Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity 9780857450074

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Preface: Seeking a Personal Past in the Deathscapes of Poland
Chapter 1 Introduction and Methodology: The Shoah, Jewish-Israeli Identity,* and the Voyages to Poland
Chapter 2 The Historical and Social Context of Israeli Shoah Commemoration
Chapter 3 The Structure of the Poland Voyages
Chapter 4 Performing the Poland Voyages
Chapter 5 The Ceremonies of the Poland Voyages
Chapter 6 Homecoming: The Transmission of Holocaust Memory and Jewish-Israeli Identity
Chapter 7 Holocaust Memory, National Identity, and Transformative Ritual
Afterword
Appendix: The Orthodox Delegations to Poland
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity

by

Jackie Feldman

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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First edition published in 2008 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2008 Jackie Feldman All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feldman, Jackie. Above the death pits, beneath the flag : youth voyages to Poland and the performance of Israeli National identity / Jackie Feldman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-362-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Jews--Israel--Identity. 2. Israelis--Travel--Poland. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Influence. 4. Memory--Social aspects. 5. Holocaust memorial tours--Poland. I. Title. DS143.F38 2007 940.53'18--dc22 2006036150 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-362-6 hardback

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Tables

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Acknowledgements

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Preface: Seeking a Personal Past in the Deathscapes of Poland

xiv

Chapter 1

Introduction and Methodology The Shoah, Jewish-Israeli Identity, and the Voyages to Poland

1

Identifying the Voyage as a Rite of Pilgrimage The Voyage as Model and Mirror Commemoration and Collective Memory Jewish Memory Paradigms and Their Zionist Transformations Territorializing Jewish History in Zionist Practice Israeli Social Research on Shoah Memory From Personal Trauma to Social Constructivism Previous Research on the Poland Voyages From Process to Product: The Ethnography of the Voyage Context, Structure, and Performance in the Voyages to Poland Organization of the book Chapter 2

The Historical and Social Context of Israeli Shoah Commemoration The History of Shoah Memory in Israel Early Reactions to the Shoah From the Six Day War to the Yom Kippur War Begin's Rise to Power: The Use and Abuse of Shoah Memory Generational Time, the Search for Roots, and Israeli Ethnicity The Shoah in Israeli Education—School Textbooks and Curricula Spaces and Times of Israeli Shoah Commemoration Yad Vashem: Monument and Memory Holocaust Memorial Day: Calendar and Commemoration

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Chapter 3

The Structure of the Poland Voyages

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Origins, History, and Proclaimed Aims of the Voyage The Title of the Voyage: Seeking My Brothers—The Masa to Poland The Voyage Group as Substitute Family The Poland Voyage as a Masa Administration and Voyage Staff Voyage Staff The Delegation Leader The Guides The Accompanying Teachers The Doctor and Nurse The Polish Guide and Driver The Survivor-Witnesses Security Personnel Logistic Arrangements: Food, Clothing, and Flags The Preparatory Program Selection of Participants The Content of the Preparatory Program The Itinerary and Its Implicit Messages Exterior and Interior Space Classification of Places in “Exterior Space”: Death, Life, and Polish “Ventilation” Sites Allotment of Time at Sites The Rhythms of Time in the Voyage Itinerary Student Expectations, Polish Landscape, and Guiding Narratives Students’ Preconceived Notions The “Look” of the Site Guides' Narrative Techniques From Structure to Performance Chapter 4

Performing the Poland Voyages On the Road: Walking through the Poland Voyage Recruitment and Voyage Preparations at Sulam High School The Threshold of Poland—Day One The Road to Treblinka—Day Two “This is Treblinka Station” Tykocin: Synagogues of the Past and the Survivor as Sheriff “See, There Are No Birds in This Forest” Evening Discussion: When Do We Get to the Shoah? Bus Travel, Ventilation and Prayer—Day Three Kabbalat Shabbat: Orthodox Judaism as Safe Zionist Heritage Shabbat Rest, Shabbat Shopping—Day Four Slouching through Cracow (Non-)encounter with a Polish School Singing for Home After Midnight: The Staff Meeting The Heart of the Shoah: Auschwitz-Birkenau—Day 5 Auschwitz I—Approaching the Contested Site of Memory

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Manifesting Israel at Auschwitz Visiting the Exhibition in Auschwitz I Birkenau: the Heart of the Death Camp "Honoring" the Righteous Gentile and the Witnesses Ventilazia: On The Road Again—Day Six Touching The Icons Of Death: Majdanek—Day Seven The Visit to Majdanek Entering the Site The Gas Chambers Shoes as Relics: Odor and Authenticity. “We’re the Same Children Who Were There at the End” Closing the Circle: The Final Evening Discussion Going Home: From Warsaw to Tel Aviv—Day Eight Confronting the Not-yet-dead Diaspora The Route of Victory Final Ceremony: The Little Guy Sends Us on Our Way! Chapter 5

The Ceremonies of the Poland Voyages

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Introduction: What Makes Ceremonies Different? Contexts of Voyage Ceremonies School Ceremonies in Poland and Israel Sites, Times, and Configurations of Ceremonies Representative Examples of Ceremony Types Delegation-wide Ceremonies Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag of Israel: The Ceremony at Birkenau Warsaw: a Ceremony that Failed Bus-group Ceremonies: “Every Person Has a Name” Individual Ritual Acts “Honoring” Ceremonies for Righteous Gentiles and Witnesses Religious Texts and the Commemorative Ceremonies The Close of the Ceremony: Hatikvah and the Flag Ceremonies as “Triggers”: Group Crying and Consolation The Ceremonies: Conclusions Chapter 6

Homecoming: The Transmission of Holocaust Memory and Jewish-Israeli Identity

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Becoming a Witness: The Aftermath of the Voyage Transmitting the Voyage Experience Talking about the Voyage: Conversations with Classmates, Family, and Survivors Presentations: Albums, videos, ceremonies, and the Future of "Witnessing" Subsequent Effects of the Voyage on Participants Changes in Attitudes towards Jewish Tradition and the Diaspora The Voyage and Polish Others The Voyage and Dedication to the Nation

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Dedication to the Flag and Students’ Political Opinions Survival by Proxy and Service in the Israeli Army The Future of the Israeli Voyages to Poland Chapter 7

Holocaust Memory, National Identity, and Transformative Ritual

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Conclusions: Poland Voyages as National Pilgrimages Cosmopolitan and Nationalist Memories of the Shoah in an Age of Representations The Poland Voyages and Modern State Ritual: An Event that Models Promoted by a Bureaucracy Models and Mirrors, Bodies and Texts The Risks of Transformatory Events in Bureaucracies

Afterword

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Appendix: The Orthodox Delegations to Poland

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Bibliography

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Index

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Illustrations

4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8. 4.9. 4.10. 4.11. 4.12. 4.13. 4.14. 4.15. 4.16. 4.17. 4.18. 4.19.

Postcard of Nomackie synagogue—past and present Polish couple tending their garden in the courtyard of the Warsaw Ghetto apartment building The student’s doodle The path of rounded cobblestones leading into Treblinka A survivor-witness at Treblinka The Sulam student group The four monuments for the Jews of Tykocin A guide checking a bus for bombs and other suspicious objects Auschwitz as an important tourist site Advertisement for daily tours to Auschwitz Photography by the Arbeit Macht Frei gate at Auschwitz The display of the flag at Auschwitz The Jerusalem stone outside the Jewish pavilion at Auschwitz The side altar at Czestochowa A witness-survivor on the steps of a barrack at Auschwitz 1 A broken tombstone wall on the outskirts of Kazimierz Dolny A participant trying on a hat in the market of Kazimierz Dolny Posing for a photo in the Lublin Ghetto Three survivor-witnesses seated at the base of the watchtower at Majdanek

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4.20.

4.21. 4.22. 4.23. 4.24. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. A.1.

Illustrations

Students place flowers and memorial candles on the floor of the gas chamber at Majdanek The gas chamber as a sacred altar Students place memorial candles in the openings of the crematoria ovens at Majdanek Beggars soliciting contributions from students at the Nozhik synagogue in Warsaw A ceremony at the Warsaw Ghetto (Rapaport) Memorial Haim reading out a poem he wrote accusing God of abandoning His people Students protect the flames of their memorial candles from blowing out in the wind A Student holds an Israeli flag aloft during the ceremonies The shlisl yid, holder of the key to the Jewish cemetery of Ungvár, leads the author to the grave of his grandmother

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List of Tables

3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 7.1.

Inside and Outside Spaces Student Associations and Feelings of Poland Itinerary in Poland Rhythms of Time in the Poland Voyage Movement in the Pilgrimage to Poland

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my advisors, Professor Don Handelman and Professor Zwi Werblowski, who guided me through the long process of writing the doctoral thesis upon which this book is based. Special thanks are due to the two additional readers of my thesis, Professor Erik Cohen and Professor Sidra Ezrachi, for their comments and encouragement. Also, to the staff of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University, who provided advice and bibliographical references. To Marion Berghahn and the anonymous reader of Berghahn Books for their suggestions and revisions. to Ruth Iskin and to Keren-Or Schlesinger whose dedicated input improved the final chapters considerably. To the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Shine Foundation, the Cherrick Institute, the Eshkol Foundation, the Institute of Jewish Studies and the Department of Religious Studies at the Hebrew University, and Yad Vashem, who all provided stipends or scholarships that enabled the research to be accomplished. My thanks also to Dr. Ilio Passeto and the Ratisbonne Institute, who offered me a congenial environment in which to write up my thesis. To the staff and students of the sociology and anthropology department at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, whose comments and criticisms on my previous work I have incorporated into this book. To Mr. Walton Franks, Mr. Butje Van Leeuwen, and Jacques and Sylvie Levy, whose generosity helped me through crucial time periods. To Yossi Levi, Motti Malachi, Ehud Pe’er, and the administrators, delegation leaders, and guides of the Poland voyages of the Youth Division of the Department of Education and Culture, who enabled me to accompany and observe the Poland delegations, and who provided me with written information and their time for interviews. I

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hope they will appreciate my efforts, even when they don't agree with my conclusions. To the guide M., and to the teachers and students of Sulam High School, who warmly accepted my presence as an observer on their voyage, and opened their hearts and diaries for my inspection. To my grandparents, Max and Pola Lipschutz, of blessed memory, and to my mother Ruth (may she live and prosper), whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Shoah, and to my father Haim/ Henri, whose memory started me off on my journey. Above all, to my wife Rachel, and my children Elika and Shaya, whose messianic belief was nurtured by the phrase “When I finish the book...”

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Preface: Seeking a Personal Past in the Deathscapes of Poland

The visit at Birkenau draws to a close. The 150 members of the Israeli Ministry of Education youth delegation 75d gather opposite the remains of the gas chambers, clad in blue and white sweatshirts. The students of the N. school form a line atop the ruins of the crematoria, Israeli flags raised aloft. The Israeli survivor-witness climbs up onto the “stage,” takes a flag from one of the students, and plants its staff firmly in the soil and ash. He raises his eyes towards heaven and cries: “How long, will we Jews, your chosen children, be a victim and prey of the gentiles? How long? How long?” He then turns to the students: “You know, you give me the strength to continue… I’m transmitting things that were sealed for fifty years, and I see that you thirst to know. And that’s why we’re here, so that you can be witnesses to what they did to the nation.” He concludes with the words: “You, in this place, know that you are the correct answer to Nazism and anti-Semitism. On one side are the crematoria, in which hundreds of thousands were burned. And now children, girls and lads, bring many sons to the nation, so that we may live forever!” (H., 17 September 1995).

What is described here is a ritual of memory and mourning, testimony and victory. In the place where his loved ones were murdered fifty years previously, the survivor returns to be proclaimed beloved hero of a regiment of Israeli youth, victor over death. The survivor’s words and actions are improvised, spontaneous. Yet the sequence and spirit of that narrative repeats itself in nearly every delegation ceremony at Birkenau. Something about the setting enables the memories buried at the site to rise to the surface to become testimony. These acts of testimony transform the survivors from victims into empowered public witnesses, and the youths into spiritual progeny, “witnesses of the witness.”

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Since their inception in the mid 1980s, Israeli youth voyages to Holocaust Poland have become one of the most intensive and most popular means of transmitting the memory of the Holocaust to future generations. Upon their return, the students are empowered to carry out the mission entrusted them by the survivors by retelling their experience to their classmates, friends and parents. The youths, born two generations after the Holocaust, become carriers of memory.

* * * I came to the Poland trips carrying my own personal baggage. The study of these voyages became part of a process of working through my own memory legacies and ambivalences. My mother was born in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, the daughter of Polish Jewish emigrés. My grandfather was a diamond merchant, first in Amsterdam, and later in Antwerp. When the war broke out, he refused to heed the advice of friends who, invoking Belgium’s neutrality in World War I, encouraged him to stay. In March 1940, he purchased a bus, loaded it with family (including my mother), and traveled through France Libre, Vichy, over the Pyrenees into Spain and Portugal, and then to the United States, keeping half a step ahead of Hitler. My father was born and raised in Ungvár (Uzhhorod), Carpatorus (Carpathian Ruthenia). He jumped off a train transporting him to the death camps. His father was killed in Auschwitz. My parents met at an evening school in New York, and I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Washington Heights, New York City. The Jewish day school I attended was made up almost entirely of children of Eastern European survivors and German Jewish escapees “from Hitler.” Although my father and grandparents sometimes told war stories, I never remember sharing them with friends, and Holocaust Memorial Day was not on our calendar. Looking back, it seems that the Shoah was so much a part of my parents’ lives and those of my friends, yet so little a part of the America that we—and our parents—were eager to belong to, that it was never spoken of in public. Perhaps, as adolescents and young adults, we didn’t need to speak because we knew, subliminally, how we were linked. That past did not need to be evoked because it was always there. As an adolescent, I often found the halakhic restrictions and social borders of Orthodox Judaism stifling, and sought to escape. But although I was alienated by the rigidity of many of the laws, the music and rituals through which they were transmitted continue to maintain a strong claim on me.

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Perhaps to highlight my individual agency as seeker of new horizons, I often chart my life story through significant voyages—the first, to Israel, as a sixteen year old. There, I discovered that the book learning of my childhood had referents on the ground, in archaeological ruins and terraced hills, and that the realia of rocks, streams, and mountains were intimately linked with the Bible verses I had memorized in school. The Israel I encountered as an adolescent also offered me a vision of a big home where the majority was Jewish and where identity boundaries and living space were not marked by the “safe side” of Broadway. Later, after college, I traveled to Holland, and in the course of a year spent serving the small Jewish student community, I spoke the Dutch taught me by my grandfather and sang several of his niggunim in the synagogue built by his father, my great-grandfather, Bompapa Chaim, in Scheveningen. Subsequently, I moved to Israel. There, I participated in numerous hikes in the government tour guide course “conquering the land with one’s feet.” The physical landscape provided places to hang memories on and anchor my attachment to the new-old place I sought to reclaim for myself. Upon completing the course, I began working as a tour guide for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Through presenting the landscape to others, I became aware of the role of imagination in molding perceptions of the Holy Land, and how the practice of travel can create emotional and spiritual bonds among people of different faith communities. I also came to realize that through vicariously participating in the devotions of Christian pilgrims, narrating the land, and presenting Judaism and Israel in language comprehensible to Christians, I was defining myself to myself—working through my identities as American emigrant, nolonger Orthodox Jew, and new Israeli. At the same time, my experience and empathy with the quest of Christian pilgrims led me to pose new and un-Orthodox questions to the texts on the Second Temple I had studied earlier in yeshiva day school (cf. Feldman 2006). In 1991, after my father passed away, I took a train across Europe to his birthplace, Ungvár. Guided with a map drawn up after a long talk with my father’s last surviving sister, I followed Moskowicz, the shlisel yid, one of the last surviving members of the pre-War community, as he waved his cane in the windswept Soviet streets, hailing a passing car to drive us to the cemetery. After checking the battered community register in his pocket, he navigated me through drifting heaps of fallen leaves to the tombstone of my grandmother. My name was there. The next day, I visited my father’s childhood home, now subdivided and let out to half a dozen Gypsy families. I

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tried in vain to make the map I drew of Reb Yankev Leizer Feldman’s ancestral home match the decaying present building. I then searched the streets of the old quarter for Jewish stigmata—scars of mezuzah nails. The voyage was an extremely moving encounter with a personal past, in a place I’d never seen before. My voyage to Ungvár, like the other voyages I mark to chart my biography, reminds me of what Nadia Seremetakis characterizes as the Greek sense of nostalghía—“Nostó,” she writes, “means return, I travel back to the homeland … nostalghía is the desire of longing with burning pain to journey (there)” (Seremetakis 1994: 4). Unlike the cases cited by Seremetakis, however, the Holland, Carpatorus, or Israel I sought was not charged with childhood sensory experiences, but with words and silences, often with a sense of irretrievable loss. The family and community that had animated those places and made them familiar, at least in the cases of Holland and Carpatorus, were exterminated or displaced. The sensory experiences that imprinted these places on my memory when I first encountered them were mediated by texts and stories and built on imagination rather than prior sensory perception. When I left Ungvár, on the train west through Hungary, knots of elderly Jewish parents and their children boarded the train at off the beaten track country stations. When, after returning to Israel, I encountered the large numbers of Israeli youngsters traveling to Poland, I surmised that they were all traveling, en masse, on pilgrimages of nostalghía, filling obscure voids left by half-articulated stories of charred pits. Drawing on my fascination with the Second Temple, I wondered if the voyages might not be an incipient canonical form of mourning for the third hurban—that of European Jewry. Perhaps, just as after the destruction of the Temple, several generations were needed before the loss of the center could be articulated and expressed in ritual forms—so too, I thought, that we might be witnessing the birth of a deeply religious, though nontraditional, mourning ritual for the destruction of European Jewry.

* * * The voyage is an attempt to explore the meanings of the Holocaust in the present through a multisensory pilgrimage to the ruins of the past. Certainly this was so for the elderly survivors, enduring long hours, bumpy rides, and cold in Poland in order to testify on behalf of their loved ones. The comments of the teacher-guides in darkened coffee houses in Cracow and in drafty hallways in Petach Tikva confirmed that for them too, the voyage was about discovering,

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expressing, and transforming personal identity—theirs and their students’. And many students brought with them, not only their cameras and their spending money for the duty-free shops, but their grandparents’ stories and their parents’ silences. My empathy for the personal search for roots and identity led me, throughout my research, to try to listen carefully to the young participants and the elderly survivors, so that their voices and their needs would not be drowned out by the steam engine of the State apparatus. My choice of research foci, no less than my choice of topic, reflects my fascination with the thought of Victor Turner, who so often expressed what I felt but could barely formulate, throughout my own voyages. One of Turner’s fundamental insights is that social structure alone cannot account for human creativity, “the spirit that bloweth where it listeth.” By leaving one’s home on pilgrimage, Turner writes, one encounters others in frameworks less mediated by social statuses and restrictions. Pilgrim sites, for Turner, are “centers out there,” places geographically distant from home, yet pregnant with meaning and potential for personal and social revitalization. There, one can rediscover the common humanity necessary for any society to function without crushing the individual. My attachment, though not uncritical, to Turner’s perspective leads me to eschew theories that would limit human freedom to isolated points of resistance between massive forces of hegemony. To suspect theories that would explain deeply felt experience solely in terms of relations of knowledge and power. Such explanations, regardless of their elegance, block the possibility of transcendent, unpredictable meanings and minimize the creative, transformative potential of ritual. My own experience of pilgrimage and those of the many other pilgrims I have come to know leads me to take pilgrims’ quest for roots, meaning, and transcendence seriously— whether in the Holy Land or in Poland. Although the stage of Holocaust Poland serves the State in presenting a performance that affirms a mythical past and a no-lessmythical national future (cf. Kugelmass 1993: 419–421), this stage can nonetheless become the scene of a sincere, deep, and creative search for personal identity. For many participants, the murmur of collective memory becomes audible only at a distance from the dense traffic of their life world, in Poland. And once audible and public, that memory and its representations may become open to evaluation and change. Certainly, that has been true in my case. The research in Poland, its presentation to various publics in Israel and elsewhere, and finally, the writing of this book, is a working through

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of the voices of my own life story that I have attempted to listen to, including those of the Holocaust dead. I hope it succeeds in serving as both critique and tribute.

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CHAPTER

Introduction and Methodology The Shoah, Jewish-Israeli Identity,* and the Voyages to Poland

The Shoah, the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their helpers, is an event of tremendous import for Western civilization and for Jewish history. Some Western thinkers have designated Auschwitz as a Zivilizationsbruch (a breach of civilization), “a monstrous, disastrous and terrible degeneration of human character” (Isaac Deutscher in Kraushaar 1997: 64). For Jews, however, the Holocaust has been designated as the hurban, a momentous event comparable to the destruction of the First and Second Temples (cf. Fackenheim 1972; Roskies 1984: 14–41; Shaked 1996: 560), or as the Shoah, a Hebrew biblical term referring to utter catastrophe.1 The insistence on a Hebrew name for the event points to a profound difference in understanding. In the words of the chief archivist of Yad Vashem, “For Germans … the overarching question … is, ‘How could these things have happened?’ For Jews … the question is rather, ‘How could these things have happened to us?’” (Lozowick 1997: 115). In Israel, the Shoah has left an indelible mark on the national psyche. (Witztum and Malkinson 1993: 236). Over the past two decades, the Shoah has come to play an increasingly significant role in Israeli collective memory and civil religion. It has become part of the master commemorative narrative that shapes the way Israelis * Throughout the book, I will speak of “Israeli identity” to refer to JewishIsraeli identity. The relation of Israel’s Arab citizens to the Shoah is a subject worthy of extensive research. See, in the meantime, Shoham, Shiloah, and Kalismann 2003. Notes for this section begin on page 27.

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think and act in contemporary situations. The Shoah has been remembered through forms that reflect the changing needs and interests of the Israeli collective that commemorates and transmits that memory. In particular, the traumatic aspects of the Shoah have influenced Israeli behavior in the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict, while the memory of the Shoah has been, in turn, continually reshaped by the conflict (Zertal 1998; Gur-Zeev 2000; 2001; Shapira 1996–97). Studies show that in recent years, the identification with the Shoah has become the strongest force uniting Israeli youths around the experience of common destiny (Keren 1986; Firer 1989). This holds true even for descendants of mizrahim, whose communities were relatively untouched by the Shoah event (Auron 1993: 112–113). School education is one of the primary means the State employs to reproduce the social order through shaping the habitus (Bourdieu 1997: 72), the taken-for-granted, of students’ life worlds. The Israeli Ministry of Education has transmitted its understandings of the Holocaust through textbooks and other materials (cf. Firer 1989; Resnik 2003). But one of the main avenues of communication of official perspectives on the Holocaust has been through school ceremonies (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1990; 1997; BenAmos and Bat-El 1994; 1999; 2003; Lomsky-Feder 2003). Compared with the countries of Western Europe, Israelis spend more school time performing ceremonies than any other country (BenAmos and Bat-El 1999: footnote 3). Over the past ten years, both curricula and ceremonies have increasingly been focused around the youth voyages to Poland, which have become the most intensive encounter of Israeli youth with the Shoah. In the 2005 academic year, twenty-eight thousand Israeli teenagers took part—approximately twenty percent of all eleventh graders (Auron 2005: 68). Upon their return, the voyage “veterans” become propagators of Shoah memory. The story of their voyage experiences, and the photographs they show, emotionally impact their schoolmates, siblings, and friends. Television broadcasts bring the images of the youth groups at Auschwitz into every living room on Holocaust Memorial Day. Alongside the original film footage of the camps, these home videos of the trips generate new images that will shape the way the Shoah is remembered by younger Israelis (cf. Fridman 1997). One scholar of education suggests that “the trip to Poland may become ... the most important educational factor, the most meaningful formative force in the life of the Israeli youth” (Auron 1993: 14). Because Israeli students’ understandings of the Shoah are strongly intertwined with their conception of the land, the nation,

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the Diaspora, and their perceptions of anti-Semitism and the Arab “other” (Auron 1993; Gur-Zeev 1999; Golani 2002), the voyages also express attitudes towards the Jewish people, the State of Israel, the past, and the world. The performance of the voyage creates and reinforces forms of social solidarity, defines the borders of the national collective vis-à-vis the non-Jewish/Diaspora other, and imbues national symbols and institutions with value and emotion. This study seeks to explore how these voyages are structured by the Ministry of Education; how they function in practice; which understandings of the past, Israel, and the world are transmitted by these voyages; and how such understandings are received, appropriated, and, on occasion, resisted by Israeli youths of a wide variety of family and ethnic backgrounds as they travel through Poland. I will demonstrate that the youth trips to Poland can best be understood as a ritual reenactment of survival. Through its restrictive security arrangements, its totalistic construction of space and time, its framing of the role of the accompanying survivors, and the ceremonies performed at the death sites, the voyage shapes Israeli memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past; the world outside Israel and the student’s perceptions of the State; and the young student’s awareness of society’s expectations of him or her. Its ultimate purpose is to root the sanctity of the State in the experience of the Shoah. The voyage is a civil religious pilgrimage, which transforms students into victims, victorious survivors, and, finally, olim (immigrants; àscender´s) to the Land of Israel and witnesses of the witnesses.

Identifying the Voyage as a Rite of Pilgrimage When I began to inquire about the voyages, teachers, guides, students, and newspaper reports described the voyage to Poland in emotional or sensory, rather than cognitive, terms, and spoke of the “changes” that resulted from it. The Ministry of Education writings and spokesmen, on the other hand, referred to the voyage as a siyyur limudi (a study trip), emphasizing acquisition of knowledge, preparation programs, or the transmission of educational values. Critical analysts saw the trip as merely another form of governmental manipulation and hegemonic indoctrination. My own intuitions, following a pilgrimage to my grandmother’s tomb in Carpatorus, and confirmed by my initial informants, convinced me that the voyage must be seen primarily as an “experience,” in which knowledge is absorbed through the senses, the body, and the emotions. In order to get at

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these emotions and sensations, I focused on symbolic and ritual, rather than the informational, content of the preparation program or guide materials. As Victor Turner emphasized, “The action situation of ritual, with its social excitement and direct physiological stimuli ... effects an interchange of qualities between its poles of meaning. Norms and values on the one hand, become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values” (Turner 1969: 30). The conceptual framing of the voyage as ritual shines a spotlight on the structuring tools often overlooked or marginalized by some participants and many organizers, as well as by many academics, who often focus on written texts and the cognitive content of spoken narratives. Once I decided that the voyage could best be examined as a ritual, the question was—what kind of ritual is it? The framework of the group voyage, the quasi religious language often used to describe the experience, and the prominence of symbolic displays and ceremonies all suggested that pilgrimage provided the closest analogue. The fact that few educators are comfortable with the characterization of the voyages as pilgrimage says much about their own position with respect to ritual. The Hebrew word for pilgrimage, aliya laregel, was restricted to the thrice-yearly Biblical ascent to the Temple in Jerusalem, and extended by the non-Orthodox Israeli public to refer to the (mostly North African) practice of visiting tombs of zaddikim (holy men). Thus, the avoidance of the term “pilgrimage” is largely a function of the educational establishment’s desire to constitute itself as progressive, rational, goal-oriented, and Western (as opposed to a “primitive,” religious, Orthodox Jewish Orient). In other words, it’s easier for many educators to accept pilgrimage practices as part of the programs they promote than to recognize those ritual practices for what they are.2 According to Victor Turner, the pilgrim is someone who leaves his home to journey (often facing hardships and dangers) to a sacred periphery, which transiently becomes the center for the individual. The sacred center attracts the pilgrim either as the source of religious merit, divine blessings, and “the inward transformation of spirit and personality” (Turner 1973: 214) or as the source of miraculous healing and rejuvenation. At that center, the pilgrim experiences communitas, “the being no longer side by side, but with one another of a multitude of persons,” “a moment in and out of time ... which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond”. The pilgrim returns home changed, with a new status (Turner and Turner 1978:

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34–35; Turner 1969: 96; 1973). The desire to undergo intense, often transformatory experiences is prominent among the motivations of the faithful and may be experienced even by those who choose to go for other reasons. Turner recognized that not all pilgrim behavior conforms to the mold he described. He wrote: “The pilgrim in an ‘existential’ quest of the Center ... is merely an idealized type, approximated only by a minority of deeply committed individuals. Still, the exuberance and exaltation manifested by ordinary pilgrims at important pilgrimage centers witness that their experience frequently possesses an existential quality, even if this may become diluted by routinization and by recreational or other accompanying activities” (Turner and Turner 1978: 36–37). Furthermore, as Erik Cohen demonstrated, in certain kinds of travel, particularly what Cohen terms “existential” tourism, the traveler undergoes a transformative experience that may make the destination a new elective center for his life (Cohen 1992; Kelner 2002; cf. Graburn 1989). Thus, the pilgrimage models described by Turner may be applicable to activities defined by both organizers and participants as tourism. The discourse of the participants, as well as the structure and performance of the practices of the voyage, lead me to conceptualize it as pilgrimage. Although there is no unifying divinely oriented worldview or set of common beliefs on salvation or the afterworld among the participants of the Poland voyages, this in no way detracts from the seriousness or depth of the Poland voyages (con. Kugelmass 1993: 419–421; Kugelmass 1994). First of all, the students do share many elements of a common cosmology, in the sense of a cosmologic, an understanding of how the world around them is ordered. These elements are not made explicit as a series of dogmatic principles, but are lived implicitly through schooling, the rhythm of the Israeli holiday cycle, and other elements of the Jewish Israeli world. These elements are a function of: (a) living in Israel, (b) understanding Israel as center, (c) intending to do army service, (d) speaking Hebrew as native tongue, and (e) the self-selection of students who decide to participate in the Poland voyages. The Poland voyages make these implicit understandings explicit and give them added depth. In reference to Christian pilgrimage, Maurice Halbwachs wrote that “if a truth is to be settled in the memory of a group, it needs to be presented in the concrete form of an event, or a personality, or of a locality” (Halbwachs 1992 [1941]: 200). On the voyage, the understandings of the students’ life world are linked to specific locations, persons, sensory experiences, and

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rituals, which, in turn, become indisputable truths, points of origin for the Israeli life world arising from them, which can be recalled later in that life world. As one of the trip initiators phrased it, “every paragraph and corner of our lives here and now is influenced by what was created there then” (Oded Cohen, in Ministry of Education 1991). In other words, the voyage is intended to imbue these students with an ontology for their cosmo-logic. Furthermore, as Roy Rapaport argued, what matters in ritual is not so much a commonly held body of beliefs, as common acceptance of canonical gestures, and acceptance of authority through bodily display or repetition of sacred texts (Rapaport 1979). As Eade and Sallnow have demonstrated (2000 [1991]), many traditional religious pilgrimages are characterized by a wide variety of beliefs and motivations among different pilgrims to a common site. The voyage to Poland is about the praxis of cultural ideals. The students discover the allure and the dangers of the death world (Wyschogrod 1985) through their bodily passage through that constructed and constricted world. Through their performance as part of an Israeli group on Polish soil, they comes to identify with larger historical collectivities. Furthermore, the ritual structure of most of the voyage frameworks closely resembles that of religious pilgrimage, even if the socalled sacred center is the locus of absolute evil, rather than exalted values (Cohen 1992: 50–51). The students leave their homes in order to face emotional and physical hardships and journey to a “center out there,” that is, nevertheless, pregnant with meaning for the society as the “founding place” of Israel. There are well-defined sacred places and a tightly constructed ritualized order of time, space, and ceremony, assigned mediators of the sacred times and places, and a rhetoric of sanctification of place. Fairly standardized liturgical texts and ritual activities are performed at particular sites, often in a fixed order. As in other pilgrimages, the significant markers in the landscape are narrated through sacred texts, while many other features are read out as irrelevant. Returning students often speak of the Poland experience in transformative terms. This pilgrimage also has definite political implications. Through its ritualized structure and performance, it paints a certain picture of the world, a cosmo-logic, with impermeable boundaries between Israel and Exile, power and helplessness, life and death, “us” and “them.” I will examine these features in light of what Bruce Kapferer termed the “religion of nationalism,” in which “the nation is created as an object of devotion and … the political is shrouded in the

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symbolism of a ‘higher’ purpose” (Kapferer 1988: 1). To this end, I will investigate how the voyage employs and transforms traditional Jewish religious symbols and texts, applying anthropological analyses of national commemorations, especially those of Handelman (1990; 1994; 2004a: 93–142), Connerton (1989), Hobsbawm (1984), Kertzer (1988), and Kapferer (1988). Furthermore, as in pilgrimage, the voyage may also serve individual needs not expressly formulated by the group (cf. Morinis 1992). For many, the voyage is an occasion to mourn family dead, search for roots, experience strong feelings, become more “adult” and responsible, and much more. These personal motives may modify or even conflict with the State’s structuring of the voyage. The voyage may also preserve or even intensify intragroup tensions or subvert social hierarchies (Eade and Sallnow 2000 [1991]: 1–29). Through close observation of the performance of students, guides, and witnesses, I will demonstrate how State and individual practices, hegemonic ideologies and individual explorations, interact to shape the texture of the voyage.

