The opening in Los Angeles of a $ 50-million Holocaust museum has intensified the debate over how to preserve the memory of the 6 million. On one side are those who call for a sober reappraisal; on the other, those striving to keep the wound raw.
In the beginning there was silence. The subject wasn't taught in schools and was barely mentioned in novels and films and history books. Perhaps no one knew what to say. Israelis were ashamed of the supposedly passive victims; American Jews were ashamed of their own passivity, of not having done more to save those they had left behind in Europe.
Besides, there was a more urgent agenda than confronting the meaning of the Holocaust: reconstruction. Survivors rebuilt and prospered. In the United States, a powerfully assertive Jewish community emerged. In Israel, we challenged the Nazi myth of apocalypse with our own myth of redemption. Jewish alchemy: reversing death into life. As if our survival through the centuries had been mere rehearsal for 1945.
But after the silence came the uproar. Like someone who has long suppressed a trauma, it suddenly became urgently necessary for Jews to talk, to make ourselves understood, to make ourselves understand.
The silence was first broken with the Eichmann Trial in 1961; but not until the 1967 Six-Day War did the reckoning begin. Israel's victory emboldened American Jews to confront the fate of the European Diaspora; while paradoxically, Israel's isolation in the weeks before the victory and the years afterwards made Israelis feel less self-confident, and more able to identify with the aloneness of Europe's Jews.
In the 25 years since the 1967 war, Holocaust study programs and commemorations have exploded. From Johannesburg to Montevideo, Holocaust museums and archives are opening. The United States alone boasts over 75 centers, most of them founded in the last 15 years. And now there are two mega-museums: the soon-to-be-opened U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which cost $ 168 million; and the just-opened $ 50-million Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit HaShoah/Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. A groundbreaking ceremony for a third museum, a $ 35-million New York center, will be held shortly.
In Israel, formal Holocaust education began only in the late 70s; now high school students must spend a total of 30 hours on the subject fully a third of the study time devoted to all of Jewish history. School-sponsored pilgrimages to death camps in Poland are proliferating. The Holocaust is a major theme for Israeli artists from the country's most popular young novelist, David Grossman, to its most popular rock singer, Yehudah Poliker.
But just as the intensity of memory is peaking, new questions are being raised about our Holocaust obsession. Last autumn, Education Minister Shulamit Aloni caused an uproar by attacking school trips to the death camps. Students "march with unfurled flags, as if we've come to conquer Poland," she said. For the first time, the Education Ministry is creating a commission to examine the effect of those trips on students for example, whether some return xenophobic, as critics charge.
The controversy over Holocaust education previously a rare consensus issue here is one of a number of signs that a new phase in the Jewish relationship to the Nazi era has begun: Following the initial repression and subsequent release of its memory, the Holocaust is finally entering history.
The survivor generation, which pioneered Holocaust commemoration, is passing. Former anti-Nazi partisan fighter Dr. Yitzhak Arad, who for two decades has headed Yad Vashem, the government- sponsored Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, is stepping down in July; other survivors who help run the institution are likewise retiring. Their places are being taken by members of the post-Holocaust generation.
It is not surprising that the passing of the survivors coincides with a reassessment of the Holocaust's place in Jewish consciousness. But along with a new objectivity there is an opposite reaction an attempt by some to emotionally "recreate" the tragedy, precisely so that it remains a raw wound. Whichever school prevails will help determine the future of Jewish identity and the Jewish place in the world. THE MATURING OF MEMORY Signs of the new objectivity are evident at Yad Vashem. Late last year, the museum unveiled a newly renovated section the first stage in what is to be a total overhaul. Perhaps the most significant change is the way Jewish resistance to the Nazis is portrayed. Rather than focusing on isolated incidents of armed revolt, as Yad Vashem once did, the new exhibit stresses varied responses, from underground cultural activities to food-smuggling into the ghetto. "We've emphasized Jewish resourcefulness," says 40-year-old museum director Yitzchak Mais.
