2003) 19 [Hebrew].
23. Dan Bar-On, Fear and Hope:Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge,
MA, 1995); Between Fear and Hope: The Life Stories of Five Families of Holocaust
Survivors, Three Generations in a Family (Tel-Aviv, 1994) 30–33 [Hebrew].
24. For the term “working through,” see Dominik LaCapra, Writing History,
Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London, 2001) 43–85.
25. Zahava Solomon and Julia Chaitin (eds), Childhood in the Shadow of
the Holocaust: Survivor Children and the Second Generation (Tel-Aviv, 2007) 305
[Hebrew].
26. Idem.
27. Karol A. Kidron, “The Social Construct of Second Generation Survivors:
Narratives of Support Groups for Bearers of Wounded Memory,” Solomon and
Chaitin, Childhood in the Shadow of the Holocaust, 279.
28. Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London, 1992).
29. See note 22.
30. Ada Pagis, Old Country Sandwitz (Tel-Aviv: 2003) 16–22, [Hebrew]; Savyon
Liebrecht, Apples from the Desert, Selected Stories (New York, 1998); Hannah Herzig,
Pictures Asking for a Title (Tel-Aviv, 1997) 81–90 [Hebrew].
31. Orna Ben-Dor, Because of That War, 1988; Lili Peri, Golem in a Circle,
( Jerusalem, 1986); The movie based on the book was directed by Anat Perminger,
Golem Partnership, Waltham, MA, National Center for Jewish Film, 1993; Nava
Semel, “Suitcases,” 83–104, and “A Journey to Two Berlins,” 145–173, in Glass Hat
(Tel-Aviv, 1985) [Hebrew]; Savyon Liebrecht, “Hyuta’s Engagement Party”, in
Apples from the Desert, 81–91.
32. Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London, 1992);
Dalia Ofer, “The March of Memory: Survivors and Relatives in the Footsteps of
the Kladov-Sabać Refugees,” Israel, 10 (2007) 201–236 [Hebrew]; a slightly shorter
version can be found in Israel Studies, 12.3 (2007) 134–160. See especially the inter-
view between the David Family and Nitza Batash, which appears only in Hebrew.
33. Liebrecht, Apples from the Desert, 93–9.
34. http://learn.snunit.k12.il/snunit/roomlit/upload/2/tapuchimditza.DOC
35. Ka-zetnik, Yiddish for an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp, derived
from the abbreviation KZ (pronounced kah-tzet) for the German word
Konzentrationslager. Yehiel Dinur, a Holocaust survivor, writer, and historian wrote

under the name Ka-Tzetnik 135633, his Nazi concentration camp number. He
chronicled his time in Auschwitz. Imre Kertész, a Hungarian Jewish writer and
Nobel Laureate was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, who later wrote of his
experiences there.
36. http://www.asimon.co.il/ArticlePage.aspx?AID=4927&AcatID=35
37. David Grossman, See Under Love (New York, 1991). The first part of the
book, Momik, was an independent publication in 2005 (Tel-Aviv, 2005) and was
produced as a theater play in 2007 at the Gesher theater.
38. Amir Gottfreund, Our Holocaust (Tel-Aviv, 2000) [Hebrew].
39. Milner, Past Present: Biography, Identity and Memory in Second Generation
Literature, 47; “A Testimony to ‘The War After’: Remembrance and Discontent in
Second Generation Literature,” Israel Studies, 8.3 (2003) 194–208.
40. Roni Perchik, “The Intimate is the Collective: Israeli Cinema and the
Holocaust,” Dimu’i, 13.1 (1996) 38–41 and conclusion [Hebrew].
41. Liat Steir, Two Faces to the Mirror: Holocaust Representation in Israeli Film
( Jerusalem, 2009) [Hebrew]. For an interesting collection of articles on the film as
a testimony, see Shofar, 24.1 (2005), “Special Issue: Israeli Cinema,” Nurith Gertz,
Anat Zanger, Nitzan Ben Shaul, and Judd Ne’eman (guest editors).
42. Ella Sharif, “Writing Poetry after Auschwitz—Expressions of the Holocaust
in Israeli Music,” Massuah, 33 (2005) 30–52 [Hebrew].
43. Baruch Milch, Can Heaven Be Void (ed), Shosh Avigal ( Jerusalem, 2003).
The text is a combination of Milch’s original diary written while in hiding during
the war and the memoir that he wrote in his last years. The similarity between
the memoirs and diary amazed his daughters. The original diary is the main part
of the published book. The missing sections come from Milch’s later compiled
memoirs, which the editor put in italics to distinguish the original diary from the
later additions.
44. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, 1995).
45. Sharif, “Writing Poetry after Auschwitz,” 45.
48. Nava Semel, And The Rat Laughed (Victoria, Australia, 2008).
49. Hanoch Ron, 12 April, Yedioth Ahronot; Ora Binur, 12 April, Ma’ariv; Michael
Handelsaltz, 12 April 2005, Ha’aretz; Zvi Goren, Habamah Internet Website.
50. Artists discussed in the article express their ideas about the Holocaust and
create new stimuli for the ongoing discourse. And the Rat Laughed by Nava Semel,
one of the first second generation writers to deal with the Holocaust, tells of the
development of the discourse among the third generation of Holocaust survivors.
The direction of this discourse is not clear yet.
52. Idem.
54. Liat Ben-Haviv, “Holocaust, Memory, and Video-Dance,” Yad Vashem,