The Voyage as Model and Mirror Clifford Geertz wrote, “Sacred symbols, dramatized in rituals, have a peculiar power that comes from their presumed ability to identify fact with value and give normative import to what is otherwise merely actual” (Geertz 1993: 279). Geertz spoke of religious ceremonies as providing models of and for social understandings. Don Handelman applies some of Geertz’s insights to modern civil ceremonies. Thus, he writes that “it is in various public occasions that cultural codes—usually diffused, attenuated and submerged in the mundane order of things—lie closest to the behavioral surface” (1990: 9). Handelman also takes issue with aspects of Geertz’s approach. For Geertz, Handelman writes (2004b: 2), ritual is always “presumed immediately to be constituted through the representations of the sociocultural surround that give it life.” The focus on the interface and continuities between ritual and daily life, writes Handelman, “makes all ritual (so it seems) comprehensible in terms of social and cultural order” (1998: xv). Ritual thus becomes understood “primarily as a didactic mold especially good for agents of socialization and indoctrination” (ibid.). Handelman privileges analysis of particular ritual forms over a priori theorizing about a broad general category called “ritual.” He writes, “What particular rituals are about, what they are organized to do, how they accomplish what they do, are all empirical questions whose prime locus of

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inquiry is initially within the rituals themselves” (2004b: 3). Thus, he suggests that we study the ways a particular ritual is put together and performed, before reinserting that ritual within its sociocultural context. Rituals may indeed represent the social order, but they also may exhibit autonomy from the social order and the intentions of their creators. Public events (the term preferred by Handelman over the too-broad term “ritual”) “may (not only) affect social order, they may also effect it” (1990: 15). Building on Victor Turner’s work, Handelman argues against the tendency of many analysts, to see all ritual performances as narratives that reflect understandings and social relations within the surrounding society. He distinguishes between different types of public events: events that mirror and events that model.3 Events that mirror (or events of presentation) present the livedin world through statements, mirror images, and reflections. “These occasions,” writes Handelman, are “vivid and vibrant expositions, in which what was done was seen fully to happen. They undoubtedly were designed to arouse emotion and to evoke sentiment ... but they do not change the lived-in world of their participants” (ibid.: 42). Such events contain “no contradictory or discordant notes, no puzzles or paradoxes, no challenges.... Public events like this say, ‘Look, this is how things should be, this is the proper, ideal pattern of social life’” (Skorupski 1976: 164 in Handelman 1990: 44). Such events of presentation, as in Geertz’s famous account of the Balinese cockfight (Geertz 1973: 412–453), “hold up a mirror to social order, selectively reflecting versions of the latter that largely are known, if in more dispersed and fragmented fashion” (Handelman 1990: 48). An event that models, on the other hand, is purposive: “It indexes or pre-views a hypothetical future condition that will be brought into being, and it provides procedures that will actualize this act of imagination. ‘This happened so that that should occur’” (ibid.: 28). Events that model have built-in incompatible, contradictory, or conflicting states of existence. Such events embody “a logic of transformation and a kind of organization (one that I am calling transformative) that enables such operations to be done in controlled, predictive ways” (ibid.: 31). Such events “make transformations happen that directly affect wider social orders” (ibid.: 48). Handelman applies his conceptual framework to Israeli contexts, analyzing ritual actions in school celebrations (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1990) and ceremonial space in public commemorations (Handelman and Katz 1990; Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1997; Handelman 2004a: 146–170) to show how

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these rites act as mirrors of the social order, subordinating the individual to the nation-state. Using this theoretical framework, along with the analyses of David Kertzer (1988) and Bruce Kapferer (1988), I will argue that the Poland voyages demonstrate how stateinitiated ritual may not only perpetuate existing power relations, groups, and ideological positions, but constitute power and create community and a shared cosmology. I will argue that, unlike most of the other state-sponsored rites discussed by Handelman, the Poland voyages are primarily models, not mirrors. Their primary dynamic is transformative—changing the status of both students and survivors. A major portion of this book will describe just how such transformations are effected.

Commemoration and Collective Memory The stated purpose of the Ministry of Education’s voyages to Poland is to foster particular forms of collective memory by transmitting a set of understandings or lessons of the past they see as relevant to students’ present Jewish and Israeli identity. This is accomplished through a series of figurative and narrative representations of the past as well as through ritual enactments of selected parts of that past which serve to legitimize the nation in the present. The term “collective memory” was introduced into sociological literature by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1940s and popularized by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists over the past twenty-five years. Developing the basic insights of Durkheim’s work on representations collectives, it emphasizes the role of the group and the experiences of the present in creating and preserving social memories. As Barry Schwartz put it, for [Halbwachs], “To remember is to place a part of the past in the service and conception and needs of the present” (Schwartz 1982: 374). Later scholars have examined both the discursive practices and hegemonic forces shaping collective memory, as well as the limitations on society’s ability to construct collective memory to fit its present needs and understandings (Schudson 1989; Olick and Robbins 1998). As Coser put it, “collective memory has both cumulative and presentist aspects. It shows at least partial continuity as well as new readings of the past in terms of the present. A society’s current perceived needs may impel it to refashion the past, but successive epochs are being kept alive through a common code and a common symbolic canon even amidst contemporary revisions” (Halbwachs 1992: 26–27).

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Collective memory not only consolidates the members of a group and legitimates its institutions, it also fixes the boundaries of the group. Each group develops a memory of its own past that individuates itself from other groups. This allows the group to account for its own origins and recognize itself through time. It is this memory that ensures the continuity of a group and is transmitted from one generation to another through a wide variety of symbols, rituals, and social institutions. In part, the continuity of a group’s memory is based on deep-rooted metaphors or paradigms, which determine the absorption of historical events. That is, historical events take on meaning to the extent that they can be made comprehensible in the schema outlined by these root metaphors. On the other hand, a group’s self-understanding may be profoundly influenced by contemporary historical occurrences. As Yael Zerubavel phrases it (1994: 5), “Collective memory continuously negotiates between available historical records and current social and political agendas. And in the process of referring back to these records, it shifts its interpretation, selectively emphasizing, suppressing, and elaborating different aspects of that record.” While unquestionably, the organizers of voyages to Poland promote a particular collective memory in the service of certain current values and perceptions, critics of the voyage (Ofir 1995; Zuckermann 1996; Segev 1991) often exaggerate the power of mechanisms of hegemonic control and indoctrination. Thus, they adopt a purely presentist view of collective memory, which fails to account for many of the long-term effects of prominent historical events. In particular, it ignores the power that the Holocaust possesses, as a singular and traumatic event, to resist certain forms of representation (cf. Schudson 1989; Vromen 1996), as well as dynamics that may make ritual representations less vulnerable to cultural change than, say, journalistic texts and political speeches. While Halbwachs already identified the topocentric nature of collective memory—its dependence on geographical places and group gatherings for its survival, Paul Connerton emphasizes (1989: 70–71) the importance of commemorative ritual in maintaining the identity of a society through time. He writes: “A community is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative.... Its master narrative is more than just a story told and reflected on; it is a cult enacted [through] … ritual performances ... [and] through bodily practices.” By performing the same words, singing the same anthem, the nation defines the boundaries of the group as coeval with those who perform the same rite together. The

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national and local ceremonies trigger public expression of emotion and convince people that the nation, and the link between the individual and the nation, are organic, part of the natural order of things (cf. Kertzer 1988: 4). Through detailed ethnography, I plan to show how the nation and the status of ‘witness’ is made natural for students in Poland.

Jewish Memory Paradigms and their Zionist Transformations Drawing on Halbwachs’s insights, Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi, in his book Zakhor, evoked the centrality of common historical memory for Jewish identity. The memory of common origins, a common destiny, the sharing of common eschatological hopes, and the practice of common commemorative rituals embedded in the life cycle and year cycle, he writes, enabled the Jewish people to retain a sense of common identity in the absence of a territorial base or common spoken language. In Jewish experience, shared destiny is a prerequisite for shared practice, and precedes the profession of common tenets of faith.4 Memory, zekher, is not so much the content of intellectualized, individual reflection as “a matter of ... evocation and identification ... a series of situations into which we can somehow be existentially drawn” (1982: 44). This memory has traditionally been transmitted from generation to generation through common rituals, liturgies, oral traditions, and sacred texts (ibid.: 14, 40ff.). Traditionally, “Only that which was transfigured ritually and liturgically was endowed with a real chance for survival and permanence” (ibid.: 40). In any group’s collective memory, beginnings play a significant role (Y. Zerubavel 1994a: 7; cf. Schwartz 1982; E. Zerubavel 1993: 458). Within the long Jewish memory, the “root metaphor” shaping memory paradigms, often marked as the significant point of origin for the nation, has been the Exodus. Later historical events have often entered collective memory through the paradigm of “from slavery to freedom.” A second root metaphor, based on the first, was hurban lige’ulah, the destruction of the Temple (hurban) leading to exile, an exile which would terminate only with the coming of the Messiah and the final redemption (geulah). In order to understand how these Jewish root paradigms function in contemporary Jewish-Israeli culture, we will need to examine the construction of historical time in Zionist collective memory5—in particular, Zionism’s account of its own beginnings as well as its complex relation to Jewish religious symbols. As Yael Zerubavel (1995) described, Zionism initially divided time into three major

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epochs: Antiquity (Israelite kingdom), Exile, and Zionist settlement of the Land of Israel. Each period was separated from the others by a cataclysmic event. Antiquity was seen as the period of Israel’s roots as a sovereign people in their land. Exile was constructed by Zionist collective memory “as a long, dark period of suffering and persecution.... A recurrent history of oppression, punctuated by periodic pogroms and expulsions, of fragile existence imbued with fear and humiliation” (ibid.: 18). This period ended with “the society of Zionist settlers who immigrated to Palestine, inspired by nationalist ideology that called for a revival of Jewish national life and culture in the ancient Jewish homeland” (ibid.: 12). This periodization of history enabled the Zionist leadership to formulate their movement as a “return to history” (Raz-Krakotzkin 1998), claiming connection with the ancient past, while establishing distance from the immediate past, the Diasporic Jewish existence. In this schema of Zionist periodization (Diner 1995; Kimmerling 1995), there was considerable overlap between the end of the Exilic period and the beginning of Zionist settlement. The break between the two periods was later assigned to the Shoah, which then served as the boundary between the ending of exile and national revival. The Shoah closes the period begun by the previous hurban (the destruction of the Temple). The founding of the state “provides a symbolic compensation for the trauma of the Holocaust” (Y. Zerubavel 1995: 34), marks redemption from the humiliation of Exile, and returns the people of Israel to the glory of Antiquity. Increasingly, especially following the 1967 Six Day War (see below, chapter 2), the State of Israel has come to present itself as “rising from the ashes of the Shoah” (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983; Segev 1991; Don-Yehiya 1993; Zuckermann 1993). While the paradigm of hurban lige’ulah is in keeping with Jewish tradition, its application to the nation-state accords with founding events in many modern nations, where founding myths which ground national identity in death and destruction are often promoted by leaders and elites, in order to suffuse national loyalties with religious passion (Kertzer 1988; Kapferer 1988; Mosse 1990). Zionism, especially political Zionism of the variety espoused by Ben Gurion, saw itself as a secular salvation, designed to solve problems of existence in the modern world, forsaking expectation for divine liberation (Cohen 1995: 203). The founders of the state promoted a so-called civil religion, that is, “a symbol system that provides sacred legitimation of the social order” (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983: 5), in which the corporate entity—the state, rather than God—

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was at the center. The objective of this civil religion is the sanctification of the society in which it functions; it can only be successful insofar as the individual fuses his identity with that of the collective. Its three main expressions are integration (uniting the society through common ceremonies and myths), legitimation (making the social order and its goals seem natural) and mobilization (arousing the energies of the society in pursuit of the approved goals and tasks) (ibid.: 5–7; cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 1–14).6 The Zionist transformation of Jewish memory paradigms is part of its larger agenda of negating the exile while claiming to be the heir to all its positive content. But when secular Zionism chose religious affiliation as the major criteria for entry into the collective (as expressed in the Law of Return), and took up traditional symbols as a means of expression and legitimation, especially after 1967 (cf. Liebman and Don Yehiya 1983; Kimmerling 1985), it exposed itself (consciously or unconsciously) to the latent content of those symbols. Thus, secular Zionism’s ambivalent relation to past Jewish symbols became even more troublesome with the demise of the secular pioneering ethos and the reaffirmation of ties to tradition on the part of many groups within Israeli society. In the context of the voyages, these problematics will be examined through the narratives and performances of guides, teachers, and witnesses, and in the voyages’ selective incorporation of religious sites and traditional religious symbols, rites, and prayers. Further light will be shed on these issues through brief examination of the variant voyages of Orthodox Jewish groups (see appendix).

Territorializing Jewish History in Zionist Practice A major issue in understanding how Jewish memory paradigms shape the voyage or are expressed through it is the Zionist territorialization of Jewish history. Although the “cosmicization” and mapping of space of the homeland has played an important role in the history of many nationalisms (Anderson 1991 [1981]: 163-87), in Zionism (Benvenisti 1991; Gurevitch 1997), the migration to the ancestral homeland was linked with a return to history (Kimmerling 1995; Raz-Krakotzkin 1998). Jewish redemption was seen as manifested through life in the homeland and rejection of the “deracinated diaspora Jew.” This transformation was accompanied by a redefinition of classical Jewish terms. As Liebman and Cohen write (1990: 91), in this schema, “Galut (exile) is no longer a metaphysical or spiritual status shared by all Jews; it is rather a physical status referring to Jews who do not live in a particular place—the land of

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Israel.… The attributes of statehood—power and pride in one’s Jewishness in particular—characterize Jews who live in modern Israel rather than in galut.” Thus, exile shifted from an existential condition to a material one, and from a more temporal concept—life in preMessianic times—into a more territorial one.7 Consequently, while the reading of distance in space as distance in time (often from a purer mythicized past) is typical of cultural tourism as a whole, the understandings of exile and homeland in Zionist thought will facilitate the reading of the Polish landscape as a past surpassed by Israel. As in other modern nation-states, national understandings of history are reflected and propagated through cultural practices. Prominent Israeli practices include archaeology—the discovery and display of certain physical remnants of significant past epochs, now claimed by the nation-state, (Elon 1997; Abu el-Haj 1998; 2001; cf. Gathercole et al. 1990; Kohl 1998), as well as hikes as a means of claiming territory (Ben-Yehuda 1995; Katriel 1995).8 Additional spatializing practices of Zionism are the erection of monuments at battlefields and military cemeteries and settlement museums, which glorify pioneer-settlers as the telos of Jewish history and the harbingers of modernity. These sites of memory, as well as the inscription of history in liturgical time, through the national commemorative and school calendars, undoubtedly influence the way students organize and perceive the Jewish past in Poland. They will be surveyed in chapter 2. Given Zionism’s project of territorializing Jewish history, why, then, does the State Ministry of Education promote a voyage outside the territory of the homeland? Does this reflect a change in the Zionist conception of the Jewish past, a diasporization of Israel (Cohen 1995)? How do the Poland voyages relate to processes of global youth culture, increased ethnic awareness, and the post-Zionist erosion of Israeli myths and devalorization of mythicized pioneering, military, and frontier landscapes? These questions will be explored in the course of the book.

Israeli Social Research on Shoah Memory As late as ten years ago, there were practically no anthropological or sociological studies of Holocaust memory, in spite of its centrality for Israeli (and American Jewish) civil religion and its great visibility in Israeli public life.9 This may be due to the initial “traumatization of the theoreticians amongst the Jewish scholars, who were able to save

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themselves by emigrating and from whom the main plea for research into the Holocaust originated” (Kraushaar 1995: 65).10 Furthermore, in Israel and elsewhere, the larger society was often eager to put the experience of the Shoah (sometimes accompanied by guilt over their own lack of response) behind them, and launch into the work of reconstruction or nation building, or just get on with life. In the Israeli case, when Israeli academics did turn to the Shoah, their primary concern was with establishing the facts. The authoritative voice became that of the historian, who often inserted the Holocaust within a Zionist narrative that negated the exile (Ram 1995a). The sanctity with which the Shoah was regarded (cf. Blauweiss 1998: 30) preserved the redemptive Zionist narrative of the Shoah from the onslaught of post-Zionist “myth busters” until the late 1980s (Bilu and Ben-Ari 1997: 233).11 In the 1990s, the growing critical orientation of Israeli scholars and the opening of previously sealed archives engendered new critiques of the roles of Ben-Gurion and the yishuv during the Shoah (Zertal 1996; Gorodzhinsky 1998; Zertal 1998; 2002), the reception of survivors by Israeli society (Segev 1991; Yablonka 1999; Vardi 1990), or the masculine silencing of gendered memory of the Shoah (Lentin 2000).12 When, however, post-Zionist historians and political scientists turned to Israeli narratives of the Holocaust (cf. Michman 1997b), they focused on the political aspect of historical consciousness (cf. Ruesen 1996: 62–63)—how such narratives are consciously composed and transmitted by the state or by hegemonic elites in order to increase their legitimacy or political power (cf. Ram 1995b; Ofir 1986, 1995; Zuckermann 1993, 2001; Zimmermann 1994). Their ultimate aim was frequently the critique of current Israeli policy. Their focus on texts and manipulation considers rituals as merely expressions of political beliefs or “ideological codes”— “knowledge packaging of the public relations of the cultural industry that determines the reception of knowledge in the public sphere” (Zuckermann 1996: 57–58). According to this approach, Shoah memory is often an arena for presenting broader hegemonic views of society, politics, or history, and rituals are merely “a didactic mold, especially good for agents of socialization and indoctrination” (Handelman 1998: xv). The lived experience of rememberers, including their search for meaning in the past, and a sense of belonging to a historical and national community, are considered to be naively misguided, perhaps a form of “false consciousness.” I argue that the focus on social discourses as instrument of power relations, and the neglect of how discursive practices function within

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social interaction reflect the view of ritual as reflective of something else—most commonly social structure (Handelman 2004b: 1–32). This approach not only neutralizes ritual’s transformative potential; it also gives place of pride to texts, while marginalizing the role of the body in the social order. This accords with Marvin and Ingle’s insight that “the more textually organized a society, the greater its failure to recognize its own ritual capacity, the more secular its selfperception” (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 4). Thus, many (mainly secular) scholars (as well as educators) are reluctant to acknowledge the primacy of the bodily practices in the voyages, and emphasize the cognitive, more text-linked aspects. In addition, the analysis also reflects many secular Israeli scholars’ allergy to ritual. Ritual is what others (i.e., Orthodox, right-wing settlers, and mizrahim) do and what we (non-Orthodox critical scholars) deconstruct (cf. Bell 1992). There have been, however, several scholars who have analyzed Holocaust commemoration from a performative point of view. Don Handelman provides a detailed hermeneutic of Yad Vashem as a landscape of sacrifice (2004a: 147–170), as well as an analysis of how survivors’ stories are crafted for retelling in capsule form to various publics (ibid.: 171–199). Several articles treat the performative aspects and changing social significance of the ceremonies for Holocaust Memorial Day and Memorial Day for the Fallen at national commemorative sites (Handelman 1990; 2004a: 101–117) and in Israeli schools (Ben-Amos and Beit-El 1994; 1999; 2003; cf. LomskyFeder 2003). Both venues provide models for ceremonies that are held in Poland, while the school ceremonies are also primary occasions for voyage veterans to perform an act of transmission of memory upon their return from their voyage. Both will be analyzed in discussions of commemorative forms in chapter 2, and of the voyage ceremonies in chapter 5. As the temporal distance from the Shoah increases, more and more people become acquainted with the Shoah through public representations, rather than through personal experience or transmission in the family. Consequently, Holocaust memory enters realms more traditionally studied by sociologists and anthropologists. Insofar as global discourse makes the Holocaust a universal “moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and [in] the absence of master ideological narratives” (Levy and Sznaider 2002: 88), and victims of other genocides and catastrophes compare their situations with the Holocaust, the interest of sociologists and anthropologists in Holocaust memory will continue to increase (cf. Sturken 1997; Gerson and Wolf 2007; Levy and Sznaider 2006). Furthermore, in

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Israel, over the last twenty years, over two hundred thousand high school students have traveled on trips to Poland; a sizable (and disproportionate) number of them continue for university degrees. As has been shown by scholars in other contexts, the performance of commemorative Holocaust ceremonies (as well as the erection of new monuments and museums) may not only reflect existing attitudes, but provoke broad processes of change.13 It stands to reason that as increasing numbers of voyage veterans enter the academy, studies of Shoah commemorations and representations may come to reflect increased subtlety and sophistication.

From Personal Trauma to Social Constructivism An additional area of research into Holocaust memory was developed by psychologists, largely in isolation of sociological discussions of collective memory. This research, beginning in the 1970s, focused on the harmful effects of the Shoah on survivors. Support groups for victims arose, as psychologists supported research into traumatic aftereffects of the Shoah on the mental health of the survivors. Following the experiences of shell-shocked survivors from Vietnam, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was added to the psychological dictionary in 1990 and applied to Holocaust victims, along with a host of other traumatized persons (Ballinger 1998: 100). Global studies were conducted on coping mechanisms of survivors (Witztum and Malkinson 1993; Lifton 1980; Danielli 1985; 1994) and their postwar psychological adaptation. In the late 1970s, research was extended to the transmission of the Shoah trauma and its effects/symptoms to children of survivors (Danieli 1985 and bibliography ad loc.). In subsequent years, research was extended to the “third generation” as well. (Bar-On 1995; Rosenthal 1995; Rosenthal and Voelter 1996; Rosenthal 1997). Most of this research, however, saw Holocaust trauma and memory as a problem of the individual, with focus on pathological cases. When social psychologists later turned to wider social phenomena (Bar-On et al. 1993: 241; cf. Bar-On 1995: 18–19), they generally employed a psychoanalytic model of trauma. In this understanding, the shattering event is first repressed by the actors experiencing it, while the original event combined with the anxiety keeping it repressed result in traumatic feelings and perceptions (Alexander et al. 2004: 5). According to this theory, culture may provide occasions to undo repression and allow pent up emotions of loss and mourning to be expressed through commemoration and cultural representation (ibid.:7), or may impede restorative psycho-

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logical processes. Thus, Bar-On identifies a “vicious circle” among the third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors, a selfreinforcing way of thinking on which knowledge and understanding of, and emotional responses to, the Holocaust have no impact” (Bar-On 1995: 18). He attributes this vicious circle to macrosocietal influences: “In Israel, the polarized political situation causes youngsters (as well as adults) to ‘mobilize’ the Holocaust and justify their current attitudes” (Bar-On et al. 1993: 241; cf. Bar-On 1995: 18–19). In this schema, cultural factors are considered an impediment to the universal psychological process of working through, rather than elements constructing if and how events come to be experienced as traumatic. As we move from second to third generation and beyond, the major means of transmission of the Shoah (and its effects on personal and collective identity) have become school education, mass media, support groups, commemorations, and public representations, rather than family narratives (Hartman 1997: 66). Consequently, memory and trauma are mediated by culturally specific social forces. As Carol Kidron notes (2003: 535), “When collective trauma occurs in the distant past, both the individual and the collective become all the more reliant upon expert discourse, cultural key scenarios, narrative practices and communal sites of memory to access, frame and sustain the presence of the past. It is culture that must create the bridge to the past, in the form of culturally constituted descendant identities, mnemonic narratives and illness constructs of transmitted trauma, all functioning as conduits of memory.” Thus, in her study of an Israeli support group of children of survivors, she demonstrates how narratives of victimhood can enable second generation participants to re-emplot their personal life stories as having been constituted by Holocaust trauma. According to the recently developed social constructivist approach (Alexander et al. 2004: 1), cultural trauma occurs “when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness forever and changes their future identity in fundamental, irrevocable ways.” Cultural trauma, as a change in a collective identity, takes place only if the patterned meanings of a collectivity are disrupted. Those patterned meanings are a function of sociocultural processes, including power structures and reflexive social agents that generate cultural classification (ibid.: 11). The understanding of a traumatic past, even for direct descendants of survivors, depends upon narrative frames dominant within the groups in which their

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stories are told, whether they be frames of redemption (Handelman 2004a: 194–199) or illness (Kidron 2003). For example, insofar as we speak of the aftereffects of the Holocaust on subsequent generations of Jewish-Israeli society, we must examine the values assigned by the larger society to victimization and survival (Ballinger 1998; Bauman 1998) and the ways in which that society extends family metaphors to the nation. Thus, Dan BarOn observes (1995: 23) an “aristocracy of victimhood” among Israeli youth: “[Some] youngsters of Asian and African origin, defined themselves as having family ties to the Holocaust on the basis of a single distant relationship. For them it served as a sort of ‘calling card’ for entering Israeli society.” Through a close ethnographic reading of on-site discursive practices and bodily actions, we may come to understand how culture produces narratives and, ultimately, carriers of memory that sustain and revitalize historical grand narratives. I will explore how the voyage community is constructed as a three-generational national family of transmission of Shoah memory, assigning them the status of “victim by proxy” (Bauman 1998), and why such assignments are convincing for participants. I will observe how the language of intergenerational family transmission renders the national collective natural and almost genetic. Insofar as students indeed come to describe themselves as witnesses, the microscopic investigation of the voyage may explain how Israeli youths come to renarrate their lives as having been constituted by historical events prior to their birth.

Previous Research on the Poland Voyages Although the youth voyages to Poland only began in the mid 80s, research on the voyages, though still meager, reflects a range of approaches to Holocaust memory in general. In his book, The Seventh Million, Tom Segev (1991) claims that, especially since the rise of the Likud to power, the humanistic lessons of the Shoah have been marginalized and that the Shoah has most often been invoked in support of a particularistic, security-oriented, and nationalistic worldview. Based on his observations of one group in Poland, he concluded that the youth missions to Poland were part and parcel of the government’s tendency to glorify strength and place Israel’s actions above moral criticism. He characterizes the voyage ceremonies as a cult consisting entirely of emotions and symbols, and sometimes bizarre adoration of kitsch and death. Segev claims that the voyages strike a responsive chord among Israeli youth searching for “identity with roots” with a mini-

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mum of personal or moral obligation. While my research confirms his observations on the ideological thrust of the voyage organizers, the reasons he advances for youths’ enthusiastic response to this trip are not grounded in ethnography. Segev does not investigate how sequencing of events and landscape are used to create total environments for youngsters with no direct experience of the Shoah. Adi Ofir (1995) and Moshe Zuckermann (1995; 1996) each devote short articles attacking the voyages from a post-Zionist perspective. Both depicted the voyage as an act of nationalistic brainwashing and emphasized the need for a nonritualized humanistic perspective. Both are based on journalistic reports, while Ofir’s information is supplemented by a student trip book and word-ofmouth student reactions. Ofir identifies the quasi religious character of the voyages as secular pilgrimages (see chapter 2), but reduces the experience of pilgrimage to functions of power. He describes the striving of the Ministry of Education for ideological hegemony, as well as an integrated “industry” in which guides, the Ministry of Education, and private travel agents combine to produce a (highly profitable) product for an expanding student clientele. The picture of an integrated profit-making machine organizing the voyages is incorrect (cf. Blattman 1995). But, more significantly, both Ofir’s and Zuckermann’s restriction of their analysis to conscious manipulative forces (whether ideological or financial) leads to a fragmentary and somewhat one-sided picture of the Poland trips. Jack Kugelmass employs (1993; 1994) a performative approach to the closely related American Jewish Shoah group missions in Poland (cf. Stier 1995). He describes Poland as a stage on which American Jewry performs a rite designed to establish contact with a mythical collective past and acts out the drama of its future. The trip is orchestrated so as to minimize contact with modern Poland and instill a negative sense of place. The death camps serve as condensation symbols for the entire Jewish past. By identifying with the Shoah dead, the participants seek to reaffirm their own vulnerability (and, in politically correct America, status) as victims, as opposed to their privileged position as Jews in American society, while pledging to resist assimilation. The trips inevitably end in Israel, mythicized as “the Jewish future.” Although the itinerary and interpretation of landscape is similar to that of the Israeli Shoah voyages, the nature of the identity being strengthened is necessarily different for young Israelis, whose present life world is Israel (cf. Feldman 1997: 131–132). While Kugelmass emphasizes the differences between Jewish tourism in Poland voy-

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ages and religious pilgrimage, I will argue (cf. Cohen 1992) that the Shoah voyages display closer affinity to religious pilgrimage than to diversionary tourism. Several studies have applied social-psychological approaches and methods to draw a psychological profile of participating students (Asa and Degani 1990) and study the effects of the voyage to Poland on returning participants. Thus, one doctoral study measures the effects of the voyage on empathy towards Palestinians (Schecter 2002), while another confirms the predominance of nationalistic over universalistic messages among students returning from Poland (Gross 2000; Lazar et al. 2004a; 2004b). A further study employs questionnaires to explore middle-range attitudinal changes of returning participants (Lev 1998; Romi and Lev 2003). I will refer to the results of these findings in chapter 6. Finally, Haim Hazan (1999; 2001: 35–55) examines the voyages to Poland in an age of simulations, claiming that groups with different organizational affiliations will conduct voyages tailored to different ideological agendas. Hazan’s focus on the cognitive content of preparation programs exaggerates the differences between groups. Their itineraries and experiences in Poland (to which Hazan was not granted access) are far more similar and far more significant in the overall impact of the voyage.

From Process to Product: The Ethnography of the Voyage After returning from Ungvár (see preface), I chose to focus on the Israeli Ministry of Education, the largest and most influential organizer of these trips.14 In Spring 1992, I applied and was accepted to the Ministry’s course preparing teachers to guide Israeli school groups in Poland. I taped the entire four-month course (plus eleven days of the “educational”—the preparatory voyage for Poland guides). These tapes provided valuable background material on the aims of the Ministry, the origins and organization of the voyage, and the motivations of guides and administrators. Subsequently, I guided four groups to Poland over a three-year period, and recorded or videotaped group ceremonies, preparation and follow-up sessions, and all events that were independent of my influence as a guide. Throughout my research, I constantly had to resist the temptation of false identification. The sites themselves speak so poignantly of mourning and absence, of powerlessness and inhumanity, that I

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was often tempted to identify the students’ expectations and experiences with my own. I needed to go to Poland several times, first as a voyage participant and later as a guide, in order to achieve sufficient emotional distance from the sites and remain sufficiently clearheaded to notice and record the students’ behavior and denaturalize what I might otherwise have accepted as taken for granted. These voyages also enabled me to gain the confidence of officials of the Ministry of Education. I became familiar with the technical arrangements and the routine of the schedule (shigrat hamasa), and was able to distinguish typical phenomena from the merely accidental. I knew the commonly used prayers, poems, songs, and texts. I could predict the essential content of the historical explanations, the locale for ceremonies within the death camps, and the positioning of flags and symbols there, as well as when to expect expressions of emotion, fatigue, or indifference. Thus, I could focus my attention on outbursts of crying, laughing, or violence, the play in ludic “decompression” times (singing, shopping), listen to some of the small-group conversations, or question students on their thoughts and feelings, without worrying that I would miss some essential part of the big picture. In the course of my fieldwork, I often experienced shifts in perspectives and sympathies. I was often touched by the depth of students’ reactions towards the remains and their expressions of compassion towards the survivors and each other. I was often frustrated by the rigidity of the Ministry of Education’s framework and their tight security measures. On the other hand, I sometimes had to choke back my anger with students whose interest in the Jewish past and in the Shoah was limited to nationalist displays of the flag and a hoped-for fistfight with a Polish skinhead. On my sixth voyage, in September 1995, I traveled as a participant-observer with a state secular school from the Galilee. The group’s guide had participated in the same guide preparation course as I and approved of my recording her tour for my research. Her personal friendship with the delegation leader, as well as the recommendations of Ministry of Education officials who knew me as a guide, enabled me free access to preparatory and staff meetings. The guide introduced me to the group as a friend, a fellow guide, and doctoral student. I made sure to sit in the back of the bus and avoid displays of familiarity with the guide, and offered no comment or explanation on sites unless asked individually by students. After the first day, I sensed that the students accepted my role as a scholar-observer and did not mute criticisms of the trip in my presence. I recorded or

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videotaped all the explanations, discussions, and ceremonies, kept extensive written notes, and took a series of still photographs, some of which are included here as illustrations. Although my constant use of recording equipment marked me as an outside observer, video cameras, picture taking, and note writing were very much a part of the students’ own trip experience. An invaluable source of information was the six trip journals kept by participants, which they allowed me to copy, even though they did not know in advance that I would ask to see them.15 These journals gave me real time reactions to trip events, often from several different points of view. Along with the evening trip discussions, they provide the main source of “exegetical meanings”—those attributed by cultural participants themselves to elements of their symbolic conduct (Turner in Katriel 1991: 9). The information I obtained was supplemented by records of the two follow-up sessions. In addition, I sent participants a four-page, open-ended questionnaire, to which twenty-five of the thirty participants responded, often in great detail. While I have kept this information separate from my description of student reactions to events in the course of the voyage, I will refer to it in my discussion of the aftereffects of the voyage in chapter 6. Two years later, I guided an Orthodox Ministry of Education group in order to compare my observations with impressions of a religious group (see appendix ). My study of the Poland voyages is limited both by the nature and number of groups I observed, the methods I have chosen for observation, and by the personal resonances of the pilgrimage experience in my own life. Although most of my claims are based on observations of a single school group at a single point in time (September 1995), the other five student groups which I guided and other groups in those delegations whose ceremonies and discussions I attended provided me with corrective perspectives on that experience. Furthermore, my readings, the interviews I conducted, and the reactions to many presentations to voyage veterans over the past ten years (including many students in my university lectures) indicate that the organization and experiences of the voyages has remained virtually unchanged among most student groups, and over the course of the seven years of my observation and beyond. While today, the Ministry of Education sponsors only a third of the school groups traveling to Poland, its itineraries and arrangements are the base for the vast majority of groups. Indeed, in some ways their administrative control of other voyages has increased. Where I

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witnessed significant variations in other voyages, I noted them in the appendix or included comments in the text or in footnotes.