That change confirms a profound shift in Israeli attitudes toward Europe's victims from contempt to virtual empathy. The need to symbolically negate the Holocaust by glorifying armed resistance has faded over time. The turning point came after the traumatic 1973 Yom Kippur War. "Suddenly Israelis saw that you could face destruction even with a powerful army," says Shalmi Barmore, 47, who heads education at Yad Vashem. From high school classes to army lectures, armed revolt is now presented as only one of several ways in which Jews resisted. So successful have educators been that the "sheep to slaughter" stigma has largely vanished. Survivors, mockingly nicknamed sabon ("soap") by young Israelis in the 50s, are now heroes. (See also: Not Like Sheep page 55.)
This belated appreciation of the complexity of the resistance issue is part of what Barmore calls a new "cultural literacy" about the Holocaust among young Israelis. "A graduating high school student not only can identify basic concepts like selection' and Kristallnacht, but understands how the process of destruction evolved," he says.
The new maturity is also evident in scholarship. The founding generation of university-level Holocaust studies in Israel had a mission: to disprove the myth of Jewish passivity. But younger scholars are less burdened by non-academic agendas. "We have fewer axes to grind," says Efraim Zuroff, 44, head of the Wiesenthal Center's Israel office. Adds Zuroff, who is completing a doctorate on American Orthodox wartime rescue efforts: "When I began researching I wanted to prove that the Orthodox had been active in rescue. But now I'm more interested in the moral dilemmas rescuers faced."
Even in politics there is a new sobriety. Israeli-born politicians are far less likely to resort to Holocaust rhetoric than their European-born predecessors: Former prime minister Menachem Begin, for example, routinely invoked the Nazi era, while his equally hardline politician son, Benny, rarely mentions it. Indeed, the Holocaust seems to be shifting from the political to the cultural arena from the collective to the personal.
Among American Jews, too, there is evidence of a new maturity. Criticism by intellectuals like Boston writer Leonard Fein and Los Angeles rabbi Harold Schulweis of Holocaust exploitation has begun to penetrate into the mainstream. It is no longer scandalous, for example, to condemn the UJA for invoking the Holocaust in fundraising appeals. "It's been pointed out so often that the criticism has become acceptable," says Amherst Jewish studies professor and commemoration expert James Young.
On April 22, 1993, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will open 240,000 square feet in the heart of the capital, near the Washington Monument, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. The museum initiated by then-president Jimmy Carter in 1978, partly to appease Jews for his sale of F-15 jets to Saudi Arabia has been unanimously endorsed by Congress, which donated land and budgeted $ 18.5 million for the first year's upkeep. For survivors who raised most of the building expenses, the museum symbolizes their arrival in American society and that of American Jewry.
"If this museum had been founded a generation ago, it would have been built in New York, and aimed at the Jewish community," says museum project director Michael Berenbaum. "Today it is in Washington and aimed at the American people."
The museum symbolizes not only American Jews' self-confidence as Americans, but also as Jews: American Jewry is implicitly declaring its independence from Israeli hegemony on Holocaust commemoration. Yad Vashem's leadership is understandably wary. Until now, Yad Vashem has been the undisputed world center for Holocaust education, hosting groups of Jewish and non-Jewish teachers for summer seminars. Now director Arad worries that American educators will stop coming to Jerusalem and look instead to Washington, undermining Israel's centrality in Holocaust studies. And he warns of competition over Nazi-era archives and artifacts between Yad Vashem which barely manages on an annual, mostly government-endowed budget of 12 million shekels ($ 4.5 million) and better- funded foreign museums like Washington's.
With the Washington museum, the Holocaust is moving from exclusive Jewish "ownership" into the world. That too is a sign of American Jewish self-confidence in the relevance of their message to non-Jews. Says Rabbi Irving Greenberg, theologian and a prime mover in the founding of the Washington museum: "Jews have always helped transform the world by telling their historical experience. Now we're doing that with the Holocaust." The museum's message, says Berenbaum, will stress American values of racial tolerance and the rule of law. "The Holocaust was a universal experience that happened on the body of the Jewish people," he says.