42 (2006) 6–7; Smadar Wies, “Remember and not Forget—Image and Word on
‘Memory of Things,’ M. Be’er,” Machol Achshav, 8 (2002) 36–39; Miri Krimolovsky,
“The Diary of Anna Frank: The Caracas Dance Troupe at the Carmiel Festival,”
Rokdim, 48 (1999) 22–24; Galit Aberjil, “Dancing Live,” Yad Vashem, 3 (1996) 8–9;
Batia Brutin, “From the Margins to the Center—Israeli Holocaust Art,” Massua, 33
(2005) 110–138; Hanna Yablonka, “Holocaust Survivor Painters in Israel—Another
Aspect of the Silence that Never Was,” in Holocaust, History, and Memory, An
Anthology Presented to Israel Gutman (eds), Shmuel Almog, David Bankir, Daniel
Baltman, and Dalia Ofer ( Jerusalem, 2002) 207–235; Yael Dar, “Correcting the
Negation of the Diaspora: Educator and Writers of Children’s Books in Israel
Reconcile with the Diaspora in the Holocaust Period,” Dapim Lecheker Hashoah
Ma’asaf, 18 (2004) 55–76 [all in Hebrew].
55. Adi Ophir, The Order of Evil: Towards an Ontology of Morals (Cambridge,
MA, 2005); Zertal, The Nation and Death; Yosef Grodzinsky, In the Shadow of the
Holocaust:The Struggle between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II
(Monroe, Maine, 2004); Dalia Ofer, “The Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Histori-
ography”; Moshe Zukerman, Holocaust in a Sealed Room: The “Holocaust” in the
Israeli Press during the Gulf War (Tel-Aviv, 1993) [Hebrew].
56. Avraham Burg, Victory Over Hitler (Tel-Aviv, 2007) 141 [Hebrew].
57. Politika, 4 ( June–July 1988) 2–5 [Hebrew]; Adi Ophir, “The Finality of the
Final Solution and the Infinity of the Loss,” in The Holocaust in Jewish History,
Historiography, and Interpretation (ed), Dan Michman ( Jerusalem, 2005) 381–637
[Hebrew].
58. Adi Ophir, “On Reviving God: The Holocaust as an Anti-Theological Play,”
Politika, 4 ( June-July 1986) 2–5.
59. Adi Ophir, Speaking Evil: Towards an Ontology of Morals (Tel-Aviv, 2000)
346–411 [Hebrew].
60. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London, 2001)
1–68; Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago and London, 1990)
3–30.
61. Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Chapters of Denying,
Forgetting, and Negating Israel (Tel-Aviv, 2006) 85–87 [Hebrew].
62. Zertal, The Nation and Death, 135–178; Ora Herman, “Broadcasts from
Another Planet: The Eichmann Trial, the Establishment, and the Electronic
Media,” (master’s thesis, Avraham ICJ, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2002)
[Hebrew]; Amit Pinchevsky, Tamar Liebes, and Ora Herman, “Eichmann on the
Air: Radio and the Making of a Historic Trial,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television, 27.1 (March 2007) 1–25.
63. Hanoch Bartov, Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street (Tel-Aviv, 2006).
Regarding the expressions of the generation in Israel, see Anita Shapira, “A
Generation in Land,” Alpayim, 2 (1990) 178–203 [Hebrew].
64. Dan Ben-Amotz was born in Poland and immigrated to Palestine with a
Youth Aliya group known as the “Teheran Children”. He lost his parents in the
Holocaust. He was reared in Palestine from early adolescence and, like many others,
tried to identify with the Israeli-born sabra. In 1968 he published his autobiogra-
phy To Remember and to Forget. Yoram Kaniuk’s parents came from Germany to
Eretz-Israel before WW II. He was one of the most important writers to deal with
the question of Israeli and Jewish identity. His suffering runs deep and leaves the
reader swinging on a pendulum. Adam Ben Celev, The Last Jew, The Last Berliner.
These works are part of his invaluable contribution to Israeli literature and I believe
should be seen as representative of an entire generation that grew up in the country.
Unfortunately, space prevents me from discussing Kaniuk in greater detail.
65. In 2007 Bartov was awarded the life citation from Akum (Hebrew Writ-
ers Association). The judges wrote “For over fifty years, from the publication of
Heshbon Nefesh to Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street, Hanoch Bartov has been
one of the pillars of literature in Israel. With enormous personal and public cour-
age, with powerful feelings and the sure hand of an artist that combines humor
and profound lyrical tenderness, Bartov has woven a world of individuals who
examine their role in the great life systems surrounding them. He has sketched the
complex, diverse collective profile of this country’s history.” http://www.ynet.co.il/
articles/0,7340,L-3489191,00.html
66. Bartov, Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street, 95. The Jewish Brigade was
a military made up of Jews from Eretz-Israel who enlisted in the British army
to fight Germany. They were the first Eretz-Israel Jews to make contact with the
Holocaust survivors.
67. Bartov, Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street, 99–100; Leib Garfunkel, Jewish
Kovna in Ruins ( Jerusalem, 1949) 221, 233 [Hebrew].
68. Bartov, Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street, 95–96.
69. Dalia Ofer, “Fifty Years of Israeli Discourse on Holocaust,” in The Holocaust
in History: Historiography and Interpretation (ed), Dan Michman ( Jerusalem, 2005)
293–328 [Hebrew].