Context, Structure, and Performance in the Voyages to Poland The Poland voyages were initiated by the State Ministry of Education at a certain juncture in history and are performed by teenagers in particular landscapes marked by Holocaust-era artifacts and ruins that are envisioned in certain ways by Israeli Jews. Hence, any interpretation of the voyage must include a survey of the legitimizing role of the Holocaust for the State of Israel, and of the ways understandings of the Shoah and the state are conveyed through other ceremonies and representations in the students’ life world. Within the voyage, we find a dynamic interaction between structure, primarily shaped by the state, and performance, in which the students generate many of the meanings—between the state educational system’s attempt at shaping collective memory and the personal memories and desires of students, guides, teachers, and witnesses. The detailed ethnographic account of the ritualized voyage I will offer is designed to incorporate both the politics of the state and the voices of the participants as they express themselves in the ruins and remnants of Holocaust Poland. These voyages are tightly structured, with few changes made among different voyages or over the course of the fifteen years of delegations to Poland. The structure includes the Ministry of Education’s selection training and framing of the staff, its designation of authority figures, its security briefings, itinerary, and schedule. The voyages have, in addition to their political dimension, cognitive, emotional, and identity-forming dimensions which unfold through their performance. These dimensions are internalized through bodily practices, rather than through a process of argumentation, intellectualization, or reflection (cf. Connerton 1989). The leitmotif of the Ministry of Education’s statement of purpose is the phrase “to feel and to try to understand” (Director General’s Circular 1991). Experience is at the heart of the trip, and that experience takes form through the time, space, and performance of the voyage. Among young Israelis, the voyage to Poland may fill a void within the crisscrossing flows of postmodernity, in which a stable and meaningful anchor in the past may be sought for, but often seems impossible to grasp. The testimony of the survivors, however influenced by the ritual frame of the voyage, is also a cry for recognition, against forgetting. The narrative strategies of many guides and

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their motivations for leading the trips reflect, not only a commitment to a Zionist mission, but their desire to transmit a story that legitimates an aspect of their own place in the world, as children of survivors. If the landscapes, artifacts, and Polish Others encountered on the voyage are narrated by survivors and guides and serve as stages for students’ ceremonies and symbolic displays, the site themselves have been preserved or reconstructed by Polish authorities, often embedding alternative interpretations. Thus, we find a wide variety of players, narratives, and needs occupying the stage of Poland, employing a panoply of strategies to advance different, sometimes conflicting, interests and desires (Edensor 2000; Eade and Sallnow 2000 [1991]; Crang 1997). All these will need to be identified and brought into connection with each other in the course of the analysis.

Organization of the Book In order to portray the interaction of structural and performative aspects within certain sociopolitical contexts pertaining to the voyage, I have chosen to organize my ethnography of the voyage into separate chapters focusing on sociohistorical contexts, structure, performance, and ceremonies: Chapter 2 will deal with the social and historical contexts of the voyage in Israeli society. After providing a description of the history and development of Israeli views of the Shoah, I will illustrate how the Shoah is presented in the curricula of Israeli schools, in Israeli civil religious constructions of space and time at Yad Vashem, and in Holocaust Memorial Day Ceremonies. Chapter 3 analyzes the fixed structural elements of the voyage, mainly initiated by the Ministry of Education. I marshal examples from various written materials, on-site observations, and interviews to provide the broader picture of the voyage’s structuring of time, space, and ritual. I describe the origin of the trips, the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education, and the role assignments, recruitment, and training of voyage staff. I then discuss the processes of selection and preparation of students and guides. I examine the structure and rhythms of the trip as reflected through the logistic instructions, security arrangements, and the itinerary and schedule, and detail some of the forces shaping the Shoah landscape of Poland, as well as guides’ techniques of narration. Chapter 4 will provide an extensive ethnography of a trip I observed in September 1995, accompanied by critical and analytical reflections. Here, I decided to integrate journal entries and reactions

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expressed in the evening group discussions (several hours to a day later) with the first-hand reactions to the site, while excluding later, postvoyage reactions or recollections. I will trace how individual participants understand their lived performances and how their individual life-experiences interact with messages conveyed by the official program in the course of their walk through the eight-day trip. As no reliable detailed description of Holocaust voyages to Poland exists at present, this account will also provide data for future research. Chapter 5 studies texts, symbols, music, and gestures of the group ceremonies, both individually and as part of the larger voyage construction. I examine the use of the flag, the anthem, and religious symbols within the ceremonies as well as the significance of communal crying. I demonstrate that the ensemble of ceremonies inscribes a series of rites of transformation, whose logic is replicated in miniature within each individual ceremony. Chapter 6 documents the immediate aftereffects of the voyage for participants, focusing on their acts of transmission of their experiences. It then explores the implications of the voyage for participants’ Jewish identity, their Israeli nationalism, and its impact on their future military service. It closes with some speculations on the future development of the voyages and the implications of the voyage for the “cosmopolitan memory” of the Holocaust. Chapter 7 summarizes the main arguments of the book and draws out the implications of the study for an understanding of the role of transformative rituals in modern societies. I conclude with a personal reflection and a short appendix on the voyages of Orthodox school groups to Poland. In the course of the study, I hope to demonstrate, through indepth ethnography, how state agendas and personal mourning interplay in civil religious pilgrimages to the deathscapes of Poland. In doing so, I will shed new light, not only on Holocaust commemoration and Israeli national identity, but also on the ways that bodily practice can create national identity and collective memories in an age of global travel and “mediarized” representations.

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Notes 1. One might argue that the choice between “Holocaust” and “Shoah” has profound implications. Some have opposed the use of the word “Holocaust,” because of its origins as the Septuagint Greek word used to refer to burnt offerings. They argue that “Holocaust” anchors the Jewish deaths within a Christian expiatory theology. This is sometimes proclaimed explicitly, for example, on Cardinal John O’Connor’s visit to Israel, when he said that “the Holocaust is the greatest gift that the Jews have given to humanity.” “Shoah” is opposed by others who see the use of a foreign Hebrew world as committing one to the uniqueness of the Jewish Shoah and foreclosing its comparison with other genocides, an understanding shared by most voyage organizers. “Holocaust,” on the other hand, has been linked to other catastrophes—“Polish Holocaust” (Piotrowski 1998: 1), “black Holocaust,” “AIDS Holocaust,” and “abortion Holocaust.” Peter Novick, however, points out (1993: 133) that already preceding World War II, the word “holocaust” was linked with widespread destruction and had become unmoored of its theological significance. He points out that it was used by Yad Vashem’s English language publications in the 1950s as a translation of the Hebrew “Shoah.” Consequently, I use “Shoah” and “Holocaust” interchangeably. 2. The secular Israeli allergy to public ritual in general, and pilgrimage in particular, is one consequence of Zionism’s rejection of Orthodox Jewish religion, as discussed in chapter 3, pp. 125-129. 3. For reasons that will become evident later, I have ignored Handelman’s third category, events that re-present “which … may raise possibilities, questions, perhaps doubts, about the legitimacy or validity of social forms, as these are constituted in the lived-in world” (Handelman 1990: 49). 4. The Talmud writes that, “If at the present time, a man desires to become a proselyte, he is to be addressed as follows: ‘What reason have you for desiring to become a proselyte; do you not know that Israel at the present time are persecuted and oppressed, despised, harassed and overcome by afflictions?’ If he replies, ‘I know and yet am unworthy,’ he is accepted forthwith” (Babylonian Talmud, Yebamot 47a). 5. On techniques of Zionist historiography in the construction of the past, see Y. Zerubavel 1995; Ram 1995a; 1995b; and the articles on Israeli historiography in History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995); and Mihazon Lirevizia (From Dream to Revision), edited by Yehiam Weitz (1997). For a survey of post-Zionist historiography, see Silberstein 1999. 6. For an alternative formulation of civil religion, placing violence and blood sacrifice at its core, see Marvin and Ingle 1999: 15–28. 7. Although Biblical prophecy (especially Second Isaiah) did not deny the territorial aspect of redemption (ingathering of exiles, return to Zion, rebuilding of the destroyed Jerusalem), and post-Biblical Judaism, unlike Christianity, never fully spiritualized earthly Jerusalem, and did not propose a heavenly Jerusalem as replacement for the earthly one. Nevertheless, exilic Judaism most often deferred the territorial dimension of redemption to the eschaton, emphasizing yemot hamashiah (the time of Messianic redemption). See also Raz-Krakotzkin 1983; 1984.

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8. Zionist practice is merely one instance of nationalist practices of claiming territory through manifestation of presence through marches and processions. In recent times, the phenomena is probably best known from the Northern Ireland conflict. For illustrations from Palestinian nationalism, see Hecht and Friedland 1998; Ben-Zeev and Abu-Raiya 2004; for marches in Afrikaner nationalism, see McClintock 1995. 9. In addition, as long as anthropology (and Israeli anthropology in particular) focused on the distant other, the Shoah was not considered exotic enough to merit study. 10. These explanations rely on what Jeffrey Alexander calls “the psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory” (Alexander et al. 2004: 7), in which, “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event … but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance” (Caruth 1995: 30–34 in ibid.). Thus, the original event combined with the anxiety keeping it repressed result in traumatic feelings and perceptions that only later surface to haunt the survivor. 11. There are some notable exceptions: see the exchange of articles between Boaz Evron and Yehuda Bauer in 1980 (cf. Michman 1997b), as well as the short article by Yehudah Elkanah in 1988 (see chapter 2, p. 39) and the articles by Adi Ofir and others in the July 1986 issue of Politika magazine. 12. For an elegant and provoking survey of Israeli Holocaust memory through the early 1990s, see Friedlander with Seeligman 1994. 13. Among the constructions of museums commemorating the Shoah that sparked controversy and research into Holocaust memory and representation are: the founding of the Holocaust Museum and its location on the Mall in Washington (Bartov 1997a; Ouzan 1997), the opening of the (long-postponed) Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York (Neeman-Arad 1996: 97), the erection of the Carmelite monastery in Auschwitz and its subsequent evacuation in response to Jewish pressure (Zarecka 1989a; Bartoszewski 1990; Weinstock 1990; Dwork and Jan van Pelt 1996: 354–378; Steinlauf 1996), the renovation of the Buchenwald concentration camp following the reunification of Germany (Koonz 1995; Odermatt 1993), and the central monument to the Holocaust in Berlin (Young 2000). See also the controversies around the dedication of Holocaust monuments in France and Germany in Carrier 2005. Among ceremonies which provoked controversies, intensity, we find Reagan’s visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg (Hartman 1986) and the Polish orchestration of the fiftieth anniversary ceremonies of the liberation of Auschwitz (Steinlauf 1996). 14. For the relation of Ministry of Education voyages to other Poland voyages, see chapter 3, pp. 58, 63; appendix; Feldman 1997: 131–132; and Hazan 1999; 2001: 35–55. In the course of many lectures presented to student and teacher groups including many trip veterans, I occasionally encounter listeners who report trips that vary significantly in itinerary and emphases from the ones I describe here. Among Israeli student trips (as opposed to those of other nationalities or age groups or held under other auspices, such as Arab-Jewish reconciliation visits), I would estimate that less than 5 percent differ substantially from the voyages I describe. 15. I returned the photocopied journals to the students unread, asking them to erase any information they did not wish to share. Only one student erased several paragraphs, describing a romantic encounter.

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What is the correct way to stand at a memorial ceremony? Erect or stooped, pulled taut as a tent or in the slumped posture Of mourning, head bowed like the guilty or held high In a collective protest against death, eyes gaping frozen like the eyes of the dead Or shut tight, to see the stars inside? And what is the best time for remembering? At noon when shadows are hidden beneath our feet, or at twilight When shadows lengthen like longings that have no beginning, no end, like God? (Yehuda Amichai, “Who Shall Remember the Rememberers”, verse 3, in Open, Closed, Open, (translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld), Harcourt: Orlando, Florida, pp. 169-70)

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CHAPTER

2

The Historical and Social Context of Israeli Shoah Commemoration

The first Ministry of Education youth voyages to Poland date from only 1988. But it is impossible to understand the voyages in isolation from the social and historical context which gave birth to them. This chapter will briefly survey the changes in Holocaust memory in Israel over the past sixty years and the forms of transmission closest to those of the Poland voyages. This survey is necessarily incomplete and provisional.1 Not only because new documents of the 40s and 50s have recently been made public, but because in recent years, Israeli Shoah memory has become the subject of highly politicized debate between Zionists and post-Zionists (cf. Zertal 1998: 5; Michman 1997; Shapira 1997), and continues to change in response to new social forces. While some critical scholars emphasize governmental manipulation of Holocaust memory, I have taken a position close to that formulated by Liebman and Don Yehiya (1984: 143) in their discussion of the Holocaust in post–Six Day War Zionist rhetoric: “The fact that symbols shape our perception does not necessarily mean they deceive us.... Nor does the fact that Israeli perceptions … happen to suit the purposes of its political elite ... make these perceptions any less valid. [They] find acceptance … partly because [they are] consistent with symbols deeply embedded into the culture of the people.” National traditions are never purely invented. They are ingrained with aspects of reality that are taken for granted by participants. Only through Notes for this section begin on page 53.

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examining the traditional Jewish memory paradigms, ingrained cultural forms, political interests, the repercussions of important national events, and the lingering effects of trauma (Schudson and Scott 1989), can we explain how particular understandings of the Shoah develop and are accepted by people as reflecting reality. In chapter 1, I discuss how Jewish memory paradigms and the dialectic and conflicted relationship of Zionism towards the Diaspora gave shape to Shoah memory in Israel. Israeli collective memory of the Shoah was also, however, influenced by the passage of time and the aging of the survivors. The survivors’ sense of their approaching demise often led them to make public experiences that they had silenced or repressed in the past. The increased receptiveness to these stories was also facilitated by the passage of generational time and the growing temporal distance from the trauma. Furthermore, as Israel’s life-situation oscillated between periods of war and reprieve, her self-perceptions fluctuated between strength and vulnerability, between openness to the surrounding world and hostility. These self-understandings also shaped the way the historical event of the Shoah was remembered and evoked. The first part of this chapter will examine changing Holocaust memory at several milestones in Israeli history, while the second part of this chapter will look at the forms of transmission and commemoration of the Holocaust that are most proximate to the life world of the participants: school education, the shaping of commemorative space (Yad Vashem), the commemorative calendar (Holocaust Memorial Day), and the performance of Shoah commemorations in Israeli high schools.

The History of Shoah Memory in Israel In its understanding of historical events, the Zionist leadership in Israel was influenced by the persistence of traditional Jewish memory structures, but also by its self-perception as a revolutionary movement that extolled the break with the Jewish past and sought to create a “new Jew” in the image of the pioneer and the soldier. In its “absorption” of the Shoah into a commemorative narrative, the pull towards identification and commemoration were offset by a strong repulsive force: the Shoah occurred in a space and in a time that were assigned negative value— exile. For the founding fathers of the State, exile represented humiliation, obscurantism, and suffering. Thus, the Shoah was a “natural” consequence of Jewish life outside the homeland. Exile embodied the loss of the physical bond to the

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land as well as the loss of the Jews’ collective experience as a nation. Within the master commemorative narrative, the Shoah, followed by the founding of the State, could thus serve as “a definitive boundary between the ending of Exile and National Revival” (Y. Zerubavel 1995: 34). For many, the Shoah served as proof of the truth of their Zionist belief that the exile, no matter how vibrant it seemed, was doomed (Weitz 1995: 143). The Israeli founders’ conflicting attitudes extended to the wider Israeli public as well. On the one hand, they saw Israel as a Jewish State, homeland for the entire Jewish people. The Jews of the exile provided both the material support for the State as well as the great reservoir of olim, potential new citizens. On the other hand, “the highly negative perception of Exile often turned from shlilat hagalut (the repudiation of the state of living in exile) to shlilat hagola (the condemnation of the people who live in exile), the product of its demeaning and regressive lifestyle” (Y. Zerubavel 1995: 19; cf. Almog 1997: 137–148).

Early Reactions to the Shoah Because of the sheer magnitude of the Shoah, in which a third of the Jewish people were murdered, because of the exterminatory goal of the killers, and because of the large presence of Shoah refugees in the Israeli population,2 the young State of Israel could not remain indifferent to the Shoah. Thus, immediately after the end of fighting in 1945, the Zionist leadership sent emissaries to the displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe, organizing the survivors to immigrate to Israel, and bringing Zionist education to the surviving youth. These movements had a share in ensuring that the largest number of survivors came to Israel to live.3 The building of State was promoted as the appropriate response to the Holocaust. In the early years of the State, the Shoah was seen through the prism of the yishuv’s more immediate loss, those of the fighters in the War of Independence. Just as only the fighters of the Independence War were memorialized, to the detriment of the civilian dead (Sivan 1993: 355–367), so too, the ghetto fighters and partisans (especially those belonging to Zionist youth movements) often became the only roots in the Shoah past that official Statist culture could admit. At a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in 1951, the poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner said: “I have no doubt that the same spirit that was witnessed in our War of Independence existed in the ghettos, and it may well be, that a liberated Israel was born in the last of the bunkers” (Kovner in

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Barzel 1994). Kovner’s statement exemplifies the tension between the centrality of historical continuity in traditional memory and the desire of Zionism to break with that past to create a “new Jew”. The making of the ghetto fighters into sacrifices for the State and forerunners of the soldiers of the Independence War was an attempt at its resolution.4 The extolling of physical resistance was often accompanied by a denigration of those who did not fight, who were said to have gone to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter.5 They were seen as representatives of the past, passive victims of the exilic period,6 and proof of the correctness of the Zionist thesis, that Jewish existence outside of the land and State of Israel was doomed. Certainly, the Israeli society of the 1940s did not want to hear of the experience of the survivors. Although some scholars see the State and, in particular, Ben Gurion’s attitude as cynical manipulation (Zertal 1998), undoubtedly, guilty feelings of the yishuv, over their inaction or helplessness during the Holocaust, contributed significantly to the desire to repress those memories (Weitz 1990: 149; Yablonka 1994: 58). Oz Almog summarized (1997: 144) the attitude of veteran Israelis as “a mixture of pity, identification, rebuke, patronization and cultural superiority.” As Dan Bar-On noted (1994: 31), “The model of the ‘tzabar’ dominated Israeli culture of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The emphasis was on struggle and action, on contribution to the collective at the expense of the desires of the individual.” The survivors were expected to be reborn, making themselves over in the image of the tzabar, including the adoption of new Israeli family names and the reshaping of their biographies (Ofer 1996: 865; and more generally, Golden 2002). For some of the survivor-immigrants to Israel, this atmosphere corresponded to their deep desire not to speak of their experience. Aharon Appelfeld, who survived the Shoah as a boy in Transnistria, after losing his family, writes (1994: 149–150): There was a desire to forget, to bury the bitter memories deep in the bedrock of the soul, in a place where no stranger’s eye, not even our own, could get to them. So strong was the desire that we managed to accomplish the impossible. One mustn’t talk. One mustn’t tell. That was the order of the day, and it did not come just from the outside. Gradually, we shed the miserable marks of suffering. We grew to look like boys from the kibbutz movement. Tanned, sturdy, immersed in the activities of daily life. They stopped asking us, “Where are you from?” and “How did it happen?” And we grew more confident, now that they no longer pestered us with questions.

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Many parents believed that through maintaining silence, they could spare their children the traumas of the Shoah. Moreover, many children avoided asking questions so as to spare their parents the pain of conjuring up the horrors of the past. This is what Dan Bar-On refers to as the “double wall” of silence (1994: 293). Furthermore, many survivors did not possess the temporal and psychological distance necessary for working through their traumatic Shoah experiences. They repressed their painful memories and, in the 40s and 50s, dedicated their energies to the urgent tasks of nation-constructing.7 Within Israeli political culture, the memory of the Shoah was fragmented between National Religious, nonreligious, and Haredi; between left- and right-wing political parties. Each invoked the memory of the Holocaust to strengthen its claim to embody the true answer to the destruction of European Jewry. The Kasztner trial in 1954 resulted in further political fragmentation of Holocaust memory and marked an escalation in the use of Holocaust rhetoric to further partisan goals of Israeli political parties. Throughout the trial, the prosecution insisted that armed resistance was the only legitimate option in the struggle against the Nazis. The Haredim, on the other hand, lit upon the disclosures of the Kasztner trial in order to demonize their opponents, secular Zionists, accusing them of complacency and even complicity in their willingness to sacrifice avak adam (human dust) for the establishment of the State (Friedman 1990: 110–112). According to Dalia Ofer, however, “The fierce debates did not extend beyond a small intellectual and semiintellectual elite that read the literary supplements” (1996: 872–873). In the subsequent three decades, Israeli society experienced events that changed its understanding of the Shoah. Anita Shapira suggests as the key historical milestones: (1) 1960: the public revelation of the stories of survivors in the Eichmann trial, which brought the Shoah to the knowledge and consciousness of many Israelis for the first time; (2) 1967: the period immediately preceding the Six Day War, which led to identification with the victims; (3) 1973: the loss of confidence resulting from the Yom Kippur War, which led to greater acceptance of the exilic experience and other types of Israeliness; (4) 1977: the rise to power of Menachem Begin, who often invoked the Holocaust as legitimation for his worldview. This enabled the incorporation and acceptance of Shoah victims as part of the new Israeli narrative (Shapira 1997: 4). The kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 was expressly intended by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to educate younger Israelis and new immigrants from Islamic countries about the Holo-

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caust so that they might achieve “a full understanding of Israel’s objectives and everyday realities” (Ofer 1996: 873–874). In the course of the 121 sessions of the trial, 83,500 people visited the courtroom, and hundreds of thousands more followed the trial through radio broadcasts. The bringing of survivors’ stories out into the open for the first time gave rise to greater empathy with the victims. As prosecutor Gideon Hausner wrote, “It came as a discovery to many that we are actually a nation of survivors” (Hausner 1966: 453). The witnesses were chosen to provide a broad ethnic, professional, and religious mosaic of Shoah victims, just as Zionism has always presented Israel as an ethnic mosaic. Through the trial, the Shoah (and not merely physical resistance) could begin to be integrated into Zionist national history (Weitz 1995: 143; cf. Weitz 1996; Stauber 2000). Many Israelis speak of the Eichmann trial as the event that first made them conscious of the Shoah (Schatzker 1987: 388). The kidnapping of Eichmann by Mosad agents, the sequence of the trial, and the display of symbols in the courtroom all made the Eichmann trial a ritual reenactment and reversal of the Shoah.8 If the Shoah were to be integrated into national history, it was essential to construct a catastrophic break, separating the Shoah, as the final manifestation of exile, from the State. Paul Connerton, in reflecting on the trial of Louis XIV, writes (1989: 7) that “trial by fiat of a successor regime is like the construction of a wall, unmistakable and permanent between the new beginnings and the old tyranny.” The staging of the trial in the capital, Jerusalem, and the presence of symbols of the State in the public auditorium reiterated that “the only reason it was possible to hold the trial at all was that there was now a Jewish state on the map” (Hausner 1966: 453). The final witness at the trial was Aharon Hoter-Yishai, a member of the Jewish Brigades, who helped bring immigrants from the DP camps to Israel. Israel’s emissaries were cast as the active force that brought exile and Holocaust to an end and brought the survivors from the camps to their homeland. Thus, exile and statehood were brought into immediate proximity. The “gray area” (1880–1948) of the overlapping periods in the Zionist narrative was eliminated. Although the suffering of the Shoah victims was now legitimized, physical resistance, as manifested by the ghetto fighters and partisans, remained the most honorable response to Nazism. A gap remained between logical explanations and the emotional ability to accept the narrative of the Holocaust. In other words, if the Eichmann trial enabled Israelis to understand that, perhaps, they could

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have been victims, it took the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War for Israelis to first feel that they were indeed victims.

From the Six Day War to the Yom Kippur War The weeks preceding the Six Day War in 1967 were characterized by the uniting of Arab countries against Israel, the isolation of Israel in the world community, and unprecedented expressions of concern and solidarity on the part of Diaspora Jews. Amidst their isolation in the world, Israelis identified their situation with that of the Holocaust victim. As Eliezer Livneh wrote in the daily newspaper, Ha’aretz, one week before the outbreak of the war: “It would be irresponsible folly not to believe what Nasser has written and said for twelve years. The world and the Jews didn’t believe in the sincerity of Hitler’s proclamations” (Livneh, Ha’aretz, 31.5.67 in Segev 1991: 367).9 The seemingly miraculous lightning victory in the Six Day War, and the Israeli conquest of the Biblical sites and landscape in the West Bank, resulted in the strengthening of primordial symbols over civic ones: Eretz Israel (the Biblical Promised Land) over Medinat Israel (the civic State of Israel).10 There was a shift away from socialist, pioneering values towards greater particularism (Cohen 1989: 154) and a division of the world into “we” and “they.” Baruch Kimmerling writes (1985: 275): “This conception transfers the traditional ‘natural’ Diaspora view of relations between Jews and nonJews to the situation of a sovereign Jewish State. Such Judeocentricity (is) … reinforced by the Shoah, which constitutes a central motif in the system of collected symbols.” One of the most important political trends to arise from the Six Day War and the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan, and Sinai was the rise of political messianism or redemptionist religiosity. This schema is summarized by Holocaust historian Israel Gutmann as follows: the Holocaust, “the low point, is a sign of the birth pangs of the Messiah, whereas the establishment of Israel, its victories and accomplishments, reveal a glimmer of the coming of the final redemption” (Gutmann 1989: 31; cf. Tal 1985: 44–45). For many groups, the Holocaust became a justification for the State of Israel’s security policies and distrust of the forces of evil (in this case, Palestinian Arabs or left-wing Israelis willing to return the territories) impeding the upcoming redemption. The National Religious groups’ messianic religiosity touched sympathetic chords among a sizable portion of the Israeli Jewish public. The prevailing Zionist interpretation of “Holocaust and revival” now became impregnated with reli-

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gious symbols, while Holocaust symbolism and references were increasingly appropriated and applied to the struggle for the Land of Israel. Thus, during their battle for Yamit in 1982, the members of Gush Emunim wore yellow stars, like the persecuted Jews in occupied Europe.11 The Labor government, which at times hesitated in approving certain settlements, was accused of aspiring to render Judea and Samaria “Judenrein.” “Auschwitz borders,” a phrase ironically coined by Labor Minster Abba Eban, became the accepted name in Gush Emunim slogans for the Green Line. In the broader public, the growing self-perception of Israel as victim led to a “growing tendency to redefine such terms as ‘martyrdom’ and ‘heroism’ so as to apply to all victims of the Holocaust” (Don-Yehiya 1993: 153). The experience of existential anguish which preceded the overwhelming victory in the Six Day War, along with the resacralization of secular Zionist symbols, enabled Israeli Jews to internalize the view of the Shoah (first presented in the Eichmann trial) as a “founding event” of the State. The adoption of catastrophe as a nation-founding event is not unique to Israeli nationalism. Bruce Kapferer demonstrates a parallel phenomenon in modern Australian nationalism. The Australian nation is sacralized through the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ (ANZAC) World War I soldiers killed at Gallipoli: “Gallipoli itself is often taken merely as a terrible defeat. But in the story as a whole, it is a key element in the discovery and reformation of a coherent identity. A movement out of chaos, one which is almost demonic, but which obscures the real character of the Australians is revealed in the suffering of Gallipoli. Reborn, the Anzacs become conquering heroes” (Kapferer 1989: 126). In post-1967 Israel, as in Australia, nationalist passion is generated through “the act of religious contemplation of culture in which a national self and a national other are defined and receive significance in the explanation of evil and suffering” (Kapferer 1989: 2).12 Once the Holocaust was incorporated into the Zionist narrative as the founding event of the State, subsequent historical events would serve to confirm the truth of this understanding. As with all nationalist ideologies, “realities once multiple and even distinct begin to refract similar messages and to shine with the same burning light that is shone over them.” (ibid.: 4). The Shoah now provided an interpretative model for current events. Equations were made: Israel=Jew, victim; Arab=Nazi, oppressor; gentiles/world opinion=bystander. These equations led to greater political manipulation of Holocaust symbols in justification of Israel’s policies.

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The 1973 Yom Kippur War further emphasized the vulnerability and isolation of Israel and strengthened its self-perception as victim. The subsequent manifestation of Arab power in the oil boycott reminded Israel of the illusory nature of its perception of strength, and increased the importance of the Holocaust and Jewish solidarity as sources of support and legitimation for the Jewish state (DonYehiya 1993: 159).

