Every major event in Jewish biblical history has a ritual or passage at least in the bible.  Because of this, each is celebrated and remembered by Jews through their rituals.  The destruction of the temple-multiple times, the crossing of the Red Sea, every major event.  Where does remembering the tragedy of Holocaust fit into this framework.  The Holocaust can be argued to be the worst thing to happen to Jews as a whole since the destruction of the temple or maybe the diaspora after it.  How should the Holocaust be remembered and ritualized?  What place does it have in Jewish identity.  Should Jewish identity now be based off of destruction, as that was the last major event in Jewish history?

If today was like in biblical times, the Holocaust would soon develop a ritualized way of remembering the tragedy.  A time would be chosen to commemorate the struggle, and then celebrate it for redemption from God.  All there is today is a Holocaust Remembrance Day called Yom HaShoah.  Yom HaShoah only remembers those Jews lost in the Holocaust.  It is very secular as it aims to teach people to never forget and to remind them of the atrocities.  It is interesting that if this were biblical times, wouldn’t there be more religion involved?  If the Holocaust is a major event in Jewish history, one that rivals that of Biblical times, should there be room to write about it in the Bible.  Is there room to write another book if all other major struggles in Jewish history have books about them?

It was very interesting to hear what people had to say in class today about the Holocaust. I was surprised at how in-depths some people’s knowledge of the subject was. I only learned about the Holocaust through European history. Outside of that, I have not thought about it as much as I should have. It was interesting to read and discuss the mythic qualities that the holocaust has for some people. I feel that the museum in Washington is probably more effective by mysticizing the holocaust a little.
In 8th grade, during a trip to Washington D.C., my class visited the Holocaust Museum. From what I remember about it, it revolved around the history of the Jews that were lost there. I remember there being shoes, the image of the gates at Auschwitz, and personal articles that were relatable to stir emotions. I also remember a large meditation room where we all sat around in silence. No one was in the mood to say anything. The meditation room was secular to my memory. While I was very moved at the time, I honestly have not thought much about the Holocaust since that trip.
I decided after class to look at the website for the museum down in D.C. It is called the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The website is available in 11 different languages. They say that 90% of their visitors are not Jewish. They express a very broad message about checking hatred to prevent genocide. All over their website is information about genocide prevention, which I do not remember when I was a child. This has probably changed due to more Western knowledge of the atrocities that happen in lesser-known areas like Darfur. In terms of the Holocaust information on the website, they emphasize mostly the Jewish struggles in the Holocaust.
The website and museum in a way probably mysticize the Holocaust. They present the images, artifacts, and stories that will most likely stir up the audiences and leave an impression. By capitalizing on this, they look to make an impact on its visitors and send them away with a message, that being “Never again”. While I know the idea of attributing mythic qualities to the Holocaust could be dangerous and controversial, it has a powerful effect on the viewers.

Our class discussion on the Holocaust made me reflect upon a conversation that I had with one of my friends when she and I were traveling in Amsterdam over winter break of last year. The Anne Frank house is located there, and before I set off on the trip, my mom reminded me of that fact and said that I should definitely check it out. When I asked my friend whether she would be interested in going to the museum, she was adamantly against the idea since she believed that the Anne Frank story was not an accurate portrayal of the Holocaust, and thus she did not feel like it should be so widely broadcast and received as one of the most crucial Holocaust stories. Since it was only she and I who were traveling, and we wanted to stick together, I did not end up visiting the house. Many people that I spoke with about my decision did not understand, and said that if they were me, they would have protested and made their friend come to the museum, or would have broken off from her for a couple of hours to get the experience. My reasoning had multiple layers: for one, I did not want to share the experience with someone who would be meanwhile resenting it, and two, on some level I did understand where she was coming from, in terms of how the Anne Frank story is over-broadcasted, and because of that, does not portray the message that stories of the Holocaust should necessarily be sending.