THE EXCESSES OF MEMORY
But along with the growing signs of a new maturity, there is also evidence of an opposite trend almost desperate attempts to "get the message across" before the Holocaust disappears into history. In the Spring Valley, New York, Holocaust museum, for example, a cramped corridor simulates the cattlecars that deported Jews to the camps. The entrance into the Dallas museum is through a cattlecar a real one, imported from Poland. Even the usually sober Yad Vashem has resorted to emotional manipulation. Its memorial to the 1 million children killed in the Holocaust, built in 1987, is a dark, tunnel-like hall surrounded by mirrors reflecting what appears to be an infinite number of candles; a voice-over reads the names of dead children. "The memorial should be austere," says Leonard Fein. "Instead, it's contrived."
By far the most controversial project is the Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. With the opening of the museum on February 8, the emotional manipulation school of Holocaust remembrance has found its spiritual center. The museum is a guided tour through staged recreations of the Holocaust, from a voice-over of Nazi officials planning the Final Solution in German-accented English to a reconstruction of the entrance to Auschwitz, complete with searchlight (See box).
The Museum of Tolerance was planned by James Gardner, who designed Tel Aviv's successful Diaspora Museum. But critics, who use words like "Hollywood" and "Disneyland" to describe the Los Angeles museum, say that techniques suitable for popularizing culture become grotesque when applied to the Holocaust.
Center director Rabbi Marvin Hier says critics are "jealous" of his success. "If you want to keep the Holocaust a secret, you can set up a place that has the solemnity of a Christian Science reading room. With revisionists' denying the Holocaust happened, we can't afford to keep a low profile. We're a modern educational center using modern techniques." Indeed, Hier's up-front style including warnings of the possibility of an American holocaust has been enormously popular: Founded only 15 years ago, the center has a mailing list of close to 400,000 and a $ 12-million annual budget.
If the Wiesenthal Center is the American symbol of unrestrained Holocaust education, some see its Israeli equivalent in the high school trips to Poland.
Yad Vashem's Shalmi Barmore describes a meeting he attended between Education Ministry officials and students who had just returned from Poland: "One girl wiped a tear and announced she would never leave Israel. The officials were delighted: They had gotten what they paid for. I felt sick. This wasn't education, it was theater. I'm interested in the kids who don't make speeches: They're the success stories, the ones who will be affected in the long term. Do we think we can scare kids into Zionism?"
Since 1988, when the trips began, the Education Ministry has sent some 6,000 students to Poland; and perhaps 2,000 more are going this year. In addition, there is the independent, privately funded March of the Living, a week-long trip in the spring by young Diaspora Jews and Israelis culminating in a silent procession from Auschwitz to Birkenau; afterwards, marchers fly to Israel. The 1991 march attracted 5,000 youths, 600 of them Israelis. Participants describe it as an emotional highlight of their lives. Just how emotional may be seen in this statistic: Last year doctors accompanying the march treated 167 cases of what director Michael Berl calls "temporary loss of control," from fainting to hyperventilation.
Berl says counselors prepare marchers through group discussions at every stage of the trip. "We don't just drop kids into the camps. We ease them in and we ease them out."
But what troubles some critics even more than the style is the message that group trips to Poland convey. In principle, says Barmore, a pilgrimage can be a "very creative" educational tool, stimulating students to think about a range of issues. But, he adds, teachers often opt for a "simplistic" Zionist message valid in itself but incomplete. "The Holocaust has universalist and Jewish implications. If we only stress one, we turn it into a cliche. A trip to Poland should humble you rather than fill you with aggressive symbolism."
Some do in fact return from Poland less aggressive. "I know extreme right-wing kids who, after visiting Auschwitz, realize that we have to respect the humanity of the Arabs," says Moshe Mazor, a Lod businessman who voluntarily takes groups of mostly Sephardi youth to Poland.
Still, as if to confirm Barmore's warnings, Michael Berl likes to tell of the time when high-spirited participants on one March of the Living entered Warsaw Airport singing loudly. "Suddenly a Polish policeman in a uniform straight out of the movies yelled, You vill be quiet!' At first everyone was silent. But then someone started singing Hatikvah (the Israeli anthem), and everyone joined in. That was a vicious Hatikvah."