Begin’s Rise to Power: The Use and Abuse of Shoah Memory The mobilization of the Shoah in political rhetoric escalated with Menachem Begin’s rise to power in 1977. Begin, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, often invoked the Shoah to justify his policies and place Israel above moral criticism. Thus, during the Lebanon War (1982), Begin wrote in a letter to President Reagan: “These days, when I turn to the Creator of my soul in deep gratitude, I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing `Berlin’ where amongst innocent civilians Hitler and his henchmen hidden in a bunker deep beneath the surface” (Jerusalem Post, 3 August 1982, in Cromer 1987: 289). In her analysis of the rhetoric of Menachem Begin’s campaign speeches, Nurit Gertz demonstrated how Begin sought to consolidate support by emphasizing the innate dispute of ‘us’ against ‘them’. The Shoah was employed to further this end: “In order to make the contrast real, so that it would not become blurred with bridging formulas, it had to be built on the most extreme elements: children and the Holocaust on the one side, and heroism and revenge on the other” (Gertz 1981: 107). In the 1980s, Shoah images were increasingly employed by both sides of the political spectrum in order to delegitimize their adversaries (Cromer 1987). In the mid to late 1980s, a series of articles appeared in the Israeli press, which, in some ways, was a refracted image of the German debate on the uniqueness and historical context of the Shoah, known as the Historikerstreit (see Gutmann 1993; José Bruner 1997; LaCapra 1997; Milchman and Rosenberg 1997). As in the German debate, in the Israeli “historians’ debate,” too, the understandings of the Shoah espoused by various spokesmen were influenced by particular conceptions of national identity.13 If in Germany, the downplaying of the uniqueness of the Holocaust was promoted by Conservative circles in order to improve Germany’s self-image, in Israel it was promoted by left-leaning historians in order to counter the Right’s presentation of Israel as archetypical and the sole victim

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(Sznaider and Levy 2006: 120–121). The Left claimed that the Right’s stress of the national Jewish character of the Shoah was a manipulation of the Holocaust memory in order to fan hostility against the Palestinians (Ofer 1996: 887–888). Adi Ofir, in a provocative article published in 1986, claimed that Israeli society had developed a “Shoah religion,” including “commandments” elevating the uniqueness, sanctity, and irrepresentability of the Shoah and enshrining its national commemoration (Ofir 1986: 3). Ofir objected to this Holocaust religion on moral grounds: “Why is our Shoah mythology dangerous? Because it blurs the humanity of the Shoah … posing instead an infinite distance between one horror and all other human atrocities; because it develops memory as an excuse for another nation consolidating ritual and not as a tool for historical understanding.... Because it is almost entirely directed to the past … instead of being directed toward the future, to the prevention of the Shoah—the one that was, or another one, more terrible—that is more possible today” (Ofir 1986: 4). In 1988, at the onset of the first Palestinian intifada, Holocaust survivor and educator Yehuda Elkana wrote an influential article calling for the forgetting of the Shoah in Israel. He wrote, “Had the Holocaust not penetrated so deeply into the national consciousness, I doubt whether the conflict of Israelis and Palestinians would have led to so many anomalies.... We must learn to forget.... We must uproot the domination of that historical ‘remember!’ over our lives” (Elkana 1988).14 The timing of these polemics reflects the growing criticism of formerly sacred institutions in Israeli society. The renewed alliance with mythic centers in 1967 war led to disillusionment among those who did not share the Messianic fervor that swept the country. The Yom Kippur War eroded Israel’s trust in the wisdom of its generals and leaders. The Lebanon War (1982) and the first Palestinian intifada (1987–1993) diminished the glorification of territory, and dimmed the faith in the justice and inevitability of Israel’s wars (Bilu and Ben-Ari 1997: 232–233). The 1990s witnessed a rise in voices critical of Israeli historical narratives and myths, including the socalled new historians and post-Zionist historiography and sociology (for an overview, see Silberstein 1999). This demythologization process included the questioning of the role of the Shoah in Israel’s self-understanding, some building on “subversive voices” previously expressed in literature (Ezrahi 1985-6). Post-Zionist statements on the Shoah and its memory are often couched in highly acerbic language, which, in turn, heightens the

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rhetorical volume of the response of Zionist historians and commentators. For example, post-Zionist sociologist Moshe Zuckerman accuses the Right of “objectifying” the six million—depriving them of their individuality and lumping them all together as objects of mass extermination—and then portraying “the State of Israel as a teleologically understood straightening out (Ausrichtung) of the Holocaust ... furthering the Nazis aims by creating a narrative that responds to violence with further violence, power in response to powerlessness” (Zuckerman 1996: 64–66). Zionist Shoah historian Dan Michman responds that the discourse of post-Zionists like Zuckerman is openly manipulative because “their conscious intention is to change the nature and values of Israeli society, using the Shoah as a ‘treatment’ in order to achieve their objectives” (Michman 1997: 57–58). Over the last fifteen years, Holocaust memory has continued to be a political and ideological battleground (Bar-On 1995: 18–19),15 reflecting larger ideological struggles over Israel’s identity and the foundations of the Jewish State, while being influenced by changes in Israel’s security situation. During the last intifada, Israeli victims were more likely to be civilians on city buses than armed soldiers at the front. This resulted in a blurring of the difference between military heroism and civilian victimhood, as expressed through memorials to terror victims in military cemeteries (Feldman 2005b.) and mention of terror victims in commemorations of the fallen (LomskyFeder 2003). A consequence of this perception has been the veneration of all Holocaust survivors as heroes, and the recasting of fallen soldiers as innocent, Holocaust-like victims. The status of the Holocaust victim increases as he “is today given a major performative role in making citizenship national by carrying the terrors of Europe … into Israel … [and] simultaneously witness[ing to] both ends of the national progression from catastrophe to redemption” (Handelman 2004a: 175–176). As the memory of the victims is constantly “replenished” through fresh blood, new dead, and new conflicts throughout Israel’s sixtyyear history, Shoah memory is kept alive as well. In consequence, Israeli commemorative sites (lieux) for the Shoah dead, including historians’ debates, have not become “beleaguered and cold (markers) of a society without ritual” (Nora 1989: 12), but are constantly reinvested with new emotion, often through fresh losses whose memories condense on the surface of older representations and memory forms.

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Generational Time, the Search for Roots, and Israeli Ethnicity Along with increased fragmentation and politicization of Shoah memory, we find greater interest in the Shoah and greater identification with the victims of the Holocaust on the part of younger Israelis. Whereas a 1983 survey of students still showed ambivalent attitudes towards the non-fighting victims of the Shoah, in a survey conducted by education professor Yair Auron in 1989, the overwhelming majority felt proud of the conduct of Jews during the Holocaust. Undoubtedly, this was, in part, a function of changes in the surrounding society. Following the Yom Kippur War, prosperity, Westernization, and social and geographical mobility increased, and a hedonistic individualistic ethos arose, while the attractiveness of the two exemplars of the tzabar (the native Israeli)—the soldier and the pioneer kibbutznik-farmer—declined. The image of the Israeli soldier was severely damaged by the Yom Kippur War, perceived in Israel as a defeat, followed by the moral ambiguities posed by the Lebanon War and the Palestinian intifada.16 As for the kibbutznik, as Israel industrialized and global currents intruded, the ideology of the pioneers was replaced by the striving for a better quality of life among their children. Thus, the kibbutz retained barely enough ideological fervor to keep its utopian vision alive, much less “export” to the larger society. Many youths felt alienated, and turned to real or imagined integrative total environments of the past as anchor. This search for roots has generated or contributed to an entire series of phenomena in modern Israeli society. Among them are: the “return in repentance” (Aviad 1983) of youths to Jewish Orthodoxy; post-army backpacking trips to the Far East and Latin America (Cohen and Noy 2005); the sacralization of new shrines for restless spirits of Moroccan saints (Bilu and Ben-Ari, 1987); pilgrimages of Moroccan-born Israelis and their descendants to Morocco (Levy 1997); ethnic festivals (Dominguez 1989); Mizrahi music, research into Sephardic heritage, the rise of a strong Sephardic political party, Shas (The International World Sephardic Association; Dayyan 1999; Shenhav 2002a, 2002b); and many more. This same impetus may have directed descendants of survivors to search for their repressed roots in the Holocaust past. Students asked their grandparents questions and encouraged their elders to publish their memoirs. Dan Bar-On notes that in many cases, roots projects in school provided the impetus for pupils to question their

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grandparents and thus enable them to tell their stories about the Holocaust for the first time (Bar-On 1995: 32). Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the children of survivors did not wish to hear the stories of their parents—whether to protect their parents from reliving traumatic memories (Bar-On 1994: 24–25), or because it might make them different from the tzabarim they wished to emulate, the following generation were eager to hear their grandparents silenced stories. The survivors, in turn, encouraged by the receptive attitude of the younger generation or urged by their approaching old age and death (cf. Danielli 1994), were more prepared to speak out (cf. Bar-On 1994: 28). Many more survivor accounts have been produced since 1980 than in the period between 1945 and 1980. The growing interest of Israeli youths in the stories of their grandparents’ generation coincides with the State’s desire to unite the community in common memory, in face of religious and ethnic fragmentation and forces of globalization. Furthermore, global culture accords cultural capital and, occasionally, material compensation to children of victims (Bauman 1998; Ballinger 1998). In a study done on Israeli high school students, many defined themselves as having a family connection to the Shoah, although it might only have been a distantly related uncle, “as if this definition was a kind of entry ticket to Israeli society” (Bar-On 1994: 28).17 Yair Auron found that nearly 85 percent of respondents he surveyed in teacher training institutes agreed with the statement, “every Jew in the world must see himself as if he were a Holocaust survivor” (Auron 1993: 104). The degree of identification with the Shoah victims has grown over the last thirty years,18 both among Mizrahim and Ashkenazim (Auron 1993: 106–107). The promotion of roots in the shtetl and the suffering of Shoah victims have other implications for Israeli ethnicity as well. The flowering of the search for roots or heritage (Dominguez 1989) was fueled, in part, by Mizrahi Jews’ anger at their socioeconomic marginalization and the delegitimization of their culture by the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment of the early State of Israel. Some Mizrahi students have referred to the cultivation of Shoah memory in Israeli society as the “the revenge of the Ashke-natzim (= Nazis),” an eclipsing of the Mizrahi Jews’ marginalization (at the hands of the pioneering Ashkenazic society) by the greater suffering of the (mostly Ashkenazic) Shoah survivors. Some have cynically nicknamed Holocaust Memorial Day the “maimouna of the Ashkenazim,” as a counterpoint to the North African Jewish celebration. The implication is,

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that through State-sponsored commemoration of the Shoah and the “glorious past of (Eastern) European Jewry” now displayed before the entire nation, Ashkenazim, too, can now show pride in their roots and be as trendily “rooted” (giz’i) as Moroccan Jewry. They may thus acquire the moral authority of the victim and the air of authentic rootedness in the past, all while maintaining their superior economic and social status (cf. Bauman 1998; Ballinger 1998). In response, the State and its institutions have instituted educational programs designed to present Mizrahi Jewish suffering in the Shoah (see below, p45 and Resnik 2003: 306-307).19 Of course, the emphasis on common destiny and common Jewish suffering in the Shoah as the glue for national identity is one that excludes Arabs as effectively as Jewish religious affiliation would.20 In the view of those who would promote citizenship and common civil rights as the basis for a secular, more universalist communal identity (cf. Kimmerling 1985), the role played by the Shoah in Israeli identity is mostly a basis for division rather than unity.

The Shoah in Israeli Education—School Textbooks and Curricula Another important means of conveying understandings of the Holocaust is through school textbooks and curricula. School education is one of the primary means of socializing young members of the society to accept the worldviews of the society as part of their taken-forgranted, their habitus (Bourdieu 1977: 72). Citing Durkheim, the Handelmans write (1990: 162): “The reproduction of social order depends in large measure on the exercise of the power of education through the requisite apparatus of the state.” The State, in its early stages, saw one of the primary functions of school education as mobilization for national goals. Ben-Zion Dinur, the first Education Minister, said: “The State is required to educate its citizens towards full identification of each individual with the State.” In a recent article, Julia Resnik (Resnik 2003; cf. Gur-Ze’ev 1999) has surveyed Israeli Holocaust education, emphasizing how the State-sponsored system forms “national subjects,” in accordance with the State’s selfinterest in each period.21 The major instruments used to transmit consciousness of the Shoah in the schools are mandated school curricula and textbooks (verbal narratives) and Holocaust Memorial Day commemorative ceremonies (ritualized poems, music, and bodily practices). Most of

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the major trends in Shoah memory described in the previous sections were reflected in Israeli schools, albeit with several years’ delay. Thus, in the early years of the State, the Shoah received little attention. Even after the official Memorial Day for the Shoah was fixed by the Knesset (1953), one-third of all schools did not mark Holocaust Memorial Day (Keren 1986: 31ff.). The first curriculum in Holocaust education was introduced into the school system in 1963, and it was restricted to a single six-hour unit, as part of the general history curriculum. The few mentions of the Shoah in Israeli schoolbooks of the period tend to demonize the perpetrators, accuse the free world of complicity, and defend national pride by extolling the fighters of Zionist youth movements while condemning the victims as those who went as sheep to the slaughter (Schatzker 1987: 385; Keren 1988: 1031). For a short period in the early 1970s, we find the Holocaust described as a series of stages that developed in Nazi Germany as a result of contingent human decisions made in changing circumstances (Firer 1989). Analytic methods took preference over emotional commemorations and universal elements were promoted over specifically Jewish ones. This corresponded to the aim of “normalizing” Israel, of integrating her as an equal member in the community of nations (Schatzker 1987: 385–386). Following the absorption of changes in self-understanding generated by the Six Day War, however (see above), the Ministry of Education formulated a sixty-hour curriculum on the struggle for the establishment of the State of Israel, which included ten hours on the Shoah. This approach “sought to arouse in students a direct identification with the traumatic experience of the Shoah” (Schatzker 1987: 386) by emphasizing “spiritual resistance” rather than active revolt. In the mid to late 70s a new program, written by Arieh Carmon, was introduced with the aim of “foster(ing) personal responsibility in order to prevent a potential sliding on that human continuum towards such a recurrence” (Carmon 1988: 84). The program showed the process of socialization followed by adolescents in Nazi Germany and provided moral dilemmas of the Shoah period in order to aid the student in his search for meaning and moral development. Carmon opposed the emphasis on what he called “the ethos of the survivor,” which “thrive(s) on accumulated anxieties and the need to invest energies, physical as well as intellectual, to maintain physical existence” (ibid.: 81). The educational establishment found this program too radical, too distant from their traditional concepts of Holocaust education (Keren 1988: 1034; Carmon

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1988: 86) and the textbook was soon replaced22 by another written by Professor Chaim Schatzker. Schatzker had criticized the existing programs for their overemphasis on emotion. He was opposed to what he saw as an instrumentalization of the Shoah to teach moral values. His program emphasized historical knowledge of the Shoah, connecting it to both the Jewish and the universal contexts (Schatzker 1981; cf. Ofer 1996: 892–893). The textbook he coauthored with Israel Gutmann (Hashoah Umashmauta 1983, revised in 1987) was the most widely used one in the Israeli school system through the 1990s. According to Schatzker, the common understandings of the Shoah in Israel as of the early 1980s were: (1) the Shoah was connected to Jewish history; (2) it was the peak of traditional anti-Semitism; (3) it was unique; incomparable to other killings; (4) it was linked to the establishment of the State; and (5) the primary significance of Shoah is for the people and the State of Israel (1987: 388–389). Julia Resnik (Resnik 2003: 306–307) argues that these understandings were part of a broader educational program designed to create Jewish unity in the face of growing distance between Israeli and Diaspora Jews and between Ashkenazic Jews and Mizrahim. In order to insure that Mizrahim identify with the Shoah and to avoid creating an ethnic hierarchy of suffering, beginning in the 1990s, Israeli institutions have emphasized the role of Sephardim in the Shoah, while claiming the survivors’ stories as a national legacy. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin provides an enlightening illustration: “In the study program for the matriculation exams … students are asked to prove that Hitler’s intention was to kill all the Jews, and they are asked to deal with the fate of the Jews of Thessalonica, and to describe the suffering of the Jews of North Africa. This is the way that the Ministry of Education has chosen to transmit Jewish national consciousness—the fact that we are ‘one people’—by showing that Hitler wished to kill not only the Ashkenazim” (Raz-Krakotzkin 1994: 127, n. 28). Judeo-Islamic, history too, when taught in the schools, is often shaped by Shoah discourse, highlighting pogroms as evidence of relentless hostility towards Jews in the Arab world. This, writes Ella Shohat, hijacks the Jews of Islam from their own geography and subsumes them into the history of the European-Ashkenazi shtetl” (Shohat 1999: 6).23 Thus, the common historic Jewish destiny, as signified through the Holocaust, underlines common persecution and anti-Semitism, which may also support a view of the State as a bastion against world anti-Semitism (Resnik 2003: 307–308).24

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The potentially divisive force of the Shoah (as an event that primarily affected European Jewry) is further offset by stressing the uniqueness of the event as fundamentally separate from both the Diaspora Jewish past and European and world history. School curricula generally teach twentieth-century Jewish history, general history, and the Shoah in separate units, using different textbooks. This impedes the drawing of universal moral lessons from the Shoah as well (Dror 2001: 32–37). The success of this orientation is reflected in a survey of students at teacher-training institutes conducted by Yair Auron (Auron 1993). The degree of identification with the Jews of the Shoah is much stronger than the identification with the Jewish past or Jewish communities abroad. While the Shoah was perceived as the most important event in Jewish history (more important than the establishment of the State), the most common lessons derived from the Shoah were related to State security and the perception of the world’s hostility. The students surveyed did not link the Shoah to world history and had minimal knowledge of the broader context of pre-War European society (German or Jewish) or the Second World War.

Spaces and Times of Israeli Shoah Commemoration Any study of the social formation of memory must focus on those acts of communication that make remembering in common possible, primarily through public orchestrations of symbols (Connerton 1989: 39). Those symbols subsequently assume a taken-for-granted nature in the eyes of later observers (Kertzer 1988: 3–5). Among the most important models for the collective memory of Israeli society are its national monuments, its commemorative calendar, and its memorial ceremonies. Public Shoah monuments provide spaces that draw citizens on civil religious pilgrimages where they can immerse themselves in a landscape of State-sanctified representations of the communal past, especially on Holocaust Memorial Day. The calendar creates a nationwide synchronization; it imbues days with joy or sorrow, mourning or victory, by building the Holocaust into existing traditional rhythms of time. The feeling-tone of that time is conveyed through commemorative ceremonies at the central memorial sites, replicated in local high schools, broadcast throughout the nation and reinforced through the Poland trips.

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Yad Vashem: Monument and Memory The Israeli government was a major actor in erecting Yad Vashem and determining the timing and forms of Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration; both were established by the 1953 Knesset Yad Vashem Law.25 The declared purpose of Yad Vashem is “to gather into the homeland the memory of all those of the Jewish people who fell and gave their lives, fought and rebelled ... because of their belonging to the Jewish people.” The law empowers Yad Vashem to set up a memorial project, to gather testimony, and to “pass on its lesson on to the people,” to foster “an experience of united memory of its heroes and victims ... and to represent Israel in international projects commemorating the victims” (“The Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Law—Yad Vashem” 19 August 1953).26 Both the law founding Yad Vashem and its subsequent erection express the value of the redeemed Land. Exile is ended and redeemed through the political rebirth of the nation-state on its land, symbolically expressed through the gathering in of the Holocaust victims, the dead of “over there,” to their final resting place “home” in Israel, the land of the Fathers.27 During the debate on the founding of Yad Vashem, MK Idov Cohen said, “(we need also) something concrete, something in hewn stone. Perhaps we will be worthy, I hope we will be worthy, of returning to the Western Wall ... we must also establish—and I emphasize, also—a wall! This nation is a nation of bereaved and orphans. Hundreds of thousands who do not have the possibility of coming to the graves of their dear ones ... let us give them here, in the State ... a place of meditation of the soul, where they can be alone with the memories of the families” (I. Cohen, in Divrei Haknesset 14 (1953): 1341). We see here two apparent paradoxes. First, Yad Vashem was to be a national symbol for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, and at the same time, a place where mourners could be alone, a place to facilitate the “meditation of the soul”—a substitute tombstone. This was partially resolved through the erection of an enclosed “religious” place of mourning, the Ohel Yizkor (Tent of Memory; erected 1957–1961), housing ashes of the victims and an eternal flame, and the creation of a large plaza for mass ceremonies by the Ghetto Fighters’ Monument. The second paradox is that Yad Vashem was to be a religious site, a substitute Western Wall, but one established by the Knesset and linked to the State. This paradox is integral to Israeli civil religion, and reflects the charged relations between the Jewish religion and the State of Israel as a whole. At Yad Vashem, this is spatially expressed through the incorporation of religious elements (the eter-

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nal flame of the Tent of Memory) into a larger encompassing landscape of sacrifice. A similar procedure is employed, as we shall see, in incorporating religious elements, such as the cantor and the Yizkor and Kaddish prayers, into the Holocaust Memorial Day national ceremony, which is framed by military and Statist symbols. This logic of commemorative construction, allied to the cult of the fallen (Mosse 1979; 1990; Azaryahu 1996) is clearly reflected in a speech made by former Yad Vashem director Gideon Hausner, which draws heavily on the Passover Haggadah: “When your sons ask you tomorrow why are you mourning for the hurban of Europe?... you will answer them, in pointing to the monument which you have established here, that thousands of Israelite congregations were destroyed ... and those remaining have to fill the place of those missing from their tasks ... to sustain and strengthen the State, which is the only security for our physical existence and spiritual creativity” (Hausner [1969] in Rein 1993: 79).28 The appropriation of religious symbols in a civic shrine such as Yad Vashem, is, as James Young writes, a two-way process: “The sanctification of particular images of the Holocaust produced in sacred places like Yad Vashem ... not only integrates, legitimizes and mobilizes the society, it also makes some interpretations of events holier than other interpretations” (Young 1993: 260). In the course of its fifty-year history, Yad Vashem has struggled with the challenge of making the absence of presence into the presence of absence. Unlike memorial sites of the cult of the fallen (Mosse 1979; 1990), the bones of the dead are not present at Yad Vashem, nor did the Holocaust take place on Israeli territory. This absence was filled through the construction of outdoor monuments to the heroes and enclosed museum exhibitions to the victims. Throughout its development, Yad Vashem reflected changes in Israeli conceptions of the Shoah and its relation to the State. In the early years of statehood, Israel saw itself as the antithesis to the Jewish victims who were seen as going as sheep to the slaughter, while it claimed to be the legitimate heir to Diaspora Jewry. This was reflected in the landscape by the proximity of Yad Vashem to the Mt. Herzl military cemetery, along with their separation by a wall, barrier, and circle of trees. These instruct us that we have entered a different world, the Europe of the Shoah, and that Yad Vashem is a foreign land within Israel. In Handelman’s words, “The Holocaust dead can be synthesized into the national vision of holism only by making disjunction integral to this holism” (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1997: ). Recently (2003), a path was opened between

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Yad Vashem and the national and military cemetery at Mount Herzl, marked out by new monuments to terror victims and Holocaust survivors who fell as Israeli soldiers in battle. The path is the venue of an annual procession of youth groups linking the sites (cf. Feldman 2005b: 25-28). This change reflects the bridging of the discontinuity between the soldier who sacrifices himself on the altar of the State in combat and the victim of the Holocaust. This is a consequence of Israel’s experience with terror directed against civilians over the past decade. More than an antithesis to Shoah weakness, present life in the State (and death for the State) is thus depicted as a continuation of the same cosmic forces of persecution and victimization. The understandings of Yad Vashem are, of course, not determined solely by the shaping of its space. The social context of the visit (school, group of survivors, military unit, new immigrants, diplomats, tourists, etc.), the narration of the guide, and the previous experience of the visitors generate different interpretations of the site.

Holocaust Memorial Day: Calendar and Commemoration Similar strategies of encompassing religious symbols within a civil religious frame were employed in shaping the national liturgical calendar. As Yosef Haim Yerushalmi wrote, in Jewish history, the survival and permanence of historical events in collective memory depended on their “ritual transfiguration,” through incorporation into the liturgical calendar (Yerushalmi 1982: 40). In the case of catastrophes, this was done by fixing public days of fasting, mourning, and prayer. After an initial period in which the Shoah was not marked by the State at all,29 Holocaust Memorial Day was fixed as a national day of mourning in 1953, and in 1959, the commemorative forms for Holocaust Memorial Day were established through a second law of the Knesset; many of these forms copied those of Memorial Day for the Fallen Israeli Soldiers, including the presence of a military honor guard as an integral part of the ceremonies (cf. Ben-Amos and BatEl 1999). The day chosen for Holocaust Memorial Day, the twenty-seventh of Nisan, places it in a cycle commencing with Passover and continuing with Remembrance Day and Independence Day. This sequence instructs the onlooker that World/exilic Jewry is rescued from utter chaos and death (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and through self-sacrifice (Memorial Day for Fallen Israeli Soldiers), raised to the order and life of the State of Israel (Independence Day) (Handelman and Katz 1990; Young 1993: 263–281; Handelman

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2004a: 93–142). Again, the dominant strategy was one of ritually encompassing traditional religious elements within a civil religious frame. Thus, when Menachem Begin sought to move Holocaust Memorial Day to Tish’a Be’av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, he was vehemently opposed, both by the partisans who wished to preserve the uniqueness of their struggle, as well as by those who feared that the secular ritual of Holocaust Memorial Day risked being overshadowed by partisan religious forms entrenched in Tish’a Be’av, thus alienating secular Jewish Israelis. Moreover, other Knesset members argued that the new date would hamper efforts to propagate Shoah memory (in the forms sanctioned by the State) throughout the country, as Tish’a Be’av falls during school vacation (Yadlin, in Divrei Haknesset 67: 507). This objection signals the recognition of the significant role of the school as the agent of diffusion of collective memory. One of the most important elements in Shoah commemoration since the 1960’s has been the performance of the annual Holocaust Memorial Day school ceremony. In Israeli education, ceremonies beginning with Israeli kindergarten holiday celebrations “are designed less to instruct didactically or to encourage reflection … [than to] arous[e] emotion through symbolic forms that evoke collective sentiments [through ...] media that engage the senses more than the critical faculties” (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1990: 167). Through their commonly performed bodily reenacting of past events, the group asserts its identity with the past, as part of a unified group moving through history. Ben-Amos and Bat-El suggest that the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies must be interpreted along with the Memorial Day ceremonies for the fallen as a semiotic pair (see further, Handelman 2004a: 93–142), as the Memorial Day ceremonies follow one week later and its forms served as a model for Yom Hashoah school ceremonies. Both begin with a moment of silence, when the siren is sounded. This creates two minutes of “frozen time” to identify with the fallen and coordinates the lived time of each school ceremony with national time (Bet-El and Ben-Amos 1999: 467; cf. Young 1993: 276–280). 30 Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies may be accompanied by recitation of the names of the death camps or by the reading of the names of victims. Directly following the siren, the students, dressed in blue and white (or, on occasion, in black), will gather in an auditorium or in the school yard. The students performing the ceremony will usually arrange themselves in a line facing the crowd, with a student carrying a large flag positioned at either end.

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Sometimes, the school flag will be lowered to half-mast. The students will often be dressed in blue and white and read their texts from folders often carrying the word “zakhor!” (remember). The audience is often addressed in military terms as employed in the national ceremony at Yad Vashem: “The congregation will stand in silence,” “the congregation may be seated.” This will be followed by a series of poems and readings, most of them culled from booklets prepared by the Ministry of Education. A text or prayer, often Yizkor will be recited; often a psalm as well. Detailed witness texts will be read, or personal testimony will be transmitted by a survivor. Sad songs, not necessarily related to the Shoah, will be interspersed among the readings. The ceremony will include the lighting of memorial candles or torches and for the dead. Sometimes, the school principal will address the students and, in National Religious schools, the school rabbi. The ceremony will always end with the national anthem, Hatikvah. The school ceremonies create an imagined unity of the commemorating congregation, which recites the same texts at the same time. The ceremony moves from the silence of contemplation, filled by the wailing of the siren, to the active, loud participation in the singing of Hatikvah” (Bat-El and Ben-Amos 1999: 479).The order of prayers and national songs is a further manifestation of the model of ritual encompassing, whereby the traditional symbols are marshaled to support the sanctity of the State. Certainly, there are some differences between the two ceremonies. The iconography differs—torches and military insignias for Memorial Day; yellow stars, barbed wire, striped prisoner’s clothes, and railroad tracks leading through a gate for Yom Hashoah. BenAmos suggests that Memorial Day for the Fallen Israeli Soldiers, seen as an ongoing struggle between Arabs and Israelis, is constantly “replenished” with new war dead, often recent alumni and brothers. Thus, the absence of the fighters from among the living is sensed more immediately. The Holocaust, on the other hand, is a one-time phenomenon that steadily recedes in history, and hence, must be corporealized through the telling of personal stories or the presence of a survivor on stage. I suggest that while the texts, songs, ritual postures, and sequences of the school ceremonies in Israel are an important model for the ceremonies that take place in Poland, the prominence of ‘veterans’ of the Poland voyages as performers of school ceremonies endows the ceremonies with new associations, images, and resonances, drawn from Poland voyage experiences. Ben-Amos also claims that the greater historical distance allows for greater flexibility in the makeup of the Holocaust Memorial Day

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ceremony. Based on an empirical study carried out over a period of seven years in the 1990s, Edna Lomsky-Feder reports that many Memorial Day ceremonies have undergone significant change in the 1990s, reflecting the personalization and privatization of memory in Israeli society and the lack of consensus over Israel’s wars and the sacrifice of its children (Lomsky-Feder 2003). The Holocaust has been less subject to these criticisms and its ceremonies conform more closely to a standard pattern. Thus, the 1995 lighting of a seventh torch (in addition to the six for the six million) for other persecuted nations and cultures in the Kedma school (which emphasizes Mizrahi identity and multiculturalism) raised a major furor (Levy and Barkai 1998: 27–28, 36–38; cf. Landau 1999). Invented national rites, Hobsbawm and Ranger (1982) note, are particularly inflexible; “They represent the idea of unchanging stability in a society of continuous innovation” (Connerton 1989: 64). The repetition of many of the same texts, prayers, songs, and ritual forms in the same place at the same time of day over a oneweek time span, often bridged by numerous television programs, newspaper articles, and school lessons on the events encourages students to conflate the victims of the Shoah and the fallen of Israel’s wars, understanding both as sacrifices on the altar of the State.31 The strong “we” feeling created between the Shoah and the student discourages reflection on universal implications of the events. The similar commemorative forms in the school ceremonies encourage a merging of the Arab enemies of Israel’s wars with the “Nazis and their helpers of other nations” of the Yom Hashoah ceremony texts. There has been, however, a shift in the importance granted the two ceremonies. If, in the early years of statehood, Holocaust victims drew their legitimacy from the partisans whose participation in active combat made them worthy predecessors of Israeli fighters for independence, today, Israeli soldiers increasingly acquire legitimacy insofar as they become associated with innocent victims, with the Shoah. In the late 1980s, the processes active in preserving and transmitting Shoah memory in the schools gave birth to the youth voyages to Poland. These voyages build on understandings made manifest in school curricula, memorial sites, and school ceremonies. Here, however, they are extended over eight days, take place in a foreign environment, and sometimes become the major focus of the entire academic year. How does the Ministry of Education shape space, time, and ritual in order to create a convincing, totalizing Shoah experience? What understandings of history and the nation do these

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voyages reflect ? What effect do they have on the commemorative forms and dominant images of the Shoah in Israel? Most of these questions will concern us in the next chapter, while discussion of the final question will be postponed to Chapter 6.

Notes 1. For a longer account of Israeli Shoah memory, see Segev 1991; Ofer 1996; Zertal 1998; Stauber 2000; Zertal 2002; Shapira 1997; Michman 1997a; Yablonka 1999; Porat 2003. 2. In the early 50s, 350,000 out of 2 million Jews living in Israel were Holocaust refugees; nearly half the population had some family connection (Ofer 1996: 916, n. 88). 3. The reasons for the survivors’ mass immigration to Israel are the topic of heated current debate. Some scholars (Segev 1991; Zertal 1996; Gorodzhinsky 1998) argue that the survivors’ immigration (and the acquiescence of the Western nations to it) was largely a result of the Israeli yishuv emissaries’ insensitive manipulation of the survivors, in order to further the Zionist cause. Others argue that Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders were responding to the overwhelming desires of the survivor population to live in a Jewish state (Ofer 1996: 853–854). For a sharp criticism of Post-Zionist historians’ view of the relation of the nascent State to the survivors, see Shapira 1997: 27-33. See also Yablonka 1999. 4. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer of Berghahn Books for bringing the significance of this quote to my attention. 5. The lionization of the armed resistance and the denigration of noncombatants, as well as the unwillingness to listen to the concentration camp survivors, was common to post-War American and European societies, as well (cf. Michman 1997b: 154). 6. Although, in the Knesset discussion on the Yad Vashem Law (1953), some representatives insisted on the inclusion of all victims of the Shoah, whether fighters or not, among those worthy of being remembered by the State (see Nurock in Divrei Haknesset 14: 1335–1337). 7. For a more detailed and nuanced account, see Yablonka 1998: 43–78. 8. The section on the ritual nature of the Eichmann trial is based on an unpublished paper written by Sebastian Geisslinger under my guidance, “Der Eichmann Prozess als Ritual der israelischen Civil Religion,” Hebrew University, Jerusalem, August 1998. Although the ritualized nature of the trial was recognized by some (“The trial resembled nothing so much as mutatis mutandis, a massive Passion play, in which the members of an entire community play parts” [Mintz 1984: 239–240]), I am not aware of any previous analysis of the Eichmann trial using this approach.