The Anne Frank story, along with Schindler’s list, and the gate of Auschwitz, mentioned in the article that we read for class, is a product of Holocaust myth. It is the story of one girl that has become so famous, adapted into numerous cinematic pieces, read by countless students. But does it help people remember the Holocaust in an effective way, or does the constant appearance of the story serve to numb individuals to the event? In addition, does the focus on this particular story take away the importance of the other stories of the individuals involved in the Holocaust? Is remembering one story enough? In a way, I felt embarrassed that I did not visit the museum, and felt as though as a Jew I had done a disservice to my family and my religion. It was as if, even if I did not think I would be affected by a visit from the house, and even though I thought the story was over-told, I had not performed an act of remembrance that was expected from me.

I can relate a lot to the comment that was made by Caroline, about how, as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, and as someone who has a lot of knowledge about the Holocaust, she often feels jaded when it comes to Holocaust related material. This has definitely been something that I’ve experienced; my grandmother is a Holocaust survivor, she has told her story numerous times at our JCC, for a project conducted by Steven Speilburg, and at my middle school. I have been to both Yad Vashem and the Holocaust memorial in DC, but I did not feel incredibly moved at either museum. Sure I understood the gravity of the material in these museums, and sure there were parts of the museum that had an effect on me, but I was not anywhere close to tears, or any immense emotion. I remember that there were even instances during these types of trips where I questioned whether I should be imposing some sort of emotion upon myself to make up for my absent tears.

So there are a lot of questions that I have about how to remember the Holocaust, and whether mythologizing is harmful as well as helpful. It seems that the repetition of certain stories are effective, because they immortalize the Holocaust within our culture. However, as these stories are told and retold, individuals are simultaneously remembering the Holocaust as well as growing desensitized from its terror. So is there a way of remembering the Holocaust, and creating myths without the repercussions? I have found that the few times I did have a visceral reaction to things Holocaust-related was when specific details were mentioned. For instance, in Hebrew school, I felt a bit sick when we learned about how Nazis performed experiments on pregnant women, in which they would sew the vagina shut, and monitor the repercussions. In a less gruesome example, I also felt something when I learned that after my grandmother and her sister were smuggled out of Auschwitz by a kind, German soldier, the other people at the camp were informed that the two women were killed. This fact was explained to my grandmother by a woman from the camp, who she ran into years later at a train station, after she moved to the States.

I guess the process of creating myth surrounding the Holocaust strikes me as problematic because it buries the smaller details, and the experience becomes impersonal, quite often masked by the faces of actors in a film. In this, I am not denying the immense importance of these myths; they make it possible to remember the Holocaust, and make these memories accessable to individuals everywhere. I just wonder what the myths will look like in years to come, how many of Holocaust’s lesser known voices (the people who did not keep diaries, and even the ones that did) will be silenced, and how many stories will be forgotten in order “to remember.”

In light of the conversation we had last Thursday discussing the Holocaust, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to memorialize and ritualize tragedies.  We feel as if we need to depict an event such as the Holocaust in the most accurate way, but why? Of course, it is important to create an understanding of the horror of the experience so that nothing like it will happen again, but no interpretation of the event will ever teach people what is right and what is wrong.  People may also claim that these monuments honor those who have died, but I can’t help but wonder if memorials serve those who are alive more than they serve those who have died.  Belief in the afterlife itself is man-created, making life a bit more significant if there is an ultimate goal at the end.  So by giving those who have died a memorial, it is an attempt to give significance to the person’s life – but how do we even know they can appreciate it? It seems to me that by giving significance to another’s life, we are really attempting to give significance to our own lives as well as taking a moment to appreciate that we have not suffered as much as those killed in the Holocaust.