THE CONFLICTING MEANINGS OF MEMORY
The only Jewish consensus on the Holocaust, notes Efraim Zuroff, "is the transmission of memory." Indeed, there is no single "lesson." For some Jews, the Nazi genocide teaches the need for generosity toward all suffering peoples; for others, the need to help only fellow Jews. The Holocaust has influenced some to become hawks, others doves. Religious Jews are inspired by the faith of many Nazi victims, while agnostics are confirmed in their doubts by the very fact of the Holocaust.
Both American Jews and Israelis commonly use the Holocaust to reinforce their own country's guiding ideals. For American Jews, that means inter-ethnic cooperation; for Israelis, Jewish self-reliance. The very different ways in which Israelis and American Jews have begun to perceive the Holocaust might mean that the trauma which once united the two communities could become yet another source of friction between them.
The Washington and Los Angeles museums may accelerate that process, by reinforcing what Michael Berenbaum of the Washington project calls "the Americanization of the Holocaust." Though focused on Europe's Jews, their bottom-line message is American: pluralism and tolerance. At the same time, the trips to Poland have strengthened the Zionist nature of Holocaust education in Israel: that the lesson of the Nazi era is the untenability of Diaspora life. And while Yad Vashem's new exhibit acknowledges for the first time Nazism's non-Jewish victims, its essential message remains embodied in the museum's final scene: a photograph of survivors disembarking on the Israeli shore.
THE BURDEN OF MEMORY
The rise of Holocaust consciousness coincided with and was fed by the post-1967 assault on Israel by the Arab-Communist-Third World alliance. It was a bleak time for Jews: In a world where we often felt virtually friendless, many began to see the Holocaust as relevant not only to our past but also our present.
But the bloc that promoted Israel's isolation has crumbled. Israel now has more embassies around the world than ever before; the U.N. "Zionism is racism" resolution, symbol of our demonization, has been repealed. To be sure, the world remains a dangerous place for Jews as the rise of Nazi violence in Germany and of racism in Europe as a whole proves. But it also offers unimagined opportunities.
One of the most compelling arguments for Holocaust education is that by studying the Nazi era, we become more savvy about the world and thereby enhance our chances for survival. But in a world that has suddenly become more complex, some now wonder whether our Holocaust obsession might achieve the opposite result: make us wary and inflexible, unable to distinguish threat from opportunity.
Zionism's goal was to restore the Jews as a nation among nations. Yet Holocaust education can impart subtle messages about the inherent separateness of Jewish from human fate. There is, for example, a tendency to speak of "the world" and "the Jews," as if those were two separate entities. Even invoking gentile rescuers as an antidote to Jewish pessimism about humanity can backfire: The very term that is used "righteous gentile" implies the exception that proves the rule.
The Holocaust has become our calling card, the way we present ourselves to the world. Says Leonard Fein: "The Washington museum says that the first thing the world should know about the Jews is that people tried to kill them."
Foreign dignitaries visiting Israel are often brought to Yad Vashem on the first day of their arrival. On March 11, 1991, secretary of state James Baker landed in Israel for his first-ever visit; he was taken directly from the airport to Yad Vashem. The obligatory tour is meant to sensitize visitors to Israel's security needs. And yet it may be communicating an opposite message: that our perception of reality is distorted by the traumas of the past. Israel's security concerns result from objective political and geographical factors; invoking the Holocaust only undermines the seriousness with which our fears are treated.
No responsible voice within the Jewish community suggests we ignore the Holocaust and revert to the pre-67 reign of silence. A people that has survived largely through memory is not about to forget its near-extinction.
Still, an uncritical approach to the past can be as dangerous as its suppression. Proponents of Holocaust commemoration often quote this saying from the Ba'al Shem Tov, founder of hasidism: "In remembrance lies redemption." But as the current debate indicates, remembering well may be as important as the act of remembrance itself. With reporting by J.J. Goldberg in New York, Sheli Teitelbaum in Los Angeles, Alan Bash in Washington and Julie Zuckerman in Jerusalem