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9. For references to Israelis’ association of the Arab threat with the Shoah in the period immediately preceding the Six Day War, see Segev 1991: 362–369, 524–525, n. 4–15; Ofer 1996: 881–884, 919–920, n. 147–151, 154–158; Keren 1986: 160ff. On the relation of Gush Emunim to the Yom Kippur war, see Feige 2006. 10. Sznaider and Levy provide (2006: 108) an additional insight: that the victory of the Six Day War convinced opponents of Israel that Israel’s destruction could not be achieved by military means, and the battle subsequently shifted to the diplomatic front. In opposition to the resolution of “Zionism is racism,” it became more imperative to unite Israeli citizens and strengthen Israel in the world arena by depicting anti-Zionism (or even opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation of the territories) as a continuation of Holocaust persecution of the Jews. 11. The same practice was repeated, but with orange stars, by protesters against the evacuation of Gaza Strip settlements in December 2004. 12. ANZAC, like Auschwitz, has also generated pilgrimage to sites by young Australians in recent years, though their forms and attitudes differ considerably (see West 2002). 13. For a comparison between the historians’ debates in Germany and Israel, see Sznaider and Levi 2006: 120–127. 14. Similar views were formulated in 1980 by journalist Boaz Evron. See Evron 1980a: 12, and, in response, Bauer 1980, as well as Evron’s reaction in Evron 1980b. 15. Thus, right-wing opponents of Premier Yitzhak Rabin, after first depicting him in an Arab headdress, then put up posters with Rabin dressed in Himmler’s SS uniform. 16. Although the combat soldier may still be the hegemonic model for Israeli masculinity (Ben-Ari 1998), the prestige of the soldier within Israeli society has continued to decline, especially as a result of the Lebanon War (1982) and the Intifada (1989–1994). The most recent Lebanon War (2006) only furthers this process. 17. The use of the Shoah as a means of one-upmanship within a growing culture of victimization is particularly prominent among American Jews. See Kugelmass 1993; Neeman- Arad 1996–97; Bauman 1998; Bleiweiss 1998. 18. This can be seen by comparing Auron’s results with previous surveys posing the same questions. See, for example, Farago 1984. 19. Most recently (2005), a prominent space in the new Yad Vashem museum depicts the Nazis’ persecutions of the Jews of North Africa. 20. Although some efforts have been made to introduce the Shoah in education in the Israeli-Arab sector (see Shoham, Shiloah, and Kalisman 2003), and, in 2002, a well-publicized group of Arab-Israeli educators, clergy, writers, and others traveled to Poland to study the Shoah and understand its role in Israeli identity. 21. Though I basically agree with Resnik, my approach gives less prominence to the conscious, instrumental aims of the State, and more to implicit shared understandings. 22. For more details on rejected Israeli Shoah textbooks, see Gur-Ze’ev 1999. 23. This is also expressed through the Zionist historiography of the farhud in Iraq, a pogrom against Jews of Baghdad that broke out during World War II. See Shenhav 2002b: 110–111.

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24. For a one-sided view relating Shoah education to the denial of Palestinian otherness, see Gur-Zee’v 1999; 2000; 2001. 25. The Knesset discussions of the Yad Vashem Law and subsequent debates on it provide fascinating insights into the formation of State-sanctioned memory. See Divrei Haknesset 14 (1953): 1310–1314, 1331–1354, 2402–2409;. 24 (1959): 2118–2119; 38 (1963): 307–308; 67: 2801–2805; 80 (1977): 564–567). The latter debates Begin’s attempt to merge Holocaust Memorial Day with the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. See Brog 1997b; Young 1993: 270-271. On the aims of 1953 Education Minister Ben Zion Dinur, see Ram 1995. 26. For studies of the history and landscape of Yad Vashem, including its relation to Mount Herzl , see Brog 1997; Brog 2003; Rein 1993; Lishinsky 1983; Segev 1991: 420–421; Ofer 1996: 916, n. 84; Young 1993; Handelman and ShamgarHandelman 1990; 1997; 2004a: 145–170. 27. This concept was also corporealized through communities’ planting of Jewish National Fund memorial groves to commemorate their dead. Judith Baumel writes that (1995: 163) “transplanting the non-existent graves of Holocaust martyrs from a European location to an Israeli one was a means of granting the victims symbolic roots and ensuring their spiritual rebirth on Israeli soil.” On the forest as national icon, see Zerubavel 1997. 28. Hausner’s speech is an excellent illustration of the use of traditional religious forms to endow civil religious commemoration with greater sacrality. He uses the language of Deut. 6:20–25, which is familiar to his listeners from their annual recital of the Passover Hagaddah, to insert his discourse within the paradigm of the Exodus: “And if your son shall ask you tomorrow saying, what are the testimonies and the laws and the statutes which the Lord our God has commanded you, you shall tell your son, we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord took us out with outstretched arm... to bring us to the land he promised to our fathers.” 29. Neima Barzel argues that the leaders of the young State assumed that antiSemitism was linked to the abnormal situation of the Jew in the Diaspora, a situation that would disappear with the acceptance of the State of Israel within the community of nations. Hence, Ben Gurion opposed the development of myths, rites, and symbols that might heighten antagonism of Israel towards the nations (Barzel 1994: 9–14). 30. This “national unity time” has become so sacred, that groups traveling between death camps in Poland will stop for a moment of silence at the time that it is celebrated in Israel (whose clock is one hour ahead of Poland’s), even though no siren is sounded there. 31. Eyal Sivan, in his film Zakhor: Slaves of Memory (E. Sivan 1990), claims that the drilled repetition of incomprehensible texts and unpronounceable place names (Chelmno, Belzec, etc.), along with the overwhelmingly militaristic aspects of the ceremonies, brainwashes kids and commands them in the name of the Shoah victims and the fallen in battle that they become good soldiers. The data, including some he shows in his own film, do not support so simplistic a conclusion.

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3

The Structure of the Poland Voyages

As I put forth in chapter 1, I see pilgrimage as the closest analogue to the experience of the voyage as described by students and educators. As characterized by Turner and elaborated by Eade and Sallnow (Eade and Sallnow 2000: x-xiv), although pilgrims’ roles are often shaped by various authority structures that construct the spatial and temporal frames in which pilgrims’ behavior takes place, the performance of pilgrimage is loaded with creative potentials for self-transformation. In the chapter that follows, I will analyze many of the “top-down” factors built in to the structure of the Poland voyages by the Ministry of Education. I begin with an outline of the origins of the voyage and its explicit aims, and continue with a description of the administrative apparatus and the major role-players. I will then itemize the preparations made preceding the voyage, and survey the educational materials and the material objects provided to the participants. I will explain the processes determining the logistic arrangements, security arrangements, and the preparation program for students and guides. I will then turn to the itinerary, analyzing how time and space are constructed in order to create total experience of Holocaust Poland. I will show that, even while structuring space and time, Ministry of Education officials and staff do not merely manipulate symbols and impose ideologies, but that many of the results reflect unconscious, taken-forgranted shared Israeli assumptions about the way education, rituals, and trips should work. In subsequent chapters, I will turn to the performance enactments, which not only enable the absorption of hegemonic messages, Notes for this section begin on page 92.

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but also create venues where new, alternative meanings may be generated, articulated, and developed. There, the main voices cited in explaining these aspects will be those of the students, guides, and witnesses.

Origins, History, and Proclaimed Aims of the Voyage During the first decades following the Holocaust, very few Jews visited the sites of destruction, and organized pilgrimage to Poland was unheard of (Kugelmass 1993). The first Israeli youth groups to ever go to Poland traveled there in 1966 to 1967 as part of an exchange program, as guests of the Polish government. Auschwitz was part of their itinerary, and, indeed, left a great impression on the participants.1 After the Six Day War and the ensuing break in diplomatic relations between Israel and Poland, the trips were discontinued. We can only speculate as to whether, under other circumstances, the youth visits would have flourished. I believe that the time was not ripe, nor was mass youth travel abroad financially possible for most Israelis in the late 1960s. In 1988, with the thaw in diplomatic relations between the Polish communist government and the State of Israel, Oded Cohen, head of the Ministry of Education of Youth Division (later renamed the Society and Youth Authority), was invited, as part of an official Israel Ministry of Education group, to visit Poland. As he described it: They showed me the program: a meeting with this Konsomol [sic] and that Konsomol [sic] and this youth center... I was supposed to go to Chernobyl that day, but The Holy One Blessed Be He helped me, and the explosion took place that day and I didn’t go there... And as we’re sitting at the official meeting, (the representative) asks me if the gentleman has any suggestions about the program. And that Sabbath was the Torah reading of the story of “It is my brothers whom I am seeking,” and my evil inclination, tzabar, Israeli, sat and studied, studied and looked at, read thousands of pages, was happy that the explosion took place at Chernobyl and I didn’t need to go there. ...And I say, “Does the gentleman mean seriously that I may ask for whatever I wish?” He says, “But you are out guest, ask whatever you wish!” I say, “You know for us Jews, and I am an observant Jew, as you see, on Shabbat we read ‘It is my brothers whom I am seeking’…Here! Here is the itinerary that I want!”…. And so, for seven days, I did about the same itinerary that you’re doing, the Poles accompanied us... Anyway, from Auschwitz you don’t return the same... Like fire in our bones, one of the main things we decided then was that we have to bring the youth of Israel to Poland... I pestered them until the project

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came about (Lecture to Ministry of Education Poland guide preparation course, 27 August 1992).

Thus, the voyage was named, “It is my brothers I am seeking.” Whether or not this event marks the real point of origin of the voyage,2 this etiological narrative is the story told to prospective guides by the meshuga ladavar, the “nut,” the chief mover and shaker of the voyages in the Ministry of Education. In this account, the goyim are regarded with moral indifference at best; at worst, “they” (the present-day gentiles/Ukrainians) deserved Chernobyl for what they did to the Jews. National identity—“my brothers”—is all that matters. Modern-day Poland is of no interest. In particular, the juxtaposition of “I was glad it happened (to someone else)”/ “It is my brothers I am seeking” suggests that the strong opposition of “us” and “them” was built into the voyage from its inception. The first two Ministry of Education–organized groups, with 190 participants in each, left in October/November 1988. The number of students traveling to Poland has increased steadily: from several hundred in 1988, to over twenty-eight thousand in 2005 (Auron 2005: 68). In the first years of the program, the vast majority of students were sent by the Ministry of Education. Although they remain the largest single organizer, no more than a third of all students travel through them today. Programs of all agents, however, must receive the approval of the Ministry of Education. The Ministry has set the base itinerary, tone, security arrangements, and norms for most of the programs proposed by private agents. Their models have become canonical for over 90 percent of the voyages. Furthermore, the Ministry subsidizes their trips to the tune of one hundred to two hundred dollars per student, which makes their trips cheaper than those organized by private travel agents. Also, the well-oiled Ministry bureaucratic apparatus reduces the responsibility placed on individual teacher-organizers in each school. In the introductory statement of purpose, in its Director General’s Circular (DGC) of January 1991, the Ministry of Education and Culture declares “its readiness to encourage and assist interested pupils to visit the remains of the congregations of Israel and the death camps on Polish soil. We assume that pupils will return from this voyage with stronger links to the history of Israel and its heritage, firmer and more determined to build and assure their future, the future of the people and the State, and prepared to mobilize to contribute their share, the share of this generation, to guard the future of the nation and the State” (DGC 1991: 3).

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This statement of purpose frames the voyage as a patriotic duty. Through their visit to Poland, the students’ generation strengthens links to their heritage through becoming the guardians of the nation and the State. The Ministry portrays the trip as part of a three-part process, involving preparation, the trip itself, and follow-up activities. As we will see later (cf. Hazan 1999; 2001: 35–55), some effort has been invested in preparation activities, but very little has been done in the way of follow-up. The main focus has been the middle stage, the voyage itself. According to the DGC, the declared goals of the trip are: 1. “To learn about the wealth of Jewish spiritual and cultural life in Poland. 2. “To feel and to try to comprehend the depth and breadth of the destruction and the loss of the murdered Jews and uprooted Judaism. 3. “To feel and to try to comprehend the moral depravity and the deep level of dehumanization attained by the Nazis who devised, planned, and committed the murder of the Jewish people in the ghettos, forests, and concentration and death camps. 4. “To feel and to try to comprehend the full significance of the courageous stand and desperate struggle of the Jews who fought the enemy and his malevolent intentions. 5. “To feel and to try to comprehend the link of young Israelis to their community Jewish past, to deepen their identification with the fate of the Jewish people, and increase their sense of personal commitment to the continuity of Jewish life and the sovereign existence of the State of Israel. 6. “To bring about renewed investigation of terms, assumptions, and attitudes towards Jewish history, Jewish behavior during the Holocaust, the values of Zionism, the relations of Jews and non-Jews, and the values of morality and humanism. 7. “To enable the youth to act in practice to renew, conserve, and clean Jewish sites and remains scattered throughout Poland.”3 The DGC emphasizes the strengthening of particularistic modes of identification—those with the Jewish people or the State of Israel. Its main goal is to increase Jewish pride; it is a service to the dead, and a reminder of the precarious nature of Jewish existence. Only

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goal six makes any reference to universal values. Furthermore, the voyage is seen primarily as an emotional experience which cannot be adequately expressed in words. Most of the paragraphs begin with “to feel” and “to try to understand.” It is emotion that is to serve as the basis for comprehension. Identification and empathy is seen as both possible and desirable; intellectual comprehension is desirable but often seen as unattainable. In 1992, when Shulamit Aloni (of the left-of-center Ratz party) was appointed as Minister of Education, she subjected the Poland voyages to severe attack. She said: “The whole matter of flags and parades doesn’t appeal to me. I’m afraid that many youths return from there with the sense that power is the most important thing, and I want to bring back the true Jew, humanism. There are too many festivals here around the [subjects of] Holocaust, blows and suffering. Too many manipulations [emphasizing] that we are victims and that we have to be strong” (Antler 1992:). Her calls for curtailing and, later, reevaluating the trips, resulted in major public outcry. After Aloni’s ouster, in early 1993, her successor, Professor Amnon Rubenstein, commissioned a review of the voyages. He introduced two changes in the text of the DGC, placing greater emphasis on the humanistic and universal messages of the Holocaust as well as on intellectual understanding: 1. Instead of goal three (above), Rubenstein put forth the alternative paragraph: “To learn the principles of Nazi ideology, to learn the principles and conditions that lead to its rise and actualization, to acts of cruelty and bestiality unprecedented in human history. To understand the foundation of a totalitarian regime in whose framework Nazi Germany declared a war of annihilation against the Jewish people and murdered a third of our people, while also committing other crimes against humanity. To derive from this both the national lesson of the need for a strong, autonomous Jewish state, as well as the universal lesson of the obligation to guard and protect democracy and to struggle against all forms of racism.”

2. Rubenstein also added a paragraph: ”To learn and understand the complexity of Polish-Jewish relations throughout the common history of the two nations, in both its positive and negative aspects, and to understand the history and heritage of the Jews of Poland also against the background of Polish history and culture” (Revised DGC 1994).

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During his term of office, Rubenstein introduced several minor changes in the program. The meetings with Polish youth became a fixed (though not obligatory) element of the voyage (except for Orthodox school groups), and more sessions on Nazi ideology and Polish-Jewish and general Polish history were added to the guides’ preparatory course. The personnel responsible for the execution of the trips, however, remained unchanged, and the structure and execution of the trips has remained identical to that in force when National Religious Party representative Zevulun Hammer was Minister of Education (before 1992). Thus, the changes in the DGC were only cosmetic. With the return of a National Religious Party Minister of Education in 1996, and under the Likud Ministers who have served through most of the 1990s and beyond, the trips have continued as before; if anything, contact with modern Poland has been further reduced, often in the name of security.

The Title of the Voyage: Seeking my Brothers—the Masa to Poland The Voyage Group as Substitute Family The title of the voyage is, “It is my brothers whom I am seeking.” The voyage personnel are composed of three generations—survivor-witness, teacher-guide (many of them children of survivors), and student. Each generation is assigned a different role on the voyage, corresponding roughly to their role in the family. The members of the grandparents’ generation are to recount their lived experience. The second generation is represented by the administrators, guides, teachers, and medical staff. They provide factual information and take care of food, shelter, and transport. They are the students’ surrogate parents on the voyage, and must answer to the parents for anything occurring on the trip. They may transmit, sometimes passionately, what they have heard, or, more often, what they have read; but the power of the journey lies in the students’ ability to identify with the grandparents, bypassing the parents’ generation. The students are explicitly assigned the roles of guarantors of the future. In Jewish tradition, the sense of belonging to a single people and sharing a common fate has been expressed through common ritual practice furthering identification with an extended family (Yerushalmi 1982: 14, 40ff). In their analyses of Israeli kindergarten and school ceremonies, Don and Lea Handelman remind us that one of the larger aims of education in Israel is to transmit to the child the

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message that the familial bond is subordinate to the link of the individual to the State and that the loyalty to the State transcends family ties (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1990: 170–189). Israeli politicians, too, commonly liken the State and its citizenry to a great family (ibid.: 163). As we will see, many students identify their own grandparents with the witnesses, while witness-survivors frequently relate to the participants as grandchildren. The witnesses remind the youngsters of their duty to transmit the legacy of the past before it is lost to oblivion, while the empathic presence of the students may provide comfort for the “grandparents” in their old age. This family construction is transmitted through the roles of the staff members and their interaction in Poland (below, pp. 61-62). Indeed, I will argue (Chapter 5, pp. 204-208) that the public rituals performed in Poland adopt many of the forms of traditional familial mourning rites, but assign the familial roles to representatives of the nation. I will thus illustrate how the voyage constructs a so-called national family and discuss its further implications.

The Poland Voyage as a Masa The subtitle of the Ministry of Education voyage is, “The masa to Poland.” In his description of Zionist outings, Oz Almog contrasts (1997: 268–277) the word used for pleasure trips, tiyyul, with the word, masa, which is constituted by the following elements: (1) A masa is usually of longer duration than a tiyyul. (2) A masa involves physical or emotional difficulties. It is often meant to test one’s strength and endurance, rather than merely provide pleasure. (3) The destination is more important than what is seen along the way. (4) A masa involves conquest of territory through physical presence and display of national symbols. (5) A group on a masa tends to be physically more isolated from surrounding people than on a tiyyul. As a result, the group becomes a more self-contained unit. (6) A masa has militaristic aspects such as long hours, disciplined marching, and uniform clothes. It is also more likely to include ceremonial activities. (7) The communitas of pilgrims characterizes the participants. Relations between teachers and pupils become more egalitarian. (8) The masa presented an element of danger that had to be faced and overcome, sometimes a hostile population. All these elements are present in the voyages to Poland. A masa in Israel is also, however, bound up with physical challenges, harsh terrain, mountain climbing, map orientation, and discovery of new, unmarked sites, and extensive walking—“conquest of the land with one’s feet” (cf. Katriel 1995; Prawer 1995). The Israeli

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masa emphasized the (often erotic) imagery of unity of the nativeborn Israeli (typecast as male) with nature and his (female) land (cf. Ben-David 1997: 139). This, suggests Almog, was an answer (whether conscious or not) to the hidden anti-Semitic argument which bothered the Zionists, that “the Jews are like parasitic growths, which can thrive only on other trees, which is why they live among the nations” (Almog 1997: 269). The masa to Poland, on the other hand, is carried out primarily by bus, and using tourist hotels, with very little walking, no panoramic views, no observation of nature, minimal use of maps, and no emphasis on discovery of new places. I suggest that, as this masa travels to the dead exile, students are to relive imagined behavioral patterns and relations to space of the “Old Jew” in Poland. Within the Zionist narrative, the exilic nature of Polish terrain is reflected through alienation of Diaspora Jews from soil and physicality. Thus, the physical challenges of the Israeli masa on native soil are replaced by the emotional difficulties of the exilic masa in Poland.4 The Ministry of Education’s choice of the word masa is also a way of saying to the students, educators, and the larger society: “This is not a vacation; this is not play; this is serious” (cf. Handelman 1990: 63–72). The voyage’s title indicates that it is both a search for family roots of the nation, as well as an ordeal to be overcome on the way to adulthood.

Administration and Voyage Staff Following his return from Poland in 1988 (see above), the head of the Society and Youth Authority of the Ministry of Education, Oded Cohen, set up an ad hoc committee of people to run the operation. Thus, Cohen became probably the most influential entrepreneur of the Poland voyages. The Society and Youth Authority has expanded thanks to the Poland trips, which have become their most important annual project. The voyages have created a tremendous demand, which, in turn, enables the Authority to grow and provide more opportunities.

Voyage Staff The students of the Ministry of Education trips travel together in delegations. Each delegation has a rigid and well-developed organizational structure and itinerary. In the course of a year, several delegations will usually leave together on chartered planes. The average

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delegation numbers 150 persons, composed of five bus groups of approximately thirty students each. The group is accompanied by teachers, Israeli educator-guides, local Polish guides, Ministry of Education officials, and Holocaust survivors assigned to accompany each group as ‘witnesses’. A doctor and nurse or two doctors also accompany each group. Also, several travel agency and Ministry of Education staff are on location in Poland to take care of the logistics and handle emergencies. The Delegation Leader

The delegation leader, usually a Ministry of Education employee, heads the prevoyage meetings, meets with the guides regularly in Poland, coordinates details with security, guides, and witnesses, and keeps the bus groups on schedule. He addresses the group as a whole at orientation sessions upon entering Poland and at breakfast or dinner meetings. Most delegation leaders volunteer for the voyages out of a sense of mission.5 The delegation leader is assigned a helper, usually a Ministry employee being trained for service as a future delegation leader, who is also in charge of contact with the witnesses. The Guides

The guides are mostly Israeli school teachers, graduates of the Ministry’s three-month long guide preparation course. On the first trips (1988–1990), the survivors guided, with the assistance of teachers and the local Polish guides. Often, the physical strain on the witnesses was too intense. Also, the survivor’s narration in places he or she knew only from reading or hearsay created confusion among students between eyewitness events and hearsay information. Thus, the task of providing background information—the facts—was assigned to the teacher-guides. Later (2000–2003), the Ministry required that all groups be guided by guides trained in their course. Guides are selected for the course based on interviews and short written applications. Applicants are mostly high school teachers, generally in history, Jewish studies, Bible, literature, or civics. The course consists of one full day per week over the course of three months, plus seminars at Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum. In recent years, the Ministry has commissioned Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum to provide the intellectual content of the guide training course. The course provides a basic knowledge of the Shoah, Polish Jewry, and Polish history. The Ministry of Education instructs guides on the logistics of the voyage and the dynamics of the group. The course ends with an eleven-day

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preparation trip to Poland. Guides pay a fee for the course, and are obligated to guide three Ministry of Education tours (for free) after completing their training. Although some guides are motivated by financial considerations—the diploma they receive upon completion of the course is recognized by the private market, which will pay them to lead privately organized tours—most sign up for the course out of deep interest. Some will continue to take groups to Poland several times a year for many years afterwards. An informal survey I conducted indicates that the majority of guides are children of survivors. For at least some of them, the guiding of groups in Poland is a way of dealing with unresolved questions in their own pasts. One veteran guide said: “We had to compete with the Palmach generation. It bothered me that my father (a Shoah survivor) was just a private off somewhere. We weren’t the same as those whose parents were born in Israel.” Another said: “We were taught that the Jews went as sheep to the slaughter, but the Israelis fought like lions. The moment the Zionists decided that there was nowhere but Israel, the exile became an object of loathing (mukzeh mahmat mi’us)” (Guides’ conversation, Cracow, 11 July 1992). Still another guide said: “I think my generation is a strange one—a generation that grew up almost without family. But the little there is must be transmitted to the children as roots; if I’ve succeeded in that, I’ve done my share” (N., 15 September 1995). For many of these guides, the mission of transmitting the Shoah to others is also a return to their own roots, a kind of therapy that enables them to rehabilitate their (previous) lesser status in Israeli society as children of victims, “soaps” (sabonim), and pay a perceived debt to their murdered relatives. The guides do not decide on questions of itinerary or timing. They are responsible for providing information, focusing the attention of the student on the relevant elements in the landscape (while reading out “extraneous” elements), choosing texts, and creating atmosphere. The information they provide is designed “to suffuse knowledge with emotion” (N. S., instructions to guide’s course, April 1992). In Erik Cohen’s typology of guides (1985), the pathfinder and meditative roles are performed by other persons, while the information-giving role is primary and the animator’s role secondary. The Poland guides are close to the model of the yedi’at ha’aretz guides, who select “information and interpretations … primarily in order to arouse feelings of belonging to the place and to evoke collective experience of identification with symbolic heroes, groups and

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localities” (Katz 1985: 63). In Poland, however, their role is modified by their interaction with the witnesses. The Accompanying Teachers

The accompanying teachers are mostly first-time visitors to Poland. While they may be the major promoters and authority figures during the preparation times preceding the voyage, they have little active educational role in Poland.6 The subordination of the teacher to the guide is made clear at delegation briefings and is reflected in logistic arrangements and symbols. Guides narrate the authoritative sites, whereas teachers are responsible for disciplining students and leading discussions with students in the hotel. Sometimes this shift in roles gives rise to tensions between guides and teachers. Guides receive a different color of jacket (on some voyages), a wireless transmitter, and a special briefcase with the voyage insignia. Teachers receive the same sweatshirt worn by the students. The Doctor and Nurse

The voyages are accompanied by two volunteer medical personnel, often a doctor and nurse, to treat medical problems that may arise in the course of a trip and deal with cases of shock or depression. Usually, at least one of the staff will be a specialist in pediatrics, psychiatry, or general medicine. Sometimes, the doctor or nurse is a child of the witness-survivor or the parent of one of the participants. The medical staff undergo a brief screening and attend a general orientation meeting prior to departure. The Polish Guide and Driver

Although the Polish authorities require that tourist groups be accompanied by a local guide, the Ministry has attempted to limit their number and influence. Hence, the Polish guide becomes essentially a pathfinder and low-level mediator (Cohen 1985)—an escort who takes care of logistic matters. He usually speaks no Hebrew and generally remains in the background. Sometimes, guides or teachers will ask the Polish guide to explain about “Polish life” sites, while additional local city guides may be hired to lead the group on town walking tours. The lack of importance attributed to Polish sites by the group, the hostility of some students and organizers towards Poles, the often inadequate English of the guides, and their often limited experience with Israeli youth result in the local guides being perceived as a nonentity at best.

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The driver rarely speaks English and works extremely long hours (up to fifteen per day) in the noisy bus. His contact with the students is usually minimal. He has his own (non-kosher) food, may be offered snack food by the students (or ignored), and is frequently requested to play Israeli rock music on the bus tape player. The Survivor-Witnesses

The survivor-witnesses are Holocaust survivors who tell the group of their personal experiences. The witness serves not so much as a source of information, but as a symbolic type.7 From the outset, even before he begins his story, the witness is framed as a hero, both by the ritual structure of the trip and by the society at large. He or she is called “ish/eshet ha’edut” (the witness person), a neologism evoking the term “aron ha’edut” (the Ark of Witness, or the Ark of the Covenant). The witnesses serve as living monuments, that is, “a group that experienced trauma and serves as a symbol of the feeling of the victim, on the one hand, and the collective identity of the group on the other” (Wiztum 1996: 226–227). The witness does not speak of the dead; he speaks for them. He is not just an eyewitness reporter for the victims; he is their incarnation. His authority is based on his physical presence; his story cannot be divorced from the person of the storyteller. The guide, on the other hand, is seen as performing a professional role, and his authority is based on book knowledge. The authority of the witness as “I”/eyewitness is also maintained through differences in narrative styles. The guide tells stories, whereas the witness tells his own story. One provides the facts about the Shoah; the other provides its incarnation. In the words of one trip organizer, Yosi Levi: Without a witness, the trip is not the same. When we talk to the kids in Israel about the millions, it’s not understood. But if you go to Poland and talk about the millions and they don’t get it, you’re stuck! The witness is a kind of food processor [sic]. The kid takes the witness by the hand, through the honor he gives him. The witness puts the kid in touch with the reality, that it really happened. Also, it’s good that the pupils see that he came out of it. The youth doesn’t come back traumatized... Their job is to explain simple things ... not historical analyses. This makes it easier for the child to understand that these are not just things written by a writer” (Interview, 31 July 1994).

Note: the witness “was there”; he “came out of it”; the pupils “see that he came out of it,” and thus come to identify with the witness and honor him (“take him by the hand”).

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“Being there” means being in the Shoah. While many witnesses on the trips did not live in Poland before the war, almost all spent time in concentration camps or ghettos there. Every group will try to include at least one survivor of Auschwitz.8 Sometimes, if none is available, a delegation leader may “import” one from another group traveling in Poland. The prime locations for the survivors’ witnessing are the death camps, not pre-War Jewish life. As the number of survivors decreases with time, child survivors, and even those who escaped during the war, are being accepted for the voyage. The Ministry is usually contacted by survivors wishing to travel to Poland with the groups. People of all ideological and political persuasions are accepted. As one organizer said, “They’re too old to be Bundists. We forgive them their sins. They’re witnesses netto. They can be symbols of national unity” (N. K., Prague seminar, 28 June 1995). Voyage organizers claim that they attempt to exclude those with a blind hatred for Poland, although, not always successfully. Stammerers and introverts by nature are accepted on the assumption that the trip will enable them to open up. A one-day preparatory workshop is held for them, in which witnesses are asked to tell their stories in a seven-minute narration.9 While some survivors are “professional witnesses.” accompanying groups to Poland several times a year, many “new” witnesses continue to come forth each year. Witnesses are told to restrict their explanation to their personal life experiences, so that, unlike the case of veterans in settlement museums (Katriel 1997a: 78), their use of “we” does not expand to include events they did not witness personally.10 In the context of the voyage, the telling of another story as his own dilutes his authority as “I”/eyewitness. The guide may tell stories; the witness must retell his own story. As Shoshana Felman puts it (1992b: 206), “testimony ... is the uniqueness of the performance of a story which is constituted by the fact that, like the oath, it cannot be carried out by anyone else.” “They came out of it” indicates that the witnesses are to display their survival and their future in Israel, not just victimhood. Through the witness’s body and narrative, he or she “simultaneously witnesses both ends of the national progression from catastrophe to redemption” (Handelman 2004a: 176). Thus, witnesses are requested to restrict themselves to personal testimony, censor themselves in accounts which may be too difficult for the kids to handle, and to consult frequently with the guides. Their choice of Israel as their post-War home, the emotional stake they have in the forty to fifty years of their life in Israel, and their agreeing to return to Poland with a group of teenagers on a trip sponsored by the Ministry of

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Education almost inevitably assures that they will give Israel a redemptive role in their personal life narratives. Thus, Jewish survivors living in Poland (or anywhere outside of Israel) or gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the war are not considered appropriate “witness people” for the group. Furthermore, students should see “that it happened.” Effective witnessing is anchored in the visual and sensory contexts of significant remains and the body of the witness. In the course of the trip, the witnesses will address the group in three contexts: (1) They will make the rounds of the five buses, telling their stories as a chronological narrative, while the bus moves somewhere through Poland. This disembodied narrative, without reference in the immediate visible surroundings, has little authority. Not infrequently, students will sleep through it. (2) Individuals or small groups of students may engage in short or long conversations with the witnesses. This kind of narration often has the quality of an intimate conversation, but is shared by a relatively small number of participants. (3) Witnesses will testify in situ, to the entire delegation group (120–150 persons) at places where they lived, fought, or were imprisoned, especially in the barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This narration is the most ritualized and authoritative one, as will be discussed in chapter 4. The assigning of supreme moral authority to the witness entails certain risks. The witness may transmit moral messages contrary to the aims of the organizers, take up more time than is allotted him by the schedule, or find himself in conflict with the guide. One trip organizer warned the guides: “The witnesses have passed through an extremely difficult experience. We need to check that these people don’t become a burden and interfere with the educational message.... We need to set boundaries and guide them, but with a sympathetic approach.... Honor them. Even if it’s difficult” (A. Zmora, lecture to guides course, 22 June 1992). Conflicts between guides and witnesses are almost always settled behind the scenes, and the witness is never contradicted or opposed in public. Security Personnel

Two or three security persons are assigned to each five-bus group delegation. They provide security briefings (in preparation for the voyage and again in Poland), check the buses and the hotels, guard the group while out touring, patrol the hotel lobbies at night, and maintain contact with the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw. The security personnel are assigned to each Ministry group by the Prime Minis-

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ter’s office. They generally have close-cropped hair and wear sport jackets with special lapel buttons marking them as security. They carry walkie-talkies and wear concealed pistols. At some sites and in the hotel, Israeli security will be supplemented by Polish uniformed or plainclothes policemen. Guides and group leaders undergo a special security briefing, usually on the first night in Poland. This is in addition to security instructions taught to guides as part of the course and the general briefing for students, teachers, and staff held several weeks before departure. One Ministry of Education voyage supervisor compiled a list of common security procedures. Its directives include: 4.1.1 Wake-up at 5:30. 4.1.7 Each morning, luggage will be loaded only after the security personnel have checked the bus (see Figure 4.8, p. 123). 4.1.9 During and after loading the bus, a guard will be posted at the bus. 4.5 Students may not leave the hotel without express permission of the delegation leader. 2.2.9 The delegation dress (sweatshirts) should be worn only when authorized. 2.9 Be aware and pay attention to personal security at all times and bring any suspicious matter to the attention of security personnel (Pe’er, Guidelines for Guides and Staff, 1994–1995).