In Thursday’s class, Kat mentioned something about how her experiences in the Holocaust memorials of both America and Israel were certainly not positive, and I don’t think anyone would associate encounters with grief as positive experiences, but it is interesting to me that there is still such an attraction to those places that cause such sadness.  Several people mentioned that they were almost disappointed when they visited former concentration camp towns by how normal and even beautiful the towns are now.  It’s clear that there is something very necessary in grief, or it may be more accurate to say that there is something vital in grief – by feeling something so poignantly it reminds us that we are capable of feeling it.  The danger comes when we substitute our own need for this vicarious pain and sorrow for the positive goal that could come from memorializing such a tragic event.  While it may feel good and maybe even right to us that the Holocaust should evoke only feelings of desolation, despair, and sorrow, I believe that we need to look to move forward from that and use history to our full advantage.  I feel like we should be happy that the towns whose history has been steeped in misery are now cheerful, thriving places.  Though certainly we should never forget the experiences that humans once had there, does that mean that we should deprive the people their own happiness? The same applies for symbolic dedication to those who have died; if we believe that the departed can see or feel how we honor them, shouldn’t they deserve a good feeling left behind them rather than one filled with feelings of horror and sadness? Someone mentioned how it was strange to see a massive gravesite in one of the towns that was covered in flowers and was alive with birds singing and sun shining.  I understand that it is important not to cover up the tragedy of the Holocaust with beautiful things, but I don’t think that this really covers it up.  I think that it pays homage to those who have died simply by allowing those who experience the memorial to appreciate their own lives and the vitality of the world around them.

As we discussed visiting concentration camps during Thursday’s class, I could not help but be reminded of some of my visits to Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan. Certainly the horrific events of September 11, 2001, are vastly different than the Holocaust and I am making no comparison between the two, but I can relate many of the topics that we discussed in class to my experience of visiting Ground Zero.

For instance, one student mentioned the strangeness of visiting a concentration camp that is only minutes away from a functioning town. How do people live and function normally when so many deaths have occurred nearby? On my most recent visit to Ground Zero, which must have been about seven years after 9/11, I was slightly perturbed by the surrounding area. It seemed that the businessmen and businesswomen walking past the destruction were too busy on their cell phones, checking their blackberries, or rushing to catch a subway to realize what they were walking past. It’s Ground Zero people, I thought. How can you walk past unmoved? I realized that these people have been passing Ground Zero everyday for years; some of them may have been present on September 11. Maybe they don’t look because they have seen it so many times and it has just become a normal part of their commute, or maybe they don’t look because it is too painful to do so, so they must look ahead and move on with their lives as if everything is fine.

Just as we discussed in class whether concentration camps were holy sites, my visit made me think about Ground Zero as a place separate from the rest of the city. Indeed, on my most recent visit, Ground Zero was not the primary destination in New York; my friends and I were doing other things in the city and spontaneously decided that we should go. We had to get off of the subway (costing us an extra fare), thus suspending fun/profane time in order to make this special pilgrimage to Ground Zero. We remained in this sacred space and time until re-boarding the subway for the South Street Seaport, where our profane time could once again resume.

It is interesting to me that my friends and I felt that visiting Ground Zero was something that we should do. It felt almost like our duty to pay our respects, to see again the devastation that had fallen on our city. We try to picture what it was like that day. We try to understand it, as if it is something too abnormal to understand logically.

Just as we discussed how the Holocaust, despite the death of 6 million non-Jews, has become Judaized, sometimes I think about 9/11 in terms of New York rather than the U.S. This feeling is difficult to verbalize, but sometimes when I am not in New York at the time of the anniversary, I feel isolated, like non-New York area residents cannot understand the significance of what happened. Rationally I know this is a falsehood, but sometimes I feel that I have more legitimacy to talk about 9/11 because I am a New Yorker. (I recognize that this sentiment is terribly obnoxious and immature, but at least I recognize it as such and hey, I am just fulfilling another NY stereotype!) I feel like it was something that happened to a small community and cannot be understood by outsiders. I certainly do not think that Jews feel this way about the Holocaust, but I have noticed that non-Jews often defer to Jews when discussing the Holocaust, because they believe that Jews, as members of that community, even if they are not descended from a Holocaust survivor, have more to say. Just as we sometimes fail to think about how the Holocaust affected millions of people, not solely Jews, I fail to remember that 9/11 affected not just New Yorkers, but most U.S. Americans.

