Abstract: The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) is a dynamic, performative space that negotiates between representing the Jew as an integral part of German history and as ultimate Other. While this tension has been documented through the political history of the museum (Lackmann 2000; Pieper 2006; Young 2000), we focus on the dynamics of guided tours and special events. We claim that guiding and festival events at JMB marginalise Holocaust memory and present an image of Jews of the past that promotes a multicultural vision of present-day Germany. In guiding performances, the identity of the guide as German/Jewish/Muslim is part of the guiding performance, even when not made explicit. By comparing tour performances for various publics, and the 'storytelling rights' granted by the group, we witness how visitors' scripts and expectations interact with the museum's mission that it serve as a place of encounter (Ort der Begegnung). As German-Jewish history at JMB serves primarily as a cosmopolitan template for intercultural relations, strongly affiliated local Jews may not feel a need for the museum. Organised groups of Jews from abroad, however, visit it as part of the Holocaust memorial landscape of Berlin, while many local Jews with weaker affiliations to the Jewish community may find it an attractive venue for performing their more fluid Jewish identities – for themselves and for others.
Abstract: THE 2001 HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY SPEECH delivered by Israel's Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, is not so much a description of the current Israeli situation, as a prescription for Israeli Holocaust memory in general, and for the visits by Israeli youth to the death camps in Poland, in particular. The objective of these visits is to imbue students with experiences that will make this view of the world plausible: that the Holocaust never really ended, and that, but for the State and its defense forces, the Jews in Israel would today be on their way to the gas chambers.
This essay aims to illustrate how the Israeli Ministry of Education has built its world view—sometimes unconsciously—into the framework of the ritual visits to Poland. It will show how these visits draw a clear, but constantly threatened, boundary around the Jewish-Israeli collective, and present that boundary in such a way as to appear to those participating in the visits as natural. I will examine this process in light of Mary Douglas's characterization of the practices of the enclave. I will conclude with some reflections on the broader societal effects of the visits, and offer some suggestions for alternative pilgrimages commemorating the Holocaust.
Research data has been gleaned mainly from Israel's Education Ministry's pre-visit instruction course and six trips (between 1992 and 1997) as part of Ministry-organized delegations to Poland, of which five were with state secular schools and the last with a National Religious group.
Abstract: Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.