The students must remain together at all times. On the bus, the security guard will always sit in the front seat by the door, opposite the driver, scanning the road ahead. He declares if and when it is permissible to enter or leave the bus and hotel. At the hotel, he is usually seated in the entrance lobby. While touring, he walks alongside the groups. His highly visible physical position at the threshold of inside and outside space ensures the impermeability of the environmental bubbles of “inside space” - the hotel and the bus. The security guards are the eyes and ears of the State, the guardians of the gateways to and from Poland, the guarantors of safety and security. Security has the final word. The students were told: “The security personnel give us orders; not we them. They have information that we don’t. Important: we must arrive at places on time. Your guides will push you in the back - there’s no other way. A second thing: there are no improvisations. Even if it doesn’t seem right. Nothing to be done” (Briefing to students, 17 March 1993). Group leaders will sometimes invoke “security reasons” in order to cloak their real intentions or insecurities, or to cover up flaws in the program or its execution. Thus, one delegation leader warned: “The schedule will

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be pressured… We have pressure from on high, from the security people. What’s important is the LU”Z [military abbreviation for schedule]” (Z. C., 15 June 1997). Security is invoked as the supreme authority justifying the need for tight control and unquestioned obedience. This reflects the role accorded to security in Israeli society as a whole (cf. Peri 1993; Aronoff 1993: 51). The decision to travel in huge delegations and manifest Jewish/Israeli presence greatly increases the group’s visibility and heightens security risks, which, in turn, result in more severe security measures.11 The highly visible role of security in the voyage reminds students that security forces are the highest representative of the State and deserving of the citizen’s loyalty and obedience. They may become heroes of the trip, especially for some of the teenage girls. The accolades they receive at closing ceremonies are often second only to those accorded the witness-survivors. One girl writes: “The security people, who guard our voyage from the minute that our plane’s wheels leave the ground on the way to Warsaw, until we land back in Israel, are of the elite of Israeli security, the salt of the earth. These are people, who undoubtedly have glorious combat records, and we youths take great pride in the very presence of Israeli security people with them.” (Yiftah, in school yearbook, 1995). We may even speak of a constructed continuity of heroism from old to young—the survivors stand for “spiritual resistance” in the ghettos and camps, whereas the security guards stand for physical courage in protecting the State and its citizens. Thus, the Zionist narrative is reproduced through this conjunction. Polish security, on the other hand, may be treated with disdain. On one occasion, a student commented: “Look! Who could imagine the ‘blues’ [ghetto name for the Polish cops] are protecting us from the Poles! If the State of Israel weren’t around, this would never have happened” (Cracow, April 1993). The security arrangements enable the students to imagine they have returned to the scene of the crime, in order to reenact the Polish(gentile)-Jewish situation of the Holocaust. This time, however, thanks to the State of Israel, they are the victors. Beyond its functional role, the highly visible presence of Israeli security forces is an important element in the symbolic world of the voyage.12

Logistic Arrangements: Food, Clothing, and Flags The logistic arrangements include the preparation of food and essential supplies. Students are warned of the poor quality of the

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food in Poland and are told to organize lunch and snack food as a supplement for the road. The consumption of an abundance of familiar Israeli snack food within the confines of the bus creates an egalitarian insular community and emphasizes the role of Israel as provider of sustenance. The Polish food served to participants consists mainly of soups, fish, and potatoes; it is the butt of many jokes among the adolescents.13 The strangeness of the food is assimilated by the participants to the primitive nature of Poland. Students are told to leave any surplus cans or packages of food for the Jewish community in Warsaw. This gives them, as representatives of Israel, status as Israeli providers of sustenance and life for the dying remnant of Polish Jewry. In addition to the usual trip clothing (two pairs of shoes, cold weather gear) and a thermos, male students are required to bring kippot (skullcaps) and all are requested to bring more elegant clothes for Shabbat. Students are advised to bring tapes of Israeli music. Almost all participants will bring a camera and film. Usually, there will be at least one video camera in the group. Students are asked to bring three memorial candles per person, and each school is required to bring at least one large Israeli flag on a staff (some groups bring as many as ten). Some will bring their city, school or youth movement banner as well. Participants are issued blue and white delegation sweatshirts emblazoned with a large Star of David designed in a barbed-wire pattern, with the word “Israel” printed in Latin letters (!) on the back. For as long as they are in Poland, students are to be identified with the group representing Israel. If Israeli security deems it too dangerous to wear the state symbols on the outside, they will be told to turn the shirts inside out, wearing the national symbols next to their hearts. Upon their return, the sweatshirts also mark the participants as belonging to the elite team of Poland voyage veterans. A text in the Ministry’s guidebook to Poland reads: “Now we have the opportunity ... to visit [the remains] and also to manifest our presence there … and remind ourselves and the Poles of this dark chapter in our history and theirs, a chapter they can no longer avoid, when standing face to face with the members of the people that was murdered, but rose to its feet again. We fulfill our obligation towards the members of our people who were killed in Poland and the Poles are forced to confront their past anew, and their role in the tragedy of the Jewish people.” (Keren in Ministry of Education 1993: 103). This text, which reflects the thinking of many group leaders and organizers,14 assumes that Poles will perceive the young Israelis as

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an extension of the pre-War murdered Jews, and that the Pole on the street feels a sense of guilt and complicity in the murder of the six million Jews.15 The prominent display of Israeli symbols and the performance of mass processions through territory perceived as hostile not only affirms common belonging, but announces JewishIsraeli claims to the legacy and remnants of the Shoah to the Polish “other.” The real or perceived hostility of the surrounding, in part aroused by the manifestations of Israeli presence, reinforces the cohesiveness and isolation of the group and increases their identification with the victims. This manifestation of the rhetoric of presence through hikes and processions, “conquering the (usually contested) land with one’s feet” (lichbosh et ha’aretz baraglayim), is reminiscent of Israeli school excursions throughout the pre-State eras and during the early years of the nation-State (Prawer 1995; Ben-David 1997) and by West Bank settlers in the occupied territories (Katriel 1995; Feige 2006).

The Preparatory Program Selection of Participants On the Ministry of Education voyages, the participants, mostly sixteen to eighteen years old, are usually selected four to six months before the trip. Most schools are allotted fifteen to sixteen places for students, plus one or two accompanying teachers. If, in the early days of the voyage, a handful of students were selected from all those wishing to go, as the voyages grew, they became open to almost all who could afford it. The eight-day trip costs the student and his parents from $1,050 to $1,200, plus tips and spending money. Competing, privately organized tours will usually charge $1,300 to $1,500, sometimes more (Y. L., 19 May 1999). As a result, the richer areas of the country will have a higher proportion of privately organized groups, whereas the economic profile of the Ministry of Education groups will be lower. Although the Ministry and local municipalities provide some scholarships, the trip remains out of reach for most of the poor. Although students of all ethnic backgrounds participate, there seems to be an above-average proportion of grandchildren of survivors, and Ashkenazim in general. Although no statistics are available, based on an informal survey of guides, I would estimate that 60 percent of the voyage participants are Ashkenazim. No doubt, the

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high price is a major factor.16 The few scholarships provided for Ethiopians, poorer Mizrahi Jews, and Soviet immigrants to travel to Poland do little to change the situation.17 Also, vocational and professional schools, largely attended by Mizrahim, tend to devote little effort to organization of extended voyages outside the school. Finally, there is probably less motivation on the part of parents of Mizrahi students to make financial sacrifices for the voyage than on the part of parents descended from survivors. There may also be opposition to the voyage on the part of some Mizrahi students. One vocational school teacher reported his largely Mizrahi class reacting, “Why should we go? Ashkenazim—they deserved it! [the Shoah]” (K. Gat, 1 October 1997). The Ministry of Education’s efforts to make the Shoah into a national legacy and avoid ethnic-based status distinctions are also expressed through the refusal to make even small detours to seek out the places of origin of grandparents of grandchildren of Polish survivors.18 Girls almost always outnumber boys on the trips, sometimes dramatically so.19 Some teachers suggest that, as crying and the expression of emotions and the loss of control over emotions are publicized among students as a prominent feature of the trip, the trip attracts more girls than boys, for whom the combat soldier continues to provide the hegemonic model for Israeli masculinity (Ben-Ari 1998). If, in combat situations, “the emblem of manhood, is ... being in a pressured situation and performing within its stressful circumstances by mastering one’s emotions,” then crying together and shvira, (breaking down), prominent aspects of the voyages, may be seen as effeminate or childish. On the other hand, many voyage veterans, and even some of the mental health advisors, extol the successful completion of the voyage as an act of heroism!20 What other factors may determine which students will elect to go on the voyage and which will prefer to stay home? A small-scale study suggests that the “desire to close the family circle, to understand the grandparents who went through the Shoah” (Asa and Dagani 1991: 170) is an extremely important factor (cf. Yaktar 1998). Among the students who decided not to participate, some cited the fear that they could not endure the intense emotional experience, or the fear that their character might be changed by the voyage. Both those traveling to Poland and those who remain at home agreed that the trip conveyed superior social status to its participants, but Asa and Dagani suggest that those opposing the trip might be less likely to conform to social expectations of them. Furthermore, some of the nonparticipants expressed reservations

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towards the mass, overly planned character of the trip. These findings suggest that, in the process of the participants’ self-selection, some of the most individualistic students may refuse to travel on the tightly scripted Poland voyages. Several sectors of the student population do not travel with the Ministry. Kibbutz students travel in a separate framework, organized by one of several kibbutz movements. While their itineraries and reactions to the sites and ceremonies are similar to the Ministry of Education voyages, their preparation programs differ somewhat (Hazan 1999), as does their social dynamic, insofar as the voyage is a mandatory class activity. Students will often travel as complete class groups and work extra shifts in agriculture to raise money for the trips. Those who decline to go may even be marked as “educational failures” (Keren 1998: 95). The kibbutz groups are more crystallized (megubash; cf. Katriel 1991) as a group and less self-selected than the Ministry’s. The Ultra-Orthodox do not travel on school tours to the death camps. If they go to Poland at all, they go as families, to make the rounds of tombs of the saints (zaddikim). State religious schools travel, for the most part, in independently organized groups, such as Yad Penina (Bnei Akiva) or commercial agencies. This is resented by some officials of the Ministry of Education, who feel that the trip to Poland should manifest the unity of the Jewish people, both secular and religious. Wealthier schools consistently travel with private companies. Some of these companies offer more touristic elements—festive meals, folklore programs, skiing in Zakopane, and so forth, in order to entice students (and their parents) to travel with them. In response, the Ministry has heightened its control over alternative programs, while marketing themselves as ‘purer’ and less commercial.

The Content of the Preparatory Program The students will follow a preparatory study program, including one or two visits to a Holocaust education institute in Israel and, usually, a meeting with the mental health staff of their school. The Ministry of Education has mandated a thirty-hour preparation period; but in fact, the requirement is rarely enforced, and inadequately prepared schools are sent out anyway. The preparation aims at laying a factual foundation before the trip so that “in places where the emotional experience is difficult—no factual explanation to the entire group will be necessary. The students should experience the place in their own way, without intellectual intervention” (DGC 1991: 7–8).

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The preparation program often provides students with a set of visual images—both present-day pictures of voyage veterans and reconstructions, such as the model of Treblinka, that help them form their expectations of what they will see in Poland. It is also meant to provide information and basic psychological preparation, and enables the school’s participants, often drawn from many different classes, to begin the process of gibush (crystallization), important for proper functioning of the emotional support network on the voyage.21 Parents will usually meet once with the teacher or principal promoting the trip to listen, pose questions, and sign up their children. In general, parental involvement in the preparation process is minimal. The voyage preparations will be discussed further in chapter 4.

The Itinerary and Its Implicit Messages The itinerary and logistics of the Ministry of Education set out the path of the pilgrim’s progress and provide orientations for his experiences. The environment in Poland is insulated and intense, with an average of twelve hours of touring a day. Almost every minute of the voyage and every site on the itinerary is determined in advance. One Education Ministry ex-official explained: “The ideology is in the collective nature of the delegation, the ceremonies and the program.... This fits the way the Society and Youth Authority works ... neither the students nor the guides have a minute to breathe22 (...) Oded Cohen doesn’t give credit to the individual student or the individual teacher or the individual school. It’s a kind of paternalistic attitude that you need to direct and control as much as possible, more than is possible” (Z., interview, 20 October 1995). This “busyness” is a widespread tool of the Israeli educational system in transmitting hegemonic understandings and marginalizing other messages (cf. Dalsheim 2004: 158–915). The restriction in freedom of initiative complements the severe restrictions in the freedom of movement, instituted in the name of security. Furthermore, all is done as a group. This works against the creation of informal subgroups who, collectively, could go off together. This is an expression of the importance accorded to top-down frameworks in Israeli culture. A child or youth outside frameworks is seen as uncontrolled and headed for disaster. This routinized practice reflects the Zionist aim of subsuming the individual in the collective. The voyage’s itinerary has undergone few changes since its inception in 1988.23 This stability is not merely a product of inertia

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on the part of the Ministry; it also reflects the nature of the voyage as a pilgrimage, whose sacred places have been sanctified by tens of thousands of previous youth visitors. The voyage veterans shape expectations among their younger siblings and friends (Romi and Lev 2004: 232), including visual expectations derived from photos and videos of their predecessors (cf. Fridman 1997). As Yossi Levi, active coordinator of the trips put it: “I tell the leaders that even if it’s boring for you because you’ve been to the place six times, it’s not boring for the students. Did it affect you to be in the synagogue at Tykocin the first time? Then, you should go with them to Tykocin” (Y. L., interview, 31 July 1994). Ninety percent of the sites are visited by all groups on the standard eight-day program. There are some Jewish religious sites of secondary importance (see below) that are visited by Orthodox groups only; those Orthodox groups will avoid visiting Catholic sites (e.g., the shrine at Czestochowa). While some itinerary considerations stem from the geographical location of important sites, the availability of hotel rooms, and other technical considerations, the main determinant is the construction of a significant pilgrimage path.

Exterior and Interior Space There are two basic kinds of space in the voyage’s construction of Poland: exterior and interior. Almost all the sites are in exterior space, which is homologized with the Shoah. It is perceived as a dangerous, dark zone, with death lurking everywhere. The interior zones, on the other hand, are visibly void of Holocaust or Polish associations. These spaces, such as the hotel lobby, dining room, hotel room, or rented auditorium, as well as the airplane and the bus, especially, are usually filled to the brim with students’ Israeli bodies, possessions, and music. They are homologized with Israel and life.

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We can schematize the kinds and qualities of space in the Table 3.1:24 TABLE 3.1 Inside and Outside Spaces

The polarity of these two kinds of space is reflected in a student’s journal entry: POLAND: For me, it all starts when we boarded the plane. Not a plane, but a kind of time machine. In this time machine, we traveled to the past... fifty-two years back. There, in that place, Poland, the world seemed to be divided in two. Present and past. Today, with the help of the Polish bus, which travels at no more than sixty kilometers per hour, we arrive in the past, our past, of the Jewish people. A past concentrated in Poland. The wide plains, on which the barracks were built, were made of red brick. In these barracks were wooden platforms and chimneys. The barracks, some of them had piles of hair, artificial limbs, statues and other difficult sites. And all in Poland, all of a sudden, the associations come together. There’s a depressing atmosphere in the air: museums inside: pictures of the past, shoes and the stink of shoes, piles of glasses, quiet, cold, slow and detached from the rest of the world ... all is associations and feelings.

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TABLE 3.2 Student Associations and Feelings of Poland

Here, the student draws a diagram of his associations and feelings of Poland: The diagram leads from scenes of Poland (gray skies) into the vortex of death—a kind of black flower, with death at its center, with each petal ending in death, and with all draining down into the abyss: Auschwitz. Majdanek. Belzec. Sobibor. Treblinka. Chelmno. The student continues his composition: “Towards evening, we return from the world of the past to the present. The same bus takes us to some hotel in Poland. There, we rest and relax from the sights of the day. We talk about the past and unload the (emotional) charge which has accumulated and prepare for a new day. We raise depressed spirits. Here in Poland, we all worry about each other, we all help each other—we’re all in the same boat, we’re all in a foreign country”(H., trip book, Kiryat Gat, 1993: 69–70).

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Site visits and ceremonies take place in exterior space, while discussions, meals, and socializing take place in interior space. In exterior space, students are expected to be serious and represent Israel. In interior space, in the hotel and bus, the students are at home and may act as teenagers. They eat, sleep, flirt, or unburden themselves of their experiences. The distances between sites are often great, travel is exceedingly slow, and students will waste much time waiting on their bus for the other buses in the delegation. In the bus, clothes are strewn around, Israeli snack food is passed between participants, Israeli music plays on the bus’s audio system, sometimes barely audible over the loud drone of the Jelcz bus motors. The bus is an insular Israeli community; the symbols of death and the alienation of the foreign terrain remain elsewhere, on the other side of the foggy or grimy window pane. The security guard remains at the front door, guarding the threshold. As the trip goes on, the lack of sleep accumulates, and the bus rolls through the flat lands of rural Poland; it becomes difficult to focus attention on anything “outside.” Students hook up to their Walkmans and Discmans, close their eyes, and dream they are back home. The noise and insular atmosphere on the bus effectively efface the spaces in between sites, and turn the bus into what one student (above) described as a “Holocaust space capsule.” This contributes to the perception of the unity of Poland as death space. By going from one place to another through undifferentiated space, one ends up, almost inevitably, in the same place—the Shoah. The bus and hotel create a “time out of time,” so that the identification of “outside” Poland with the time of the Shoah can remain uncontested. In most cases, the guide recognizes this division of space, and acquiesces through his silence in the bus. Few guides explain about the modern Polish life at towns and villages en route, nor do they mention place names along the way. For the students, this area becomes a kind of no-man’s-land. If teachers complain about the lack of sleep hours resulting from the intense schedule, delegation leaders inevitably answer, “They can sleep on the bus.” The environmental bubble and transience that typifies all guided tour groups is here given moral value, and becomes a prototype of imagined historic Polish-Jewish and gentile-Jewish relations. Students live out of their suitcases, and are never located in the same hotel for more than two nights. The transitory nature of the “home” away from the real home, Israel, becomes a sign of the fragility of Diaspora existence. “Not-Israel” becomes a place of hostile, strange surroundings, wandering, and the inevitable end. In the meantime, it

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is only a temporary residence—a bus, a hotel. The opening text of a 1997 guidebook for Poland voyage participants reads: “POLISH JEWRY. There once was a Jewish Poland, a travelers’ inn on the road of a people’s wanderings. The Jews unburdened themselves here of their bundles and made the inn into a home” (M. Tzanin 1997: 7). The Polish hotels, like the towns they are located in, are in many ways interchangeable. Each town with its own death site: Lublin and Majdanek, Warsaw and Treblinka, Cracow and Plaszow, Tykocin and Lupochowa, all of Poland and Auschwitz. Anyway you look at it, the itinerary tells us, the Jewish people were doomed.

Classification of Places in “Exterior Space”: Death, Life, and Polish “Ventilation” Sites One of the most effective elements shaping the nature of the voyage is the itinerary. The principal taxonomy employed by the Ministry of Education educators and guides divides sites into: (1) sites of Jewish death in the Shoah; (2) eight hundred to a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland, as illustrated through visits to sites of Jewish life in the past; and (3) “ventilazia” sites—mainly historical tourist sites and shopping time (Israel Ministry of Education, Organizational Guidelines for Teachers and Educators 1994: 3). The following table classifies the various sites in the delegation of Sulam High School, whom I accompanied as an observer in 1995. This itinerary is a typical one, and will be replicated with few changes by all Ministry of Education groups in Poland. The amount of time dedicated to each site remains fairly constant among different tours, as is the number and choice of sites on each touring day. The sequence of sites on each day is primarily determined by logistic considerations: proximity to the hotel, location along the road, and avoidance of overcrowding at sites by staggering the visit times of various groups. Several sites associated with Jewish resistance, primarily in the Warsaw Ghetto, straddle the categories. Although they are Holocaust sites, they mostly celebrate heroism and victory, rather than death. I have included them in the chart under the category of life sites, and marked them in italics. Of course, the narrative of the guide or witness or, occasionally, the encounter with manifestations of Polish anti-Semitism, can change the character of the site (say, from a Jewish life site to a Jewish death site).

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TABLE 3.3 Itinerary in Poland Shoah and Jewish death sites

“1,000 years of Jewish life” sites of the past (revolt sites in italics)

DAY 1

Pawiak* (30 minutes) Ghetto wall fragment (15 minutes) Czerniakow’s house (45 minutes) YIVO (45 minutes) Umschlagplatz (15 minutes)

Rapaport monument (Warsaw Ghetto revolt site) (30 minutes)

DAY 2

Umschlagplatz (15 minutes) Treblinka (2 hours and 30 minutes) DC Lupochowa Forest death pits (1 hour) SGC

Tykocin Synagogue and town (1 1/2 hours)

DAY 3 DAY 4

Cracow Ghetto wall (5 minutes) Umschlagplatz (20 minutes) Pankiewicz pharmacy (closed)

DAY 5

Auschwitz-Birkenau (9 hours) DC Evening ceremony for Righteous Gentile/witnesses in hotel (1 1/2 hours) DC

DAY 6

Plaszow (40 minutes)

DAY 7

Majdanek (4 hours) DC Lublin Ghetto (1 1/4 hours) Lublin fortress* (15 minutes) Kazimierz Dolny wall of tombstones (40 minutes)

DAY 8

Ghetto courtyard at Prozna. Str. (20 minutes)

Polish “ventilation” sites Lazenki Gardens orientation (40 minutes + 50 minutes for lunch)

Prayer at Tempel Synagogue, Cracow (45 minutes)

Wieliczka salt mines (2 1/2 hours)

Old Synagogue (20 minutes) Remo Synagogue (15 minutes)

Wawel Palace (30 minutes) St. Stanislas Cathedral* (10 minutes) Sukenice shopping (2 1/2 hours) Meeting with Polish youth* (1 1/2 hours)

Lancut Synagogue (1 hour) Lizhansk cemetery* (1 1/4 hours)

Lancut, Graf Potowski’s Palace* (1 1/4 hours) Kazimierz Dolny market—free time (40 minutes)

Warsaw cemetery (40 minutes; rain) Nozhik Synagogue (1 1/4 hours) Route of Heroism (45 minutes) Rapaport Monument (30 minutes) Closing ceremony (1 1/2 hours) DC

Warsaw Old City, tour and explanation (1 hour) Free time* (1 1/2 hours)

NOTE: DC = delegation-wide ceremony. SGC = small-group ceremony. *Sites not visited by all Ministry of Education groups.

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Allotment of Time at Sites Although there seems to be a fairly even distribution between the number of death sites (nineteen) and Jewish life sites (thirteen), the most time and energy is allotted to the death sites. The voyage includes visits to three death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Treblinka), as well as three ghettos (Warsaw, Lublin, and Cracow), one concentration camp (Plaszow), two mass graves (Tykocin and Warsaw), and several cemeteries. The longest visits are to Auschwitz-Birkenau (full day) and Majdanek (four hours). Proportionally more time is spent at the death sites (twenty-six hours) than at past Jewish life and revolt sites (six hours for past Jewish life sites and four hours linked with the Warsaw Ghetto revolt) or at Polish tourism/historic sites (thirteen and a half hours, of which five and a half hours is free time). In addition, forty-two hours were spent on the bus, not including some of the time spent waiting for other groups in the delegation to arrive or for security to permit students to leave the bus. The relative importance of the sites, as reflected through the amount of time allotted for them, is confirmed by students’ ratings of the sites in a survey conducted by Michal Lev (Romi and Lev 2003). Whereas the death sites were rated as important by 94.6 percent of students, visits to Jewish cemeteries were rated at 49.5 percent, villages of past Jewish life at 32.3 percent, and Polish historical sites, 28 percent (Romi and Lev 2003: 234). In addition, far more preparation time is dedicated to the sites and events of the Shoah than those of past Jewish life, and group ceremonies (chapter 5) are almost inevitably held at death sites, rather than Jewish life sites. Furthermore, even the Jewish life sites are empty of living Jews. The synagogues have been preserved as museums. They are sites, not of life, but of still-life, Stilleben, nature morte. Without the voice of a living Jewish individual or community, they speak of death and emptiness, confirming students’ impression of Poland as a Jewish cemetery and of the Diaspora as extinct. No effort is made to provide a meaningful encounter with members of the local community. Even the neutral country landscape—skies often gray, cold and damp, the alienating buildings of the cities, and the monotony of the flat Polish countryside—may serve as metonymic triggers, pointing to the time of the Holocaust as seen in black-and-white documentary films. The itinerary provides no meaningful contact with Poles, which might counteract the picture of the outside world as a place of danger and Holocaust death. The visits to tourist sites are classified as times of ventilation, designed to remove the psychological pressure

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of intense exposure to death sites. Nearly half the time allotted to these sites is free time (five and a half hours out of thirteen and a half in this program). These are often ludic times, where students’ interaction is mainly among themselves (as in shopping together), or it provides them with opportunities for engaging the Poles as hostile “others” (e.g., through shoplifting from the market). As I will demonstrate later, even meetings with Polish youths or the Polish Righteous Gentile are framed in ways that do not challenge this dichotomy.

The Rhythms of Time in the Voyage Itinerary The capacity of the voyage to imprint itself on students’ memory is, in no small measure, contingent on its success in creating a sense of time different than that of the mundane. In order for the students to become participants rather than spectators, they must come to feel coexistent with the events themselves. I have identified two significant rhythms of time that set the voyage apart from the day-to-day: (1) a larger movement from home to death world and back, and (2) the regulation of the sequence of itinerary days according to the principle of “touch and recoil,” as formulated by voyage organizers and staff. Each of these rhythms is then reproduced in miniature at various sites and occasions, and the effect of all these micro rhythms reiterates and confirms the larger movements in time. 1. The larger structure of time is framed by the cyclical movement from Israel to Poland and back. The student leaves his takenfor-granted life center, to voyage to the place of the death world, the site of the death of Diaspora Jewry, whom he identifies as his own brethren. The student’s way back home, like that of all pilgrims (cf. Turner 1973; Turner and Turner 1978) is emotionally different from his way out. The return to Israel is ritually cast as an ascent, an aliya, reaffirming the centrality of Israel as successor to Diaspora life and, indeed, as the center of life (cf. voyages of Israelis to Morocco in Levy 1997: 45–46). Through the voyage to Poland and the Israel-centered ceremonies performed there, the student endows the taken-forgranted life world with new value. Within the Poland itinerary, there is a cyclical motion from Warsaw, first presented as the center of pre-War Jewish life, to the villages and death camps, and, finally, back to Warsaw, now the site of the Ghetto and the revolt. The Rapaport Monument, erected over the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, is generally the only site visited twice: on the day of arrival in Warsaw and for the final ceremony at

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the end of the trip. Symbolically, the monument serves as the gateway to Poland and as the exit from Poland back to Israel. 2. The internal rhythm of the voyage may best be understood as a series of alternations between the categories of life in Israel and death in the Shoah, where Polish and past Jewish life sites serve as mediating categories. I will chart the dominant sites for each day, as expressed through the amount of time spent visiting them, the performance of group ceremonies there, and the extent to which the site was remembered by students after their return (based on followup questionnaires): TABLE 3.4 Rhythms of Time Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Day 8

(Shabbat)

Life World

Death World

Israel

Rapaport Monument

Closing ceremony, return home

Polish Life sites

Wielieczka salt mines

Shopping

Jewish Past sites

Temple Kabalat Skabbat

Synagogue Visits

Treblinka/ Lupochowa (Tykaoln) death-pits

Lancut Lizhansk

AuschwitzBirkenau

Warsaw cemetery

Majdanke

It is the death sites, the extermination and concentration camps, that are the most significant. Although they are, emotionally, the peak experiences of the voyage, they appear as low points on the chart. They are the most sacred sites; those in which the presence of mass murder, the antithesis of life and sacred values, is made most real. As Sidra Ezrachi characterized the memory of Auschwitz (1996: 121), “The positioning ... in relation to this mountain or this defiled center functions much as does the positioning of the pilgrim vis-a-vis the holy mountain or the sacred center.” Jewish past sites, which are meant to commemorate Jewish life, but present mainly past, exterminated life, occupy the middle of the chart. Polish life sites, which are “fun” or “ventilation,” and are closer to the daily life world of the teenagers in Israel, yet contain the (real and imagined) potential of encounters with antiSemitism, occupy the upper part of the chart. Both mediate between life in Israel and extermination in the Shoah. Finally, the Warsaw

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Ghetto Monument, which symbolizes proud revolt and heroic youth, occupies the top of the chart, closest to the Israeli life world. The inner rhythm of the itinerary is determined by what Ministry officials and guides have designated as the principle of laga’at v’livro’ah (to touch and recoil) (Yossi Levi, interview, 31 July 1994). The encounters with the death camps are seen as potentially dangerous, and thus must be administered “homeopathically,” in limited doses. A heavy Holocaust day, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, or Treblinka-Tykocin is followed by a lighter day, with visits to sites of the Jewish past, Polish tourist sites, or free time.25 Although the sequence of sites within each category varies, the most sacred and most intense parts of the voyage will always be the three low points of Majdanek, Treblinka/Tykocin death pits, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The trip begins and ends at the transition site of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, the “gateway to Poland/Israel.” The second day will usually be spent visiting a death site, followed by another “life” day. There will be two additional alternating sequences of death sites/life sites in the course of the trip, ending with the ceremony of reentry to Israel at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument on the final day. The sequence is broken up by a leisurely Shabbat that is usually held in Cracow in the middle of the voyage. Shabbat in Cracow is always followed by another intense day of visits to a death site— either Auschwitz, as in this program, or Majdanek. That day is, in turn, succeeded by an intermediate day of Jewish life sites of the past and bus travel. Finally, the last transition day in Warsaw combines some ghetto sites with the cemetery, occasional free time, and concludes at the transition-to-Israel site, the Rapaport Memorial, before the return home. Although there is some variability in itineraries, the curve drawn on the chart, with its alternation of the sacred sites of the death camps with life sites, is constant. It is the sacred rhythm of the Poland pilgrimages. This rhythm is again repeated through the alternation of days of confrontation with death and nights of socializing and fun, and still again through the alternation of time spent in inside and outside space. The rapid shifts from sorrow to joy are valorized by dominant rhythms of Israeli time, such as the instantaneous shift from Memorial Day for the Fallen Israeli Soldiers to Independence Day, and legitimized by the “testimony people.” If, however, the lightheadedness leaks into serious time frames, and the masa becomes a fun trip (tiyyul), students will be chastised by staff and parents and made to feel guilty upon their return (Katzen and Shahar 2000).

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Student Expectations, Polish Landscape, and Guiding Narratives The impact and importance of a site within the itinerary is also predisposed by several additional factors: (1) Students’ preconceived notions of Poland in general, and of certain key sites, in particular, as formed by media representations and reports of previous groups. (2) The “look” of the sites, as determined by its natural or urban setting, as well as by commemorative or conservation processes undertaken by the Polish government or other organizations. (3) The narrative and didactic strategies of guides and/or witnesses.

Students’ preconceived notions: Students frequently preconceive Poland as backward, ugly, and antiSemitic.26 Backwardness: The premodern look of houses, especially in the villages, helps to authenticate Holocaust sites, especially if lack of change is narrated as stagnation: “Everything remains exactly as it was, except that now the Jews are gone.” Because of the tragic end of Polish Jewish life (and the East European shtetl), the romantic past is also a tragic one. Alternatively, the alienating post-War Soviet public architecture may be invoked as a marker of the decline of a Poland without Jews. Difference is often glossed as backwardness. On the other hand, the increasingly modern and Western looking parts of Warsaw and Cracow challenge guides to develop narrative strategies to screen out modernity and Westerness. The backwardness of Poland is sometimes invoked by organizers to cover any faults in the organization or logistics of the program, quality of food, accommodation or transport, communication difficulties with Polish personnel, or poor service in hotels. It is sometimes explained as just punishment for the Poles’ presumed collaboration in the Holocaust: “Serves them right.” Ugliness: Students expect that Poland will look like a black-andwhite Shoah documentary or like Schindler’s List—gray buildings, raw concrete, dark skies, mud, unfriendly gray people. As Sidra Ezrachi writes (1996: 139), “Generally speaking ... the (non)color of Auschwitz is black, just as the color of the documents and of documentary film is black and white.” Finding color in Poland is an intrusion of nature and beauty into a place the students preconceive exclusively as the death world.27 An initial reaction on the first bus ride was: “What ugly people! What ugly women!” Furthermore, it is easier to see physically repugnant people as morally detestable.