Sometimes I worry about how my kids or my grandkids will think about 9/11. To them, it will be something that they learn about in history class. I worry that they will feel disconnected from it; it will just be another event, another fact, something to remember for exams but nothing that affects them personally. And sometimes I worry about this in regards to the Holocaust as well. I have had the privilege of seeing several Holocaust survivors give lectures, and I believe that this is the most effective way to learn about the Holocaust. Soon there will be no survivors to give lectures, and I worry that the Holocaust will be forgotten. As much as we might say “never forget” or “never again,” is this plausible?

Yesterday in class we were talking about the Holocaust and it reminded me of an incident that happened when I was at Seeds of Peace in 2007. This day was the first day there that I cried. At Seeds, there is an hour and a half designated to dialogue sessions between the Palestinians and the Israelis where they are able to share their stories with the “enemy”. I remember walking into the dining hall for lunch where my friends Maor and Sapir, both Israeli, were waiting for me at our table. Maor pulled me aside and asked if I had heard what happened in one of the dialogue sessions that day, I told him I hadn’t. “Someone drew the swastika on the floor of one of the dialogue huts in permanent marker and said it was the best thing that had ever happened,” he said. Hearing that someone believed that the Holocaust was the best thing to happen in history was not only shocking, but rather painful. I later broke down and cried to my bunk counselor because that comment made me feel as though that Palestinian child was spitting on my father’s grave. After that comment, the Jews banded together and only talked to other Jews. Despite the forced integrated seating, the tables in the dining hall divided into Arabs and Jews, and it remained this way for a few days. As it turned out, the situation was that one of the discussion leaders drew the swastika on a piece of paper, passed it around the circle and asked each person what was the first thing that came to mind. However, one of the Palestinian kids stated that he believed that it was the best thing that had ever happened.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about the Holocaust and she pointed out to me that we really only learn about the Holocaust from the Jewish perspective and that often we forget that it also happened to 5 million people who weren’t Jewish…gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled were all persecuted as well. It seems that the Jews are trying to claim it as their own personal experience when it in a way happened to everyone. In class, we talked about how there are slogans about the holocaust like “never again”, and as we pointed out in class, “never again” to whom? “Never again” to the Jews? I’ve been studying the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the last few years and Gaza and the West Bank look a lot like the concentration camps…now obviously there are not mass genocides or people being forced to work and being starved to death. However, Israel has restricted 1.2 million Palestinians to the Gaza Strip which is 28 miles long by 4 miles wide. They live in refugee camps, and are not permitted to leave, and then the Israeli government wonders why the intifada’s happen…I’m not trying to be anti-Semitic, it just seems hypocritical.

Entering today’s class I was very hesitant as to where our class discussion would lead. As a Christian from German descent with blond hair and blue eyes, I had no idea how my classmates would react if I decided to participate. My grandmother was living in Germany with her mother and sisters when World War II broke out and was to forced to remain there for the next four years after her travel documents permitting her and her siblings to leave the country were burned in one of the many bombings. Yes, she saw some horrors of the war and lived through some terrible bombings, but how can one compare her experiences of wartime Germany to someone who was Jewish? For example, my friend Rachel Saperstein’s grandmother was on the run along with a handful of other Jews. Where my grandmother had a bed to sleep, my friend’s grandmother had the ground. My grandmother knew her sisters were alive in the other room while my friend’s grandmother knew nothing of her closest friends’ and family’s whereabouts. It is scary and extremely sad that one can say, yes, my grandmother endured many hardships and lived through one of the most devastating wars to ever occur on this planet, but she was one of the lucky ones. She was lucky to be able to have friends and a father in New York to get her and her sisters on a train while Munich was being bombed to non-stop travel to Portugal to get on a French cargo ship to return to the states. She was lucky.