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Dalia Ofer

The Past That Does Not Pass:

A lthough the Holocaust occurred over sixty years ago, for

of the formal agents of memory in affixing an aura of hallowedness around

theme in the discussion. A comprehensive survey of the Holocaust should

Almost immediately after independence, many leading Israeli intel-

PARTNERS IN A MULTIFACETED DISCOURSE

estrangement. These images accompanied them into adulthood and became

SURVIVORS, HISTORIANS, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS:

Eretz-Israel in 1941 with Youth Aliya (established in 1933 to assist German

museums, attend a few lectures, and meet with a Holocaust survivor—the

WHOSE HOLOCAUST IS THIS? THE SECOND

. . . the second generation, the offspring of Holocaust survivors in Israel, is

Carol Kidron’s research on the second generation’s social construct

the second generation’s sense of obligation to convey the Holocaust legacy

Henya hears her granddaughter’s weeping and the raucous argument

In an interview with Moshe Granot in Conversations with Writers,

main characters in Our Holocaust, develop a sense of intimacy and imme-

MORE THAN JUST WORDS

On Friday, September 1, 1939 the end of real life began.

I kept my promise Father, I finished your book.

The critics also expressed this sentiment.

Ella initiated another innovative musical piece on the Holocaust.

. . . A fascinating socio-musical phenomenon was observed at the end of

recently been accorded only to such artists as Bernstein and Barenboim—

These two examples of responses by Israeli audiences (few had either

Ophir contends that the alternative commandments will save human-

The Holocaust cannot be explained without understanding the role

research. Zertal, for example, regards the Eichmann Trial as a spectacular

how as a young man, as a sabra, he looked on in amazement at the young

Again I stood at Shulamit and Yitzhak Elhanan’s “cottage” door on Katowitz

OVER BUT NOT COMPLETE

This article was translated by Moshe Tlamim

18. Tova Perlmutter, “Teaching the Holocaust, Research on the Educational

Konzentrationslager. Yehiel Dinur, a Holocaust survivor, writer, and historian wrote

54. Liat Ben-Haviv, “Holocaust, Memory, and Video-Dance,” Yad Vashem,

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