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Anti-Semitism: Most Israeli students perceive Poland to be a rabidly anti-Semitic nation. This preconception is sometimes expressed in briefings by group leaders or security personnel. Furthermore, as MacCannell has noted of sightseeing (1976:30), “The mechanics of group formation are nicely simplified when cultural productions mediate in-group/out-group distinctions.” As the Germans are not visibly present, modern-day Poles can become a stand-in for the bystanders or even the executioners (cf. Zuckerman 1995; 1996). Anti-Semitic graffiti is searched for everywhere. Many groups include a visit to the church in the town of Sandomierz only to view the side altar, where a painting of a blood libel against Jews is displayed. The indifference of the Polish passersby to the group is assimilated to indifference towards the Holocaust victims, especially if students encounter expressions of modern anti-Semitism somewhere along the way, as they usually do. The perceptions of antiSemitism and danger heighten group solidarity. The “look” of the sites:

To be effective, the site must look authentic, as if it has remained untouched since 1945.28 Students want to be reassured they have come in touch with the real thing and not a reconstruction. This is especially true for key sites, like the Birkenau barracks that serve as the setting for the witness’s incarnation of the Shoah. Yet authenticity in tourist sites is an extremely problematic concept. MacCannell (1973; 1976) claims that tourists search for authenticity as a way of countering the alienation of modern society, but that this quest is doomed to failure, as service providers “pretty up” their backstages so that they conform to tourist expectations. Edward Bruner suggests that authenticity is not some essence inherent in the original, but steadily vanishing object, but rather is emergent in tourist performances. Thus, the tourist’s understanding of authenticity may mean one of many things: (1) historical verisimilitude—mimetic credibility, (2) an immaculate simulation, (3) the original as opposed to a copy, (4) duly authorized, legally valid, or certified by those the viewer accepts as authoritative, Or (5) that the object is actually what it professes to be (Bruner 1991: 400–401). In the case of Shoah remains, representations are increasingly becoming the authenticators of lived experience. Thus, paradigms of the authentic are created through preparatory programs. As one guide said: “The preparation is most important. The kids didn’t have to imagine Treblinka, because they remembered the model at Lochamei Haghettaot, and when I showed them the map, they saw

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what was there” (N., 16 September 1995).29 Films, both documentary and fictional, also implant a series of images that predisposes students to accept certain objects as the real thing. As Umberto Eco characterizes the postmodern search for authenticity (1986: 6): “For historical information to be absorbed it has to assume the aspect of a reincarnation. To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real.” Some sites are approached by students with previous knowledge or well-defined preconceptions. As Claude Lanzmann said of his film, Shoah, “I said, ‘What will I see in Poland, I will see the nothingness, I will see the absence.’ And I did not want to go.... But something extraordinary happened.... When I arrived in Poland I was really loaded with knowledge ... like a bomb. But the fuse was missing. And Poland was for me the fuse of this bomb” (Lanzmann in Felman 1992b: 256–257). Among the best-known sites were Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Warsaw. If the site conforms to the students’ preexisting visual image of it (as in the case of Birkenau), it will resonate more strongly than if it does not (as in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto). In the latter case, one of the key functions of the guide is to bridge the gap between the site and the expectations of the site, through the appropriate interpretive techniques. The impact of a site also depends on the thickness of its sensory “envelope.” The more the site can be visually, acoustically, and olfactorily isolated from the presence of modern Polish life, the greater the possibility of effectively constructing a totalistic world of the past for the participants. As Yi Fu-Tuan wrote (1977: 18): “The (sense of place) achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all our senses as well as with the active and reflective mind.” Thus, a plaque on a wall abutting a bustling street will have far less effect than an enclosed, darkened room. At places where the most senses are affected (like in the shoe barracks at Majdanek), many students report a “time tunnel” effect. As Edward Casey wrote (1987: 201–202), “Remembering is an activity of reemplacing and re-experiencing past places … the memory-bearing body can be considered as a body moving back in place.” Place is the intersection of time and space, and bodily movement through a sensorily closed environment can yield the impression of travel to another time. A variety of relations are possible between the site and the site marker.30 Many of the sites are preserved or restored by the Polish government, primarily for Polish visitors with different views and

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sensibilities.31 The Polish inscriptions often reflect a Polish vocabulary or symbolism of commemoration (“Polish citizens,” “Hitlerites,” Gruenwald Cross of heroism, Catholic crosses) that conflicts with the language and sensibilities of Jewish Shoah memory (“Jews,” “Germans,” Star of David). The Israeli guide may underline the ideological nature of the Polish inscription and arouse the students’ hostility towards what he identifies (whether justifiably or not) as a deliberate attempt to usurp Jewish memory. This often arouses or justifies the desire to “reclaim ground” through manifestation of Israeli symbols and/or ritual at the site. Alternatively, Israeli groups may deliberately avoid holding ceremonies at spaces designated by the Poles for commemorative rites (as at Birkenau), and choose unmarked spaces nearby. The text of the site markers also affects perception. A plaque on a nondescript wall focuses attention on what would otherwise be ignored. If the plaque is written in Hebrew and includes Jewish symbols, it engages the students more directly. Yiddish inscriptions, even on visibly recent plaques, are seen as an incomprehensible but recognizable Jewish language of the dead, an artifact of the Shoah past. Sometimes the marker creates the site. An example of this is the Route of Heroism in the area of the former Warsaw Ghetto. There, in a landscape totally devoid of remains, students march along a processional route marked out by engraved stones honoring, not events or places, but representative heroes of the ghetto. Guides’ Narrative Techniques

As I mentioned earlier, in the Poland trips, part of the guide’s role is to focus the attention of the students on the appropriate objects in the landscape, create the right mood, regulate the level of tension/excitement, and often “read out” the objects considered irrelevant. Like the yedi’at ha’aretz guides, one of their primary functions is to imbue the sites with emotion and national significance by “dramatiz(ing) the scholarly scenes and heroes of the past, as if they were taking place here and now” (Katz 1985: 62–63). The challenge to the guide is greatest where modern, non-Shoah objects and sensory stimuli intrude, or where the remains are meager. There, the job of the guide is “to name, frame and elevate, and ultimately to transform the objective reality of a restored small house into the subjective reality of a historical shrine” (Fine and Speer 1985: 78); “to make an ankle-high site into towers floating in the air” (Katriel 1997a: 23). Several of the strategies frequently employed by guides include:

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1. Use of pictures or visual aids that show the site as it was then to enable students to place themselves in the picture. 2. Employment of the ironic mode to interpret the emptiness, the lack of any trace of the past in the present, as a sign of destruction or indifference (cf. Fussell 1975). This irony is sometimes effected by quoting Bialik’s, “City of Slaughter”: “The sun shone, and the slaughterer slaughtered,” integrating the site into a landscape of Jewish martyrology (cf. Roskies 1984). The Poles are closely identified with their soil and sky, while the Jews are depicted as foreigners, strangers to it. The landscape itself is (de)humanized and portrayed as indifferent to the Jewish blood that seeps into it. 3. Interpreting the present remains as a symbol of the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews and their desire to obliterate the evidence of their crime. Even the ruins are ruined. 4. Omitting or ignoring information that might diminish the staged authenticity or sanctity of certain sites. The barracks at Birkenau must be constantly reconstructed and maintained in order to maintain their original look (Szurek 1990a; Dwork and van Pelt 1994). The victims’ shoes at Majdanek are periodically polished (by German volunteers!) so that they do not disintegrate (Längerer 1989: 163). The crematoria at Majdanek were rebuilt after the war. Those guides aware of these facts rarely pass them on to students. 5. Reading a survivor’s account of his or her experience there. These readings are referred to as kit’ei edut (fragments of testimony) and are seen as an invocation of the voice of the dead, an echo of the voice of the living witness. 6. Playing music in order to set or intensify a particular mood or trigger pent-up emotions. One guide plays a recording of “El Mole Rachamim” or “Dema’ot Shel Mal’akhim” as the students stand alongside the dissection table adjoining the Majdanek crematoria: “I get them all on the floor with tears,” he boasted. 7. Reading a prayer or a poem or performing a memorial ceremony at the site. The guide of the Sulam High School group read poetry at the entrance and conclusion of visits to significant sites. It served as an invocation, reminding students: “Pay attention! You are about to cross a threshold!”

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8. Acting out bodily states/movements of the victims. In one case, a witness brought the group out onto the ramp at Birkenau, performed a “selection,” and sent one group running in mass to the gas chambers (Trip veterans’ meeting, 13 May 1996). Another tour organizer regularly crowds students into the gas chambers at Majdanek so that they reenact the crowding through touch, the press, the smell of bodies, the lack of control, and so forth. (E. H., interview, 27 May 1996). Such reenactments are rarely performed by guides and are not encouraged by the Ministry of Education, as they may create distance from the Shoah if they are perceived by students as play.

From Structure to Performance In the subsequent chapters, I will demonstrate how the values built into the ritualized structure are expressed, modified, or contested through students’ performance on the voyage. How is the landscape of Poland narrated to students so that it becomes part of a meaningful experience? How are the messages built in to the pilgrimage internalized by a diverse group of adolescents in the course of the voyage? To what extent do students’ expectations and psychosocial needs correspond to or conflict with the ideological orientations of the voyage? What venues and strategies do students possess to articulate their divergent appropriations and understandings of voyage symbols? How do the physical encounters with the sacred death centers affect the participants? What role does the witness play in transmission of the voyage messages? What identity questions or resolutions are provoked by the visits to the death camps? These are some of the questions I will attempt to answer in the next chapter.

Notes 1. The 1966 to 1967 youth voyages to Poland took place under very different sociopolitical circumstances in both Israel and Poland. A comparison of the 1960s voyages with the later ones would make for a fascinating research project. 2. In fact, the voyages had been practiced by the Kibbutz and Moshav Movement (TaKaM) since 1984, and the Ministry of Education adopted their base itinerary. For the origins of the TaKaM voyages, see Atzili 1998. For the concept and role of the meshuga ladavar, see Azulai 1993.

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3. In fact, this last aim of active commemoration has rarely been carried out, allegedly due to logistic difficulties. 4. Interestingly, the path of the greatest suffering, the March of the Living, the three-kilometer road through the streets of Oswiecim linking Auschwitz I and Birkenau, was “cosmicized” in 1997 when it was signposted with the tricolor markings of Israel Nature Reserves Authorities’ cross-Israel hiking path! 5. Although their expense account is small ($20 a day), administrators have been able to take their spouses along (at reduced cost), and often extend their stay after the voyage to include a vacation in Europe. It offers some Ministry employees a welcome break from the tedium of a desk job, and enables them, in the words of one organizer, “to touch the living flesh” of the voyage (Y. L., 19 May 1999). The financial incentive is a negligible part of delegation leaders’ motivations. 6. Beginning in 1996, the Ministry initiated a short (optional) preparatory course for accompanying teachers, thus further institutionalizing their role. 7. “The symbolic type annihilates symbol and metaphor through the holism of the body.... The symbolic type becomes wholly itself through its perfect praxis, leaving no vacant space for the alienation of practice from ideology. The result is a being that recursively signifies itself as the totality of reality, so long as it recreates itself through performance. The symbolic type is wholly real, signifying nothing beyond itself, thereby encompassing self-definition as the only reality” (Handelman 1994: 11). 8. Ezra Hartman, organizer of tours for Bnei Akiva youth and religious girls’ schools, only takes witnesses who have spent at least six months in Auschwitz! “Because that’s the story. If a witness was moved from one camp to another, when they reach Auschwitz, it doesn’t speak to the kids” (Interview, 27 May 1996). Auschwitz, the sacred center, must be made incarnate through the testimony of the witness. 9. On such capsule testimonies of survivors, see Handelman 2004a: 171–199. 10. This differs from old-timers’ narration of objects at the kibbutz museums, described by Tamar Katriel: “Thus, to heighten the dramatic effect of their story, they may purposefully blur the protagonist and witness roles in constructing their role as narrator-participants, leaving it unclear whether the story relates to their personal past or is about someone they knew, or some generic member of a pioneer group.... Usually, these practices are condoned as a matter of a special narrative license enjoyed by the old-timer guides” (Katriel 1997b: 78). 11. Though not necessarily out of proportion to perceived dangers on the part of students or their parents. At one prevoyage meeting, parents voiced great concern that a single guard would be insufficient to protect their children in Poland. Such security arrangements are seen as “natural” by Israeli students, accustomed to armed guards accompanying class outings within Israel. 12. Compare Handelman’s analysis of the ritual significance of military envelopment in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies at Yad Vashem (Handelman 2004a: 104–107). 13. For an account of how the disgust displayed by participants towards Polish food (and toilet facilities) shows the logic of the group-as-enclave, see Feldman 2002: 93-94.

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14. Though not all. Avraham Atzili, one of the founders of the TaKaM voyages, wrote (1998: 112): “At the beginning ... we were carried away by our emotions and it was important that the whole world know that ‘we are here.’ We marched with unfurled flags waving in the streets as well as in the death camps. Only gradually did we come to recognize that we haven’t come to demonstrate, that there was no one to demonstrate against, and that the trip should proceed in minor tones, as is worthy of a serious educational project and not a demonstration!” 15. The question of Polish attitudes towards Jews has been discussed at length over the past decade, especially since the publication of Jan Grosz’s book, Neighbors, and with the entry of Poland into the European Economic Community. See Iwona-Zarecka 1989a; 1989b; Steinlauf 1996; Polansky and Michlic 2004. 16. In 2004, a lower income, mostly Mizrahi township sponsored one-day(!) trips to Poland. The article reporting the event was entitled, “Auschwitz for the Poor.” 17. Michal Lev’s survey, based on seven high schools, shows that 98 percent of those traveling to Poland were native-born Israelis, compared with only 83 percent of those remaining behind. Of the mothers of those traveling, 68 percent were born in Israel, 12 percent in Eastern Europe or Germany, and 11 percent in Asia or Africa. Among those not traveling, the figures were 42 percent, 29 percent, and 19 percent, respectively (Romi and Lev 2003: 226). Romi and Lev provide no adequate explanation for these discrepancies. I suspect that finances play an important role (mothers born in Eastern Europe are likely to be recent Soviet immigrants). A sample questionnaire I distributed to seventy students showed that in the vast majority of cases, the students’ trip costs are paid for entirely by the parents. Only in the case of the kibbutzim and moshavim do we find large-scale work projects undertaken by the students (giyusim) in order to raise money for the trip. An additional variable, noted but not explained in the study of Romi and Lev, is that the majority of class members who traveled to Poland classified themselves as traditional, whereas a substantial majority of those remaining saw themselves as secular. 18. In some Shomer Hatza’ir kibbutz youth voyages (which draw on a largely Ashkenazic population), the itinerary may be organized around visits to towns and homes of families of individual participants, who interrogated their grandparents intensively about their hometowns in preparation. 19. Although I am not aware of any systematic survey, two articles that use a quantitative approach found significantly more girls than boys participating in the voyages. Romi and Lev report (2003: 226) that in the seven high schools they surveyed, 57 percent of the students opting to participate in the Poland voyages were girls, whereas girls numbered only 32 percent of those who did not travel there. Lazar et al (2004a) report that 60 percent of their sample of voyage participants were female. 20. The psychologist, Dr. Yossi Zeiler, saw the subject as part of youths’ confrontation with death and development of personal identity. He compared the voyage to the camps with entering the lions’ den: “Only one who has the courage to plumb the depths and overcome—is a strong person.… These youths have proved that they can enter the inferno, look death in the eyes, and come back” (Zeiler in Bressler 1990: 23).

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21. For further details on preparation programs, see Hazan 1999; Hazan 2001: 35–55. 22. The organizer of the Orthodox Bnei Akiva Poland missions said explicitly: “We keep them busy all the time. They come back with a head bursting open. That’s okay, they’ll sort it out later. This way they don’t have time for shopping, wasting money, or going out for entertainment“ (E. H., interview, 27 May 1996). 23. The most important addition has been the inclusion of an optional two-day visit to Prague and Terezin at the beginning of the trip in Autumn 1995. In 1999, the Ministry introduced the option of a short visit to Kovno and Vilna. The Prague option has since been canceled. 24. A similar classification of space was noted by Andre Levy (1997: 37–41) in the tourism/pilgrimages of Moroccan-born Israelis to Morocco. In the walled cemeteries and on the bus (=interior), travelers felt secure and could give expression to their Jewish religious identity and speak Hebrew, as this was “safe territory.” Outside, in the markets, they were to “act as if they were Moroccan,” and suppress signs of their particular Jewish-Israeli identity. 25. When the Poland trip is preceded by two days in Prague/Terezin and a full day’s ride to Cracow, the rhythm of the graph of laga’at vlivroah is changed. By placing such a large mass of Jewish life sites and touristic sites at the beginning of the trip, the social nature of the interior spaces (=Israel) becomes predominant. Many students and teachers said that it was only with the visit to Auschwitz (on day six) that they felt that the trip had really begun. The whole graph is “pulled” towards the touristic and social (=Israel) end. This is one of the reasons that later led to the Ministry’s cancellation of the Prague option. 26. See the master’s thesis of Joanna Dyduch (2003), which examined anti-Polish attitudes among Israeli students. 27. Robert Wistrich reports that many people were shocked when shown a recently discovered home movie of Hitler in Munich filmed in color. 28. The concept of authenticity has been further questioned by Ning Wang (2000), who claims that tourists’ authenticity is a function of the intensity of experience and need not have a concrete reference. I have chosen to remain close to participants’ use of authenticity, referring primarily to relics and sites, as the objective traces generating their own emotions. In Selwyn’s language (Selwyn 1996: 21), the students seek authenticity that is both “hot”—reflecting “modern and pre-modern concerns with the authentic self and the authentic other,” as well as “cool”—scientifically verifiable or falsifiable. 29. In the new Yad Vashem museum, inaugurated in March 2005, visitors can see a plaster model of Jews in the gas chambers, walk a reconstructed Warsaw Ghetto street, touch the bunk beds from Birkenau, and witness piles of shoes from Auschwitz. With the growth of the trips to Poland, voyages have come to influence what is displayed or reproduced in the museums. 30. Although I adopt some of MacCannell’s insights (1973; 1976) on the relationship between the site and the site marker here, I will employ the term in a more restricted sense than he does, to refer strictly to a descriptive sign, memorial plaque, or sculpture located in situ. 31. See, in particular, the discussion of the shaping of the memorial space at Auschwitz in chapter 4 (see also Dwork and van Pelt 1994; Charlesworth 1994a; Berg 1996; as well as, in general, Young 1993; 2000).

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CHAPTER

Performing the Poland Voyages

Walking through the Warsaw Ghetto Guide book in hand, Slim like a breviary Our struggling column Threads its way through the bidon ville Where the ghetto once was. Intoning texts of witnesses, Maneuvering the map like a dousing rod That might unearth the bodies From under the pavement, Locate the underground spring. A passerby stops to show us – There, over there, Pani See, Pani, the fist painted in tar On the crumbling plaster? Didn’t you read all about it? Trace the tram tracks, Count the cobblestones, This side is inside, that one out. The church thereThe Nazis built a wall around it To keep it out of the ghetto, the church. And, important, It has a clean bathroom. Just ask the nun And she’ll open it for you.

Notes for this section begin on page 183.

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On the Road: Walking through the Poland Voyage In the previous chapter, I described the fixed, structural elements that determine the text of the voyage. But voyages are “dynamic and diversified communicative events that are shaped and reshaped in and through participants’ construction of their narrative roles” (Katriel 1997b: 102). In this chapter, I will show how the structural elements are expressed in the development of the voyage, and how the messages of the trip are internalized by participants over time, or modified or resisted by participants through their interaction with the site, state symbols, authority figures of the voyage, and each other. Through a detailed ethnography of the performance of the voyage over the course of the eight-day trip, I will demonstrate the interaction between landscapes, Holocaust relics, movement, and the authority of various staff roles in the voyage family. I will also show how various sites and activities have a cumulative affect, which, over the course of the week, tunes students’ emotional state, overcomes dissonance between their previous expectations and the facts on the ground, and consolidates the group around symbols of the nation. Especially important is the students’ breaking down in tears sometime in the course of the voyage. I will illustrate these themes through a chronological account of the Poland voyage of thirty students of the Sulam High School whom I accompanied in 1995 as a participant-observer. My main sources of information will be my field notes, texts of ceremonies and speeches, as well as entries of six participants’ diaries that I have integrated into the description.1 I also made use of recordings of the three evening group discussions, whose materials I utilize twice. The discussions are mined for information and individual reactions, and incorporated (along with diary entries) as reactions to the sites and events, as expository meanings. They are treated a second time in separate subsections as performances. There, I focus on the group’s mood, concerns, developing social dynamic and their understanding of the landscape as expressed and generated through discussions. In this chapter, I have removed the ceremonies from the descriptive sequence of events. The dense, ritual language they employ calls for a detailed analysis of texts, songs, dances, placement of actors, prayer language, ritual gestures, and emotional expressions that would hopelessly interrupt the chronologically ordered description of the voyage. Consequently, I will mention the ceremonies briefly in this chapter, reserving a more detailed discussion for chapter 5.

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Recruitment and Voyage Preparations at Sulam High School Sulam High School is located in the Galilee, and draws its population from two towns with widely different populations. Whereas town A. is composed of a well-educated, fairly affluent population of 85 percent Ashkenazim, town B. is made up of 60 to 65 percent Mizrahim, plus a large number of recent Russian immigrants. The academic track of the school has a high concentration of Ashkenazim from town A., whereas the vocational track has far more Mizrahim from B. The cost of the trip was about $1,000. Although the residents of B. were offered more generous subsidies by the municipality, the expense was much easier for the parents of A. to bear. According to one student, almost everyone from A. who desired to go went, whereas some students from B. could not afford it. As a result, although most of the school population are Mizrahim, only five to six participants (out of thirty) in the group were. This illustrates how the voyages, while ostensibly fostering Jewish unity, reinforce ethnic and socioeconomic hierarchies. Sixty-four students (of a potential population of four hundred eleventh and twelfth graders), accompanied by two teachers (selected by the principal), traveled to Poland in two separate delegations of about thirty each. I traveled to Poland with the first of them. Usually, a school that responds so enthusiastically to the call to travel to Poland has either a strong tradition of participation or an enthusiastic meshuga ladavar (cf. Azulai 1993), a mover and shaker on the staff who promotes the trips. In this case, the school had both. A core of sixteen students from the school had participated in a Poland voyage the previous year. A local school teacher, Naomi, who completed the Ministry of Education’s guide course with me, served as the guide of the group, and the school principal saw the trips as an important educational venture. As Naomi related: “The most important factor in recruiting students is word of mouth. The school principal gave permission to wear the sweatshirts as an official school dress, and that gave them a sense of pride! In buses, when we traveled together [on day trips in the course of the academic year], we recruited people for the Poland voyage. The interest is constantly growing. Kids don’t stop talking about it.” The students began their preparation for the voyage seven months in advance. At the opening meeting, two trip veterans came and spoke of their experiences, saying that the trip was also fun. This is another illustration of the intitiatory role played by Poland voyage veterans.

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The teacher leading the group then had registered students list all their reasons for going on the blackboard. Some students expressed the desire “to experience the subject.” This angered the guide, who responded: “What do you want—that we should go in to the gas chambers and open the showers?” Nevertheless, the students’ desire for powerful sensory-emotional experience will continue to be a prime theme throughout. In the course of the following months, students attended a series of lecture sessions on various topics at the school, interspersed with student discussions. The topics, along with an evaluation given them by the accompanying teacher, were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

history of World War II (dry, superfluous); racism (excellent; short and to the point); life in Poland before the Shoah (okay); organization in the ghetto (all right; a little boring); a two-day seminar at the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum (“They heard testimony of a survivor for the first time. He made them roll on the floor with laughter. Some students thought, ‘Well, if he can laugh, maybe it isn’t so difficult.’”); 6. a session analyzing the experience at the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum; 7. a session on the determination of who is a righteous gentile. In comparison with other groups I have observed, their level of preparation was above average to good. Towards the end of the preparation period, the students were instructed as to what clothing and personal items they should bring. The Sulam High School voyage group of the previous year prepared a humorous instruction sheet for the members of the delegation. It included items denigrating the Polish food, buses, weather, shopping, Polish security, hotels, toilet paper, and rest stops. This demonstrates how the building of a unity of the senses—smell, touch, taste, and hearing—are all part of the Poland experience. Furthermore, the extreme disgust displayed towards Polish food may reflect the impermeable boundaries of the group as an Israeli enclave in what is perceived as hostile Polish territory (Feldman 2002; Douglas 1993).2 At the sixth session, some students related life stories of their grandparents. A short questionnaire was given them, to which ten out of thirty responded. Of the ten, seven claimed some direct family relation to the Shoah or to Poland. Most of the participants mentioned that they saw themselves as representing their families at the

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death sites (cf. Yaktar 1998). All said that their parents supported their participation. Several expressed a desire to feel the experience of the Shoah that has become banal after watching so many Yom Hashoah ceremonies at school and on television. Two explicitly mentioned representing the State of Israel at the death sites. An additional session was devoted to expression of feelings. A teacher related, “One teacher asked students how they felt towards society in connection with the trip, and I cut that short immediately. I wanted us to concentrate on their feelings and not on what teachers expect them to say.” Some students in the group expressed fear of getting too emotional; others feared they might not feel anything (cf. Asa and Degani 1991: 170–172). Participants characterized the trip as a challenge, although the nature of that challenge was not clearly articulated. One participant said that “others in school were jealous of us, not because we’re going to Poland, but because we’re going to hutz la’aretz (abroad), flying together and they aren’t.” One meeting was held with a school psychologist, who spoke about resistance in pressure situations. The session with a psychologist is strongly recommended by the Ministry, though some mental health workers overemphasize the risks of trauma. Some of the most salient themes that surfaced in the discussions include the search for intense experience and adventure, the intense need for peer approval and affective security, the desire for recognition by society, the concern with crying, and the fascination with death.3 The voyage, as we shall see, provides a sheltering envelope and performative venues for the expression of many adolescent needs, while assigning him or her a more adult status upon his or her return. Through the roles assigned adolescent participants in the framework of the voyage, “Societies thus verify the new individual and are themselves historically verified” (Erikson in Guardo 1975: 219). One aim of the preparation process, as one of the teachers noted, is the achievement of gibush (crystallization). Tamar Katriel writes (1991: 19), “The social ideal of gibush involves an emphasis on the undifferentiated collectivity—on joint endeavors, on cooperation and shared sentiments, on solidarity and a sense of togetherness.” Gibush is seen as a value in itself, especially in the context of the Israeli school class. “A class with a high degree of gibush,” according to Katriel, “(a) has clearly demarcated boundaries; (b) has a high degree of integration and hence inner strength; (c) is internally undifferentiated; and (d) presupposes particular conditions under which it can form” (ibid.: 18). One might see gibush as a social mech-

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anism for reproducing a social unit with strong group and weak grid, what Mary Douglas characterizes (1993: 44–45) as the structure of the enclave, “a social unit which maintains a strong boundary but … a weakly articulated social structure.” The strategies used by the enclave to prevent leakage of its members, as enumerated by Douglas, correspond closely to the techniques of gibush and isolation practiced during the voyage. Such strategies emphasize the voluntary character of membership in the collective; the unique value of each individual member of the community (along with a discourse of egalitarianism), and the maintenance of the boundary around the enclave community by erecting a wall of virtue between themselves and the outside world (ibid.: 60; cf. Sivan 1995). While gibush may naturally emerge “in response to affectively loaded, shared, often stressful experiences” (Katriel 1991: 24–25), successful planned prevoyage gibush of the group will help overcome inevitable frustrations and support emotionally affected individuals. Furthermore, as we will see, within the voyage, the crystallized group is endowed with moral value as a manifestation of Jewish-Israeli strength and unity and an answer to the Shoah.4 In the intervening summer vacation preceding the trip, three students considered canceling because their friends were not participating. The teachers tried to dissuade the students from leaving the group, as, within a crystallized (megubash) group, “a refusal of participation ... is interpreted as a refusal to sustain the collectivity” (Katriel 1991: 20). In the end, only one actually dropped out. Two weeks before departure, the Sulam school participants met with students of the other four buses in the delegation to coordinate expectations. After a short orientation by delegation leader Omri, as well as a security briefing,5 participants were served refreshments and sang Israeli songs, accompanied by a guitarist hired for the occasion. During this time, the teachers and staff met in a side room to get to know each other and discuss their respective roles in the voyage. The preparation served the following aims: familiarization with basic concepts and time frames, providing technical and organizational information and security procedures, providing a basis for expectations and encouraging mutual sensitivity, and beginning the process of gibush of the delegation-wide voyage group and setting the ground rules for staff interaction.

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The Threshold of Poland—Day One In many schools, some sort of symbolic action is performed to establish continuity between previous Poland trips and the current one. In the case of Sulam High School, a mother sent along a letter for her son that was only to be opened on the airplane. Veterans of previous trips from the school accompanied the group to the buses on the late night departure for the airport. The ceremonial nature of the departure is akin to the departure of hajjis for Mecca or that of medieval European pilgrims (cf. Oesterreith 1997). The new initiates are brought to the threshold by those who have passed through before and by the authority figures of the society the initiate is meant to join. For many of the students, the trip is their first time on an airplane. The excitement of leaving for a foreign country (hutz la’aretz) is foremost at the earliest stages of the trip. For many, it began with a mad dash for the duty-free stores. One wrote: “We were in the duty-free [store], we bought stuff, the group spoke together, we counted our luggage. A normal trip. But sometimes, we see something else. The titles of the books, It Is My Brothers I Am Seeking ... [remind us] that this is not an ordinary trip, this is a voyage of selfsearching, a voyage where I know how it begins, but I don’t know how it will end.... Some have come for personal reasons, some for national reasons, and some out of curiosity.... I myself, don’t know exactly what I’m doing” (d4, 1–2). The voyages take place in El Al or LOT airplanes chartered for the group, and filled entirely with delegation members. As this group traveled with El Al, the plane was seen as an Israeli space. When the students fly LOT, students relate to the plane and its attendants as part of Poland. Thus, any malfunction or inconvenience on the plane is attributed to Polish primitiveness, and any sign of impatience or unfriendliness on the part of the stewardesses is attributed to Polish anti-Semitism. After getting their bags, students board the Polish buses to take them to Warsaw. They are briefly introduced to their Polish driver. “The red Bordeaux bus looked like a whorehouse,” comments one girl. The guide opens by calling for quiet and reading a poem written by a participant on the Poland voyages, “Go There and You’ll Know.” Naomi thus transmits that the students have fulfilled the “commandment” of coming to Poland, so that they too may experience and understand something that cannot be fully expressed in words. The poem serves as an invocation on the threshold of Poland, marking the liminal nature of the moment: the students

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are about to enter into the experience; they will join the ranks of the initiated. On approaching Lazenki Park, the Israeli teacher-guide says: “We’re going to show you a bit of hutz la’aretz before we get into the subject of the Shoah.” By a nomenclature distinguishing such sites from meaningful Shoah sites, the guide primes students to particular ways of seeing that will facilitate rapid transitions and overcome the dissonances between serious (death) sites and kef (fun) sites. The Polish guide is introduced: “Tomasz speaks Hebrew well, so watch your language.” Tomasz gives some background history on Warsaw. The students have been traveling over twelve hours since they left home. Some have been awake for nearly thirty hours. Within minutes, most fall asleep. The group’s first stop is Lazenki Park, site of the orientation session. After taking pictures of each other by the pond, they sit down on the ground and are introduced to the security staff, guides, and delegation leaders. The security guard warns them again about the dangers of Poland. The delegation leader delivers a short address ending with: “Raise your heads high, backs upright, and behave accordingly. Don’t disgrace the flag, the anthem, or anything connected to their good reputation.” The groups eat their sandwiches and take a short walk through the park, herded along by the three Israeli security personnel. The buses are checked carefully by security before the group is allowed back on. Participants are surprised by the warm weather and beauty of the park. One student insightfully summarizes: “Look, we’re in many places at once: we’re in the ghetto and in Warsaw and in Poland and in Europe.” Students’ expectations are not entirely disappointed, however, as another student wrote: “People in Poland look calm but not relaxed; they were dressed a bit like the Russian kids at our school ... they are almost all blond and thin and hunchbacked and hardly smiled. Two small boys greeted us with a hearty, ‘Heil Hitler!’” (d4, 1–2). The student orients Poland by assimilating passersby to hometown marginals—Russian immigrants. The first Shoah site visited is the Jewish Historical Institute. On the way, the guide stops in front of a large skyscraper on a busy commercial street, and, with the aid of black-and-white photographs of the ghetto, attempts to explain about the synagogue that was once there (see Tlomacka postcard, Figure 4.1). Most students cannot hear her. The students enter the three-story building that, during the war, became headquarters for Oneg Shabbat, a documentation project

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of the ghetto, headed by Emmanuel Ringelblum. The guide begins with a twenty-five-minute lecture on Ringelblum. The students sprawl on the steps. Few listen. They are then given ten minutes to wander around the dimly lit exhibition room, containing several items of Polish Judaica, documents from the ghetto, and pictures familiar from the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum exhibits.