One of my classmates made a very interesting comment today. She said that she did not feel something until she saw the ashes even after visiting a few of the camps and the two museums. For me personally, I feel the most when I am with a survivor and they retelling their story, which leads me to the question of how are we going to convey these stories and the history to our children’s generations and our grandchildren’s generation? I have actually had this discussion with my friends multiple times over the past couple of years. Each year my grandmother loses her ability to recall certain details from her childhood (she is going to be ninety in three years). The people of her generation have truly lived through it all – some WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the scare of Communism, Vietnam War, more financial crises, more genocide. Again, this is sad to say, but these survivors are a dying breed and with them go many stories that have yet to be shared. As Professor Staub mentioned in class, how are we going to convey the stories to the future generations of our world? How are our children going to learn about the Holocaust? How are they ever going to fully understand the impact it had not only on the then-current state of the world and the Jewish population but also on the future Jewish population and the future state of European countries? And not only the Jews, but also the disabled, the gays, and the gypsies. As stated in Jonathan Webber’s essay “Lest We Forget!”:

“How does one depict Auschwitz in a Holocaust exhibition? Very often this is done by showing a photograph of the famous entry-gate… One problem with this representation is that visitors to such an exhibitions would be tempted to reduce their image of Auschwitz to just this entry-gate, thereby substituting a part for the whole and giving that part more meaning than it really deserves. A related problem is that the comparative normality of the appearance of this entry-gate may also act in such a way as to shield visitors from the horrific realities of what went beyond” (p. 120)

When our children read their textbooks in school, is the publisher going to use the entry-gate as a symbol of the concentration camp? Will our children only think of this gate when their teacher mentions the word Auschwitz or are they going to think of the events that occurred at this camp? How does one “accurately” depict the horrific crimes? Can anyone who did not witness it truly grasp the horrors of it? You can tell me people were gassed to death, but I cannot fathom how someone could push a button to kill hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. How can my children understand if I cannot and I have heard from people who were there in the midst of it all? Professor Staub ended class saying there is a possibility that in our lifetime the Holocaust will be re-mythologized and viewed very differently. Will this new view help future generations understand or will this new mythology of the Holocaust sugarcoat it?

Caroline brought up a point in class today that she throughout her Jewish education she has become almost desensitized to the Holocaust. This is something I’ve thought about a lot over the last couple of years. To be honest, when I looked at the syllabus for this week I saw that we were talking about the Holocaust and my reaction was “oh no, not that again.” It’s not that I don’t recognize the importance of talking about the Holocaust, and the more I thought about it the more I realized I had never really talked about the Holocaust with non-Jews before and began to dread it less. As we’ve been talking about in class I feel that American Jewish identity is incredibly focused on the Holocaust.
As a child, I was naturally drawn to it. I read every book that I could about the Holocaust, and especially the ones that had girls around my age as the main character. In a strange way I was reading these stories not because I wanted to remember the horror of what happened, but because I could identify with these Jewish girls my own age. It wasn’t easy to find books about young Jewish girls living in America, but in the context of the Holocaust I could find a plethora of girls with whom I could relate. And even more these girls had endured great struggles in order to maintain their Jewish identity, which made me feel proud.
As I grew up the Holocaust began to play into my academic life more. It became less of a personal fascination and more of something that came up in every class. I remember in 7th grade I was reading a book about the Holocaust in English, studying it in History class and talking about it during Hebrew school. Since then it’s been brought up at least once in every year of school. And when I transferred to a Jewish Day School it became even more prevalent.
At JDS we celebrated Yom HaShoah (the Holocaust Remembrance day) every year. We the whole school was decorated for the day, there was a 24 hour vigil where names were read, and there was always an assembly. In addition many teachers dedicated the day to talking about the Holocaust in their classes. We also took a mandatory Holocaust class in our junior year. After graduation the majority of the class went to Israel with a 10-day stop over in Poland and the Czech Republic to visit concentration camps and other Holocaust “landmarks.” And these were only the big events. They were only symbols of what went on the rest of the year.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that it’s important to remember the Holocaust, just as it is important to remember all of history so that we do not repeat it, but it has gotten to the point in my life where it is rare for a day to go by in which the Holocaust does not come up in conversation with Jews. And this is what bothers me. It has become the focus of Jewish life for so many. Especially in place of many of the more religious aspects of the religion, but for some, in addition to these. I think that it is an important part of Jewish history, and it should not be neglected. We should remember but we should not let this remembrance control our lives.

