Today, we went to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum. It was not an easy day for any of us, but as a Jew I was especially struck by the horrors displayed within the museum. I had not been sure how I would react, seeing as I had already done a similar tour on my last visit to Israel, but the enormity of the Holocaust seems to provide an infinite source of grief, as there is always more atrocity to take into account. The scale of the exhibit at Yad Vashem also cannot be properly comprehended in one visit, and I found that there was much I had not previously known or remembered. While the experience of walking through Yad Vashem was quite painful, I do think it was a vital part of the course and, at any rate, the readings helped us to contextualise the atrocities displayed and described within the museum.
For example, Rachel Auerbach’s powerful “Yizkor 1943” provided a lyrical and near-poetic depiction of Nazi brutality and the sad fate of the Jewish people in this period. Auerbach’s article is interesting for a few reasons. First (and most importantly), her vivid imagery and descriptions are extremely powerful and evocative, as she accounts for the different segments of Jewish society and what befell them. Yet her article is not merely an evocative catalogue of the suffering of the Jews. Rather, she frames her text through Yizkor, the Jewish mourning ritual. In this way, she is able to emphasise not only Jewish pain, but also the communal aspect of Judaism, since Yizkor is a public – and not private – ritual. In doing so, Auerbach seems to suggest Jewish community and solidarity as the only (or at least, the best) response to the Holocaust. Although she acknowledges that the ritual of Yizkor, which is only performed four times a year, cannot possibly express the true brutality and loss of Holocaust victims, I see her emphasis on a communal ritual as a means of ensuring future Jewish survival and the continuation of the Jewish spirit. Secondly, her appeal to a traditional Jewish ritual can be seen as a means of reaffirming Jewish religious and cultural identity after the Holocaust sought to strip Jews of not only their lives, but also their heritage. Thus, while it is important to grieve for the victims of the Holocaust, Auerbach appears to suggest that we must place this grief within the larger practices and history of Judaism, as opposed to losing faith.
This sense of persistence as a sense of triumph over Nazi goals, perhaps alluded to in Auerbach’s article, is expressed more explicitly in Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz”. Here, Levi also talks of suffering, as he seeks to describe indescribable acts of evil. However, Levi also addresses the theme of human dignity, as he describes how his friend Steinlauf insisted on washing his body in the camps despite the apparent futility of such an endeavour. Although Levi initially dismisses this act as the “dismal repetition of an extinct rite”, Steinlauf reminds him that they must retain at least “the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of human civilisation”; namely, “dignity and propriety” (24). Levi ultimately comes to recognise the sheer act of living and surviving as a form of rebellion against Hitler. Additionally, we see once more how ritual serves a fundamental role within the preservation of the Jewish nation and spirit. As with Yizkor in Auerbach’s article, the act of washing (a key part of Jewish ritual practice) is used as a framework for understanding Jewish perseverance and tenacity.
Emil Fackenheim deals with similar themes in his article, “The Jewish Return into History”. Although perhaps his primary goal is to understand the character of Jewish faith and religion after the Holocaust by means of philosophy and history, he ends his article on an almost triumphal note. Specifically, Fackenheim identifies the establishment of Israel as a type of restoration of Jewish identity and culture post-Holocaust. Although Hitler and the Nazis wanted to annihilate all Jews in the Final Solution, Fackenheim interprets the very fact of their survival and prosperity as a response to the Holocaust; instead of being silenced, Jews have become more empowered through sovereign statehood. This outlook on the Holocaust and on Jewish philosophy is fundamentally Zionist, as the Jewish return to Israel is viewed not merely as a political victory, but also a religious one. The success of Jewish religion is thus understood as being reflected in the success of the Jewish state.
This Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust is clearly reflected within Yad Vashem in a couple of ways. First, the fact that there was a law set in place demanding a national means of Holocaust remembrance can be seen to illustrate this link between the past sufferings of the Jewish people with the present success of the Jewish state. Second, the architecture of the museum itself is inherently Zionist, offering a clear view of Jerusalem at the end of the tour, as the final source of redemption for Jews after the traumas of the Holocaust. Indeed, this relationship between the Holocaust and the necessity of a Jewish state has often been criticised as a form of Zionist propaganda, as many opponents of Israel assert that Israel was formed out of Holocaust guilt. As a Zionist, this view is fundamentally repugnant to me. However, applying a more critical and objective lens, this view of Israel as a direct result of the Holocaust is still problematic, insofar as it is overly simplistic. Specifically, such a reductive view fails to consider the previous half-century of strong Zionist zeal and ideology percolating within nineteenth and twentieth century Jewry, as well as within Jewish religious practice. Whereas the Holocaust did serve as an extremely harsh and potent reminder of anti-Semitism, pre-Zionist sentiments are clearly present even within the Passover ritual, which expresses the hope that next year, we will be in Jerusalem. Therefore, I think that the links between Holocaust remembrance, Zionism and Israeli politics is too complex to be clearly categorised, but rather serves to illustrate once more the complicated relationship between religion and public life within Israeli society. In any case, our visit to Yad Vashem was an important part of the course for me, as it is impossible to try and understand either Israel or Judaism without taking into account the events, as well as the aftermath, of the Holocaust.
– Simon Zeldin