In today’s class, while discussing the “myth” of the Holocaust, many students told stories of their experiences visiting concentration camps in Europe. Between the members of the class, there were many different types of concentration camps represented, and we learned about the different ways that the concentration camps presented themselves. One student said, “I took a pilgrimage to Eastern Europe and then to Israel, visiting different concentration camps.” The word pilgrimage made me think about the role of the Holocaust and the notion of memorializing concentration camps. According to the New Oxford English Dictionary, a pilgrimage is, “A journey to a place associated with someone or something well known or respected.”

If you interpret the definition as traveling to a well-known place, then trips to concentration camps are pilgrimages, since they are well known. However, respected is not a word I would uses to describe a concentration camp. But since people do travel to the camps, there must be respect for them. Maybe respect for the death and tragedy that occurred there? So, pilgrimage seems to be the right verb to describe a trip to a concentration camp, but then I thought, why do people take these pilgrimages to concentration camps? Why have we turned these places of destruction into memorials?

In my opinion, by turning concentration camps into memorials, we have made time and life freeze. People get upset when people want to develop new institutions on the land of concentration camps. Instead of moving forward and sending the message that the Holocaust is over and it is time for life in Europe to proceed forward, the camps are constant reminders of the tragedies that took place eighty years ago. Some argue that we need to maintain the concentration camps, to remember, to never forget, and to never let the Holocaust happen again. But we also want to move forward. There needs to be a balance between remembering and moving on.

Today we ended class by stating that whole generations of Jews have based their Jewish identities on the Holocaust, but what happens when people do not feel that same connection to the Holocaust? When people say enough is enough, it was terrible, but the Jews are strong, look at Israel and America? I think it is time to move forward. The Holocaust needs to be remembered, however it the symbols of the death and destruction do not need to memorialized to the extent that they are. People do not need to be making pilgrimages to concentration camps to form their Jewish identities; they need to focus on the future to form their identities. A generation of Jews have created identities on destruction and it is time to form identities on hope for a brighter future.

Near the end of class this afternoon someone mentioned how they worry that the way the Holocaust is portrayed today might lead to the desensitization of future generations. We also discussed how the United States’ perception of the Holocausts differs from that of Europe in that it focuses the event on the losses of the Jewish people while in some ways downplaying those of other groups. From these two points, I could not help but think of a discussion I had with a friend a few years ago who was pointing out the many ways he thought Jews exerted power in the United States. He discussed Jewish influence in politics, though that would be considered more specifically an Israeli influence, and also within Hollywood and the media, stating that if you played a Jew in huge production Holocaust movie you were automatically a “shoe in” for an Oscar but if you did an amazing job playing a Nazi your chances at getting an award were quite low. Another point he made was how the Jewish suffering during the Holocaust was “over publicized” in the US, ignoring other groups that suffered.

I think many people would consider my friend an anti-Semitic but I would disagree. Our class seemed to share a few of his ideas though perhaps in a more sensitive and politically correct way. Nevertheless, pulling from the article we read today “Lest We Forget!” by Jonathan Webber, it would make sense that the US perception of the Holocaust is focused on Judaism. Webber writes that the Holocaust has become a way to identify oneself as Jewish within secular Judaism. This form of identification has not been so much associated with God or rabbinic forms of Judaism, thus resulting in conflicts between the Secular and Rabbinic Jewish community regarding their individual stance on this historical tragedy.  Organized and popular reform and secular Jewish communities mainly exist in the United States. Webber focuses his article on the subject of the Holocaust myth however, the idea outlined above already provides insight on why the Holocaust “belonged exclusively to Jewish history” in America (Webber 107).