4.1. Students are asked to perform a monumental feat of imagination, as depicted on the postcard: to look at the present and imagine the past.

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While one Orthodox participant is deeply moved by the Torah scrolls, sacred vessels, and the painting of a religious Jew displayed there, most students display indifference. One says: “I can’t take it any more. I don’t see that there is a ghetto here. What is this? Who lived here?” Another complains, “I want to see concrete things, not just candlesticks that I can see anywhere.” In answer to my question, “What do you want to see?” he replies, “I want to be in Auschwitz.” The students slouch back to the bus which travels fifteen minutes to a section of the ghetto wall in a house courtyard. A plaque of Israel’s ex-President Herzog and a map of the ghetto is affixed to the wall; alongside, an old Polish couple tends their garden (see Figure 4.2). The guide gives out maps of the ghetto, points out the piece of wall, and explains about the borders and division of the ghetto. Most students are interested. This is their first real site.

4.2. Polish couple tending their garden in the courtyard of the apartment building, once within the Warsaw Ghetto.

The students take pictures or light memorial candles. The guide concludes: “They had a force of life that is not found among other nations. The uniqueness of the Jewish people ... is not to lose the image of man ... Assimilated Jews returned to their Judaism. The sense of togetherness helped people to survive.” The guide appeals to national pride, while attempting to overcome the decallage between the past ghetto wall and the present garden wall through her height-

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ened feeling tone, designed to signal “increased authenticity of experience … and … communion achieved [between visitors and the site, and among the visitors]” (Fine and Speer 1985: 87). Some students consider the performance overdone. One says to her friends: “What ecstasy! When she starts talking, she doesn’t come down for at least half an hour!” One girl wrote in her diary: I felt that I didn’t sense the place well enough. At the wall, I felt that that was really my first contact with the Shoah. I touched the wall and tried to smell: was there a burnt smell or did it only appear to me to be so? I hit the outside of the wall and it was totally stuck to a school and an apartment house. An old Polish couple was working in the garden, and we stood silently. I couldn’t stop thinking about what they did during the war. I wanted to ask them if they lived in the same building; probably, they did. Did they hear the screams from the ghetto? Probably not. They really looked hard of hearing to me! (d5, 3–4).

Another student summed up: “The wall we were standing by for the Poles is a garden wall and not a holy wall.” What makes this site more meaningful to students than the Jewish Historical Institute? After all, both have “original stones” of the period. Perhaps the function of the Historical Institute as a museum and research center (then and now) has a distancing effect. The building is presented and perceived, not as a Shoah relic, a fragment of past life, but as a container for documents and objects. The inaccessibility of the objects to touch makes the three-fold distancing process that every museum object undergoes visible: selection, separation, and installation in a new synthetic context (Brink 1995b: 66). As the ghetto wall fragment can be touched and (so some visitors imagine) smelled, as well as seen, visitors sense they can absorb the memories impregnating its fabric. Furthermore, the ghetto wall corresponds to previously implanted representations. It is of a different color than the other walls, and the red bricks are known to the students from the Yad Vashem exhibit, pictures, and films. Finally, for a people whose primary national-religious symbol is the Western Wall, a wall is a relatively easy object to sacralize. A teacher is afraid to touch it at first; she approaches it with awe. A student seeks to smell it, to absorb it, to touch it, to feel its memories. The Hebrew plaque put up by former Israeli President Herzog authenticates it, and elevates it to an object of devotion. This is one instance of the “massive institutional support ... often required for site sacralization in the modern world” (McCannell 1976: 44). The

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plaque, the “right look,” the guide’s elevation of the site, and the candles left by previous (Jewish) pilgrims result in sacralization, which then calls forth “the corresponding ritual attitude of participants” (ibid.). Once sanctified, almost any element of the surrounding environment can be given symbolic significance. Thus, the old couple doing their gardening, oblivious to the group, becomes a pair of Polish bystanders, indifferent to the screams of the ghetto Jews on the other side of the wall. The residents of the apartment house are merely props or mannequins, reanimated at every visit to the wall. The students return to the bus and travel ten minutes. They then enter the courtyard of the apartment house where Adam Czerniakow once lived. Naomi speaks of Czerniakow’s role as leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat and his suicide after refusing to comply with the Germans’ orders to hand over the Ghetto population for extermination. Only a third of the students are now grouped around Naomi listening. The rest are scattered around the courtyard, conscious of being the object of curiosity on the part of the Poles living in the courtyard. Again, the decallage surfaces: “They said two thousand people lived (around the courtyard), but that’s impossible.... It’s difficult to believe that people lay there in the street dead or starving, like in all the pictures.... They explained to us that people stayed alive even under such conditions. We were in lively spirits, even if, in fact, it was inappropriate; but I’m sure things will work out later” (d2, 5a). Although all tourists on package tours learn to play scripted roles (taking pictures, moving as a group), often choreographed by guides and disciplined by fellow group members (Edensor 2000), the role of students in the heterogeneous space of the (not signposted) Polish apartment courtyard is unclear to them at this early stage. Noting the students’ lack of attention, delegation leader Omri says to me in private: “I find that the coin usually drops on the third day.” By then, according to Omri, the messages of the trip accumulate, the rhythm of the voyage is internalized, and students come to understand their representative role vis-à-vis the Poles. Only then can the appropriate emotional effect be triggered; only then can the coin drop. A short stop was made at the monument outside the Pawiak, a notorious Gestapo prison. The memorial is a tree with small name plaques of prisoners and crosses nailed to it, located on a street in a residential lower-middle-class Polish neighborhood. Only half the group got off the bus. No one seemed to know what we were doing there. At the end of a twenty-minute trudge through the former ghetto streets, the group arrived at the Umschlagplatz monument.

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The guide shows a black-and-white picture of Jews amassed for deportation to Treblinka, asking students to identify the Gestapo and hospital buildings based on the picture. A teacher wrote in her diary: “[At the Umschlagplatz] a four-lane street with a tram in the middle passing by all day.… You understand that it’s not a different place, dark with strange smells and weird voices, but Netanya or Nahariya, a normal place with normal people where other normal people went mad all of a sudden and closed the street and sent them to death. The quotidian nature and the brightness are threatening” (d6, 4). If the guide succeeds in creating sufficient confidence in the site, then even the “now” can become the present of the past. Once accomplished, the dissonance felt by the Israeli sightseers there, viewing Polish passersby, is read as marking Israeli difference from the normality of Polish indifference. Trams and the bustling city then become signs signifying the Shoah. The guide takes the group inside the monument enclosure, explaining that the slit in the monument was positioned so that a living tree appears behind it, symbolizing the hope of continued life of the people of Israel (for a description, see Gebert 1995). One girl wrote in her diary, “This artistic device sums up the entire day—the live trunk behind the chopped down stumps is like the Jewish people who preserve their living force forever and that is their heroism!!” (d2, 4a). The “hope” in the guide’s narrative is transformed into “heroism” in the student’s transcription. Another girl wrote: “At the Umschlagplatz I again tried to imagine the people of the ghetto sitting with all their belongings waiting for death, and I thought that if I were there, I would have put an Israeli flag in their hands”(d5, 3–4). At about 7:00 P.M., the bus pulls into the hotel. Students are ready to run out, get into the hotel, and rest. The guide instructs them: “Nobody gets out of the bus until we get the clearance from security. Don’t forget tomorrow, delegation sweatshirts, memorial candles, at least two, because we have to light in two places. Warm jackets for evening. Absolutely no leaving the hotel at night. There have been unsympathetic events in the past where even the police were called in.” At the end of the day, students are tired and excited, but also frustrated. One of them says: “We were disappointed with the day. We expected more concrete sights. To show us a piece of wall and explain that this was the ghetto—it’s difficult to imagine. I expected to see... I want to see the camps, the places where the Jews died.”

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The Road to Treblinka—Day Two “This is Treblinka Station” Students are woken up early, some after a late night of socializing and rehearsing their ceremony. At 7:25 A.M., the buses leave, traveling in a convoy of five. The guide, Naomi, outlines the itinerary for the day, pointing out the route on the map. After a few minutes of introductory explanation, she tells the students they can sleep until Treblinka and puts down the microphone. An hour and a half later, the delegation makes a bathroom stop. The buses have no toilets, the stretches in between towns are long, the weather is cold, and few Polish service stations can accommodate large groups. Thus, for the students, a forest is not just scenery—it’s a potential bathroom stop. The bursting bladders add to the perception of discomfort of the Polish countryside. Shu-shu (pee-pee) becomes part of the students’ trip folklore (see student doodle, Figure 4.3). One girl wrote: “We stopped for a shu-shu break, in the forests with big, fairly bare trees and brush. At first, it was nice and romantic, but when Bilhah and I went to find a place to pee, I almost fell into some kind of ditch, and immediately I ran. I thought, maybe this is a ditch that someone hid in.… We looked for another place and all of a sudden everything looked quite frightening, so we started to run, and then we stopped in fear—because it was even scarier.… In the end, we peed quickly and left!” (d1, 7b–8a).

4.3. The student’s doodle

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The students are often loaded with images that may be triggered in seemingly neutral areas, like the forests. As they are encouraged to imagine the Shoah time in order to bridge the gap between the present and the Shoah past, the woods may be imagined as the landscape of fear of the partisans, hiding from Nazis and Polish collaborators. After the toilet break, students return to the bus; most fall asleep again. No one mentions the places along the way. The hauntedness of the misty forest landscape outside, the drone of the Jelcz bus motor inside, the cold and damp outside, the misted-over grimy windows of the bus and the morning fog in the heads of the weary students inside, all draw the participants together as they travel through no-man’sland between the Umschlagplatz and Treblinka. The environmental bubble that typifies all guided tour groups (Cohen 1979) becomes a prototype of imagined us/them relations during the Shoah. Students are woken up as the bus drives onto the tracks at the railway/road crossing at Malkinia, a few miles from Treblinka. Naomi places the Yehuda Poliker tape, Dust and Ashes, on the bus cassette player and reads a short poem. Poliker is a popular singer and son of a survivor from Saloniki. Dust and Ashes has become the single most played album in Poland. One girl wrote: “After about an hour’s ride, all of a sudden railroad tracks appeared. THE railroad tracks. I closed my eyes and tried to feel how they must have felt. After all, we’re both traveling along the same road and almost to the same place. Impossible”(d5, 5). The five buses arrive together at the entrance to the Treblinka death camp site. Before they leave the bus, students are reminded to wear their delegation sweatshirts, bring memorial candles, and carry the Israeli flags they brought along. Students disembark at the reception area, a small exhibit fashioned in the form of a country railway station. The “ticket office” sells books, tapes, and posters on Treblinka. The station is as described in the text of the Poliker song that the students have just heard on the bus. The students enter the site by way of a two hundred–meter path of rounded cobblestones (see Figure 4.4) laid parallel to a path of concrete railway ties, reminding one of the tracks that once fed the death camp. “The gas chamber location,” writes Konnilyn Feig, is “a spot (like all others) to be guessed at, for there are no markers, no traces.... Where huts and watchtowers and piles of clothing and barbed wire stood, nature has taken over” (1979: 293–294). In the early 1960s, the Polish government created a symbolic cemetery with seventeen thousand granite slabs, some inscribed with names of towns, representing those killed in the cities, towns, and villages of Poland (see Figure 4.5). There are thousands of stones, all

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4.4. The path of rounded cobblestones leading into Treblinka

4.5. A survivor-witness at a symbolic tombstone at Treblinka

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dwarfed by the towering rugged rock symbolizing the three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews who died at Treblinka. A menorah is carved into the reverse side of the stone. At its base, a stone plaque reads, “Never again.” Several receptacles for memorial candles and a pit of elongated black stones are nearby, reminiscent of the pyres built to burn the bodies (ibid.: 293–295; Young 1993: 188–189). Naomi replays Poliker’s song, “Here is Treblinka Station,” on a cassette recorder, as the group walks the stone path into the main memorial area, holding their flags aloft. Naomi has the students sit down on the site of the unloading ramp, as she points out the approximate locations of the gas chambers, the barracks, and burning pits. A group of Polish teenagers rides through and around the memorial site on their bicycles. Some students are visibly disturbed. Naomi says: “No Poles served in the death camps, in spite of the stereotype. The Poles were not collaborators with the Germans. They’re a very nationalist people. They weren’t prepared to live under occupation. Even though they hated the Jews.” Naomi gives the students half an hour to explore the site. The students wander among the stones—some alone, others in small groups. Some search for a stone inscribed with the name of a town of one of their family members. Others stop to write notes, light memorial candles, take pictures. Half an hour later, the students are seated on the grass in back of the huge stone memorial. Facing the other four bus groups, on the other side of the symbolic burning pits, students of the Sulam group, assigned to conduct this ceremony, are lined up with their backs to the monument. They wear delegation sweatshirts and are framed by Israeli flags (see Figure 4.6). The ceremony begins with the Kaddish, continues with several Poliker songs, a dance, and several poems referring to the voyage to Treblinka, its present emptiness, and the imagination required to bridge the gap. The ceremony ends with Yizkor, and the entire delegation sings Hatikvah.6 Following the ceremony, the students are rushed by the delegation leaders and guides back to the buses. Some students complain of the lack of time alone. Several engage in a short discussion on the extent to which the Nazis were human beings. Some students gather to smoke cigarettes or munch on sandwiches. When they return to the bus, the kids demonstrate high, almost giddy spirits, joking and passing around snack foods. This pattern will be repeated following every visit to the death camps. The visit to the death camps has a ritualized superstructure, and each activity planned within the visit builds towards the desired result—the identification of the participants with the central

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4.6. The Sulam student group at the ceremony at Treblinka

messages of the voyage. I will quote at length here from the diary of one of the female participants: We arrived. A path, a sign and then gray rectangular blocks parallel, one behind the other. Here were the tracks, and the boxcars, and in one minute we’ll be in Treblinka, and the cubes are in their place like tombs without tombstones, without name or sign. How can we count the cubes when they’re on the horizon, seemingly endless. I took a picture with our flag. I’m walking in the same road to death, where people were led like animals, but I’m walking with a delegation sweatshirt and waving the flag as if in the sweaty face of Adolph Hitler... And then we arrived at the ramp. Naomi said, “Here’s where they unloaded them,” and we sat where they walked, fell, were pushed down, were beaten, bled, cried. I listened to the explanation and saw a ladybug.... I wonder if they were always here. And if so, then the Jews in the Holocaust must have seen them and certainly were made happy by them, at least a little. Or otherwise, how did they get here? I think the ladybugs are actually red drops of blood with pain, suffering, and black humiliation... We went into the camp which was designed for one purpose, killing the Jews. Eight hundred thousand in all. First thing, I lit a candle by the memorial and felt nothing. Around us were ten thousand stones representing ten thousand communities killed at Treblinka... The larger communities had their names written on the stones.... The name of zeide’s community wasn’t written, so I adopted a stone and decided that it would be Skupianova, the town of my zeide, the place where his father, mother, their families and altogether two hundred

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others were killed. No one knows for sure where they were killed, but probably in Treblinka, since most of the villages of the area (near Cracow) were killed there.... I took a picture of my stone… The ceremony was the most moving thing at Treblinka. And even though I stood facing a large group, I couldn’t control myself; [the emotion] rose and rose and especially during the song, “Where Are You Going To?” and the Hatikvah, I broke down (nishbarti). I couldn’t even sing, though I so much wanted to. But between one choking and the other, I listened and that was enough. When they asked me what moved me so much, I answered that it was the pain in the readings and especially the song, “Where Are You Going To?” where you can be anyone: mother, sister, girlfriend, and the pain at her departure. The song echoed in my ears and suddenly we sang Hatikvah, as if to say, we defeated you. You took away from us people who didn’t know where they were going to, but we are alive and crying and our families they won’t take from us. Hatikvah and the flag at the place of the crime at Treblinka: no revenge would be better, for that I cried (d5, 5–8).

The structure of the visit may be described as follows: Approach—“charging” the site: As Treblinka is visually “empty” of remains, and as it is the first death site visited, students need to be charged by the guide with enough information to enable them to envision a Holocaust past. In this case, the guide reminds students of what they have seen in the model of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, thus activating previously planted triggers. The road in—a national path: The ritual framing of the entry, accompanied by the Poliker song, “This is Treblinka Station,” enables this student to understand the group’s walk into the site as a reenactment, a following of footsteps. The national symbols she displays, however, frame her as active victor: “But I’m walking with a delegation sweatshirt and waving the flag as if in the sweaty face of Adolph Hitler.” The “unloading” ramp—visualization and contemporaneity: The guide focuses on the killing process by seating the students on the ground of the (now invisible) selection ramp and locating the gas chambers in the terrain: “We sat where they walked, fell, were pushed down, were beaten, bled, cried.” Once the landscape is identified with the key event, the last minutes before the gas chambers, the entire landscape can now reverberate with the same messages. Thus, “The ladybugs are actually red drops of blood with pain, suffering, and black humiliation.” The use of creative bridging metaphors (like that student’s wish to place Israeli flags in the hands of the deportees, above) is part of the personal search of individuals for connectivity with the death world, thus making the dead live in

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personal ways.7 The Polish teenagers who ride by on their bicycles can then be identified with the bystanders or perpetrators; this event then serves to animate and validate the context of Polish indifference and anti-Semitism. Thus, the absence of presence in the stone memorial site is transformed into the presence of absence (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1997)—screaming silence. Time to wander—further individualization of memory and destiny: Some students are overwhelmed by the anonymity of the victims and the massiveness of the site: “Tombs without tombstones, without name or sign... endless…” (d5, 5). Thus, the individual ritual act performed there may be merely mechanical: “I lit a candle by the memorial and felt nothing” (d5, 6). The student then finds a ritual way of personalizing death: “I adopted a stone and decided that it would be Skupianova, the town of my zeide.... I took a picture of my stone” (d5, 5–7).8 Through her identification of “her stone” in the field, all the other stones also become those of individuals like her grandfather. Yet their grouping together and the repetition of ritual acts of the group’s ceremony (candle lighting) makes the field of stones a symbol of the nation. Delegation-wide ceremony—encompassing individuals through national symbols: When students gather for the ceremony, the wandering individuals congeal into a single static group in front of the burning pits, under the flag. The ceremony moves from the individual to the collective, from death to victory, from Kaddish to Hatikvah.9 As one girl wrote: “Hatikvah and the flag at the place of the crime at Treblinka: no revenge would be better” (d5, 7). The ritual fuses the emotional and the rational, the individual and the collective, and focuses them on the symbols of the nation. The multivocality of symbols (Turner 1969: 246) is channeled into a limited number of meanings. National symbols, in general, support little ambiguity. At Treblinka, the raising aloft of the flag is also a movement from the horizontal space of the dead to the upwardly thrust vertical space of the living. It unites the diversity of horizontal groups into a single unified thrust. As one student wrote: “Blue shirts with Stars of David, the flag of Israel raised high—no longer right and left wings, religious and secular, but many Jews—pride—the joy of victory!”(d2, 5a).

Tykocin: Synagogues of the Past and the Survivor as Sheriff After an hour and a half’s ride, the bus arrives at Tykocin. The students gather in the huge, fortress-like seventeenth-century synagogue.

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Abraham Kapice, a survivor of the town, mounts the bimah and addresses the students: “The prayers on the walls, are all from then. They didn’t add anything; maybe they cleaned a little. My father prayed here, and we children were around him. My mother stood over there in the women’s’ gallery... Twice a week there was a market here in the marketplace, from where they took the Jews to be murdered... Three of the four quarters of the town were Jewish. All the houses around the museum/synagogue belonged to the Jews. The stores belonged to the Jews. Everything was in Jewish hands.” A guide chants one of the prayers painted in large letters on the wall. Some of the students are moved by the chanting. Others seem indifferent. The acoustics make it difficult for spoken words to be understood. Most of the participants have little experience of synagogues. While the words on the walls are recognizable as Hebrew, the prayers are unfamiliar and the building evokes no personal associations with Israeli Jewish life. One of the two religious girls (from other schools who joined the Sulam group) wrote: “It is the prettiest synagogue I have ever seen, and then a sense of alienation creeps in because I am a Sephardi among all the many Ashkenazic elements, and then again love for the entire Jewish people and again pride and great faith in God” (d2, 4b). The student’s ethnic alienation from the voyage group is overcome by a sense of shared identity with the religious Jews of the past who inhabited the synagogue. The witness-survivor, Abraham Kapice, affirmed: “Religious youth are far more attentive. They got up at 4:00 in the morning in order to daven shacharis (pray the morning prayer) at the synagogue. They took a Torah scroll with them from the Jewish Institute to read there. What wonderful kids!” When a religious group gets up early to pray shacharis in the synagogue, they make the synagogue an object of pilgrimage. They can inhabit memorialism, finding its interior meanings and becoming one with them. By contrast, when Kapice speaks with the secular groups, they can only imagine, through his words, what it would have been like to grow up as a religious teenager, praying alongside their fathers in what, for them, is a foreign building.10 Throughout the voyage, imagining is a problem—it demands the creation of a picture in one’s head that is often at odds with the surrounding materiality absorbed through the senses. Unself-consciously praying the same prayer as the dead prayed at the site, often with the same bodily movements, the Orthodox inhabit the past—that is, they share part of the habitus that once was (even if less than they may imagine). Insofar as “part of what we honor by memorializing the past is the

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sheer fact of the survival of its memory in the present” (Casey 1987: 230), prayer is an act of witnessing. In order to effect this inhabiting, the secular groups need a family connection, the mediation of the nation, or both. After leaving the synagogue, the witness walks at the head of a group of about 150 students through his ancestral town. He greets people along the way and addresses them in Polish, sometimes with an aggressive edge to his voice. Some respond with a hearty smile, others with a sheepish grin. He hands out Israeli chocolate bars to some of his Polish former-neighbors and snubs others. A teacher said: “Abraham passed through the village like a sheriff, this one he knows and greets, that one he pushes away. It shows how much the Jews were in control of things.” Here, the conspicuous display of affluence and power also expresses revenge. Kapice speaks of the town’s gentiles in a tone of disgust: “She had a sister and she married a goy, and she’s a goyete. She converted to Christianity and she’s a goyete.” He emphasizes how most townspeople turned against the Jews, depicting the next-door neighbors of his childhood as murderous anti-Semites. For those too far back in the crowd to see Kapice, it is a walk through a quaint and poor country town, where, they sense, little has changed: “But beyond the Shoah, it was so interesting to see the town which has remained standing almost one thousand years. Although there have been many renovations, still, the houses were very primitive and from them simple farmers came out, people who are born and die in the same house, and work in the same profession that there fathers and grandfathers did” (d5, 9). The presence of the witness in the flesh, supported by the look of the town today, provides a multi-sensory authenticity to the narrative. For many students, Kapice becomes a local hero. Over the past few years, Kapice has traveled to Poland with youth groups over twenty times, in spite of failing health. As one of the seventeen surviving Jews of the town, he sees himself as a living memorial to his town: “I tell about my town, before the memory disappears. Children want to travel and see—so I can transmit the Shoah to them, especially my town.” He later confided that he would be afraid to spend the night alone in the town. The presence of the youth groups allows him to confront local Poles as an honored member of a large, uniformed youth group from a more prosperous country, not as a lone survivor of an extinct minority. It is the youth’s presence and attention that transform Kapice from survivor into witness. Without an audience, the witness cannot perform his mission,

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his duty towards the dead. This reciprocity is an essential part of the witness-student relationship, as I will expand on later. While the other students were following Kapice, the guide Naomi went with her daughter to find the house where her grandparents lived in the 1920s. She later recounted: And sure enough, I look at it and we find a Star of David in stone on it. We stand outside, take pictures, our Polish guide laughs at us, saying, “Should I tell the owner that you want the house back?” We peek in and see that between the two doors is a hole for the mezuzah. And we find the same niche at the entrance to every room. The woman there says that this was a Jewish house, and she moved in after the war. Orit looks at it and says that it reminds her in style and in its smells of the old house of her grandparents. So, Orit says, “Now I see where my roots are. And to feel where the roots come up, that’s something.”

This experience is not shared directly by the group. The trip does not make time for exploration of individual roots in order not to privilege biological descendents of survivors. The youth are to acquire the status of third-generation witnesses by virtue of their belonging to the surviving nation, not through bloodlines.

“See, There Are No Birds in This Forest” The bus then makes its way to the death pits. On the way, students sing 50s and 60s songs in English (Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley). Essentially, once they are in the bus, they’re home in Israel. After about fifteen minutes’ ride along narrow roads, the bus stops by a sparse forest, and students walk ten minutes among the trees to the mass death pits, where the Jews of Tykocin were executed. Naomi tells the students that there are no birds in the forest—a sure sign of the presence of death. A student relates: “I had the sense of someone hiding behind the trees and watching me all the time, like the eyes of their spirits were upon me. I was afraid.” At the end of the path were three fenced-off mass graves. Abraham Kapice ends his testimony on the massacre, and speaks of his struggle to erect a Jewish monument to the victims. At the site of the mass graves are four monuments to the Jews of Tykocin (see Figure 4.7). The first, a Polish monument put up under the communist regime, avoids any reference to Jews. The second and third are private monuments erected by American Jews in memory of their relatives, and while Jewish, contain no Hebrew letters. The fourth, erected after great efforts by Abraham Kapice, is in the form of a Star of David. Kapice said: “It should be written in Hebrew so that every

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4.7. The four monuments for the Jews of Tykocin

child coming here can read it in Hebrew... When I first came, under the Russians, the word Jew wasn’t mentioned.” The issue of contested Jewish-Polish memory will resurface in the course of the trip. The students light memorial candles, mainly by Kapice’s monument. Several guides improvise a short ceremony, while Kapice recites Kaddish. The ceremony ends, as almost all voyage ceremonies do, with the communal singing of Hatikvah. The pilgrimage to Tykocin revives the Jews of the past in the synagogue, only to have them killed in the death pits. Death overshadows life. The bus travels through the dark back to the hotel in Warsaw. A number of students cluster around Kapice asking questions, while others sing or sleep. One student said at the evening discussion: “With respect to the witness, it’s hard to think that here’s someone who won’t be around much longer and we need to make use of him, and I feel the same thing towards my grandmother who is dying and she’s a Holocaust survivor.” A guide commented on the singing: “It’s wonderful how they make the switch from the forest to MTV.” Another guide replied: “Maybe it just doesn’t mean much to them. They don’t see or feel.” Some students are uncomfortable with the rapid shifts between “the forest and MTV.” Some feel guilty for being happy. The laga’at v’livro’ah (touch and recoil, pp. 84-6) syncopation has yet to be internalized.

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Evening Discussion: When Do We Get to the Shoah? After about three hours’ travel, the students arrive at the hotel. After dinner, each school group meets for the first of the three group discussions held on the voyage. Discussions are almost always scheduled directly after visits to the death camps. Discussion groups will always be held in the framework of a single bus or school (fifteen to thirty participants), and all students and teachers will attend. The guide may absent himself. The average discussion will last from one to two and a half hours. These discussions are both a regulatory mechanism as well as a forum for generating alternative meanings. They enable individual students to give vent to their emotions and bring their perceptions and feelings into synchronization with those experienced by the group at large. They also enable the adolescent to compare his self-image with the image others hold of him. The expressions of emotion that often take place in these discussions and the legitimation granted their expression by the group, as well as the airing of gripes and social tensions, makes them an important tool in the process of gibush (group crystallization). If the discussion is not dominated by the teacher or guide, they enable participants to first formulate what they think, and thus bring private, sometimes subversive, understandings to the public domain in a supportive environment where they can be appropriated by the group or parts of the group. Thus, they may serve as a valuable indicator and tuner of the mood and affect of the trip. This discussion opened, as most do, with the question of where students were most emotionally affected. The opening tones are often given by those who feel the greatest urge to “get something off their chests.” One girl said: “I wanted to share with you what I felt at Treblinka. Something screamed in me, ‘Enough! Stop doing this to me!’ But the feeling diminished with your help, and in the bus, I felt better. Thank you.” For the most part, the speakers did not interact with each other; each person had an emotional statement to make. In later discussions, as the group becomes more trusting and crystallized (megubash) through common experiences, they will support or oppose each other’s emotional reactions far more. In this discussion, students expressed two kinds of frustration: (1) difficulties in imagination: the place doesn’t look like expected; there are not enough authentic remains supporting the narrative; and (2) difficulties in emotional identification: the students do not feel what they think is the appropriate emotion at the sites or are disappointed at not having been overpowered by emotion. One male student summed up:

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The whole thing about digesting things and understanding: I feel really retarded [laughter]. I feel like I’m lagging behind everyone else. I haven’t even begun to digest this trip and I still don’t feel that I am in a foreign country... [laughter] They promised us tens of things: Poland is cold, the food stinks, and it’s not so bad… They promised us ugly and frightening people (maybe I’ll still find them)… We were in Treblinka and they tell me that people died here. And I see myself staring at the grass and trying to understand what happened here. They shot people and here, there are fences and candles and flowers and I can’t understand. And I find myself trying, by force, to imagine, but I don’t want to do it by force. If it doesn’t speak to me, it doesn’t; maybe it will come with time. But I’m unable and it’s very frustrating. They told me, if you don’t cry, if you are not shocked, if you don’t that’s okay, you don’t have to, it happens. But how come they cried and I didn’t; it’s not fair, I want to too. [students laugh] I hope some shock arrives, because that’s the aim of the trip. If worst comes to worst, you’ll beat me up at the end of the trip and I’ll cry.

Helmut Plessner writes (1970: 132): “Not all feelings can make us cry ... but only those in which we become aware of a superior force against which we can do nothing.… Feelings move us to tears as ways of taking cognizance of and of being addressed by a threatening power.” This overwhelming of the self is recognized through students’ referring to crying as shvira (breaking down). The students seek to be overpowered by the experience, to lose their sense of distance, so that they can experience their encounter with the Shoah as objective—that is, as embodied, rather than imagined. At the same time, students also fear this momentary capitulation of the self, this loss of control that they desire. Fellow students encourage patience. One said: “Perhaps towards the end of the tour, you’ll cry over Treblinka, because you’ll understand what you saw.” In spite of Naomi’s (not always consistent) attempts to reduce the importance of crying, the students persist in their conviction that crying is the clearest index of understanding. Uncontrollable, usually public, crying is the clearest indication of the coin dropping. The frustrated student replies: “If worst comes to worst, you’ll beat me up at the end of the trip and I’ll cry.” That is, “If the sites won’t do it, then through the experience of pain and the shedding of tears, I’ll come to embody the experience.” The final topic of the discussion was Polish anti-Semitism. One boy said: “I feel persecuted everywhere. There is a tremendous amount of graffiti and it’s all in Polish and I don’t understand it, but every time I see something written on the wall, I am 100 percent certain that it’s against Jews, that it’s anti-Semitic.”

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Others defended the Poles against the generalization. Naomi gave a fairly long talk against anti-Polish stereotyping. One student expanded the topic: “And we are the people who have suffered most from anti-Semitism, and we’re anti-Semitic now. I never see anyone who doesn’t curse Arabs.” This led to a shouting argument among the participants. One replied: “But the Arabs hated us always.” The first responded: “I ask, if you hate someone, learn his name, where he lives, where he works, what he likes and hates, and then decide who you hate.11 [applause] The argument might have continued (among those still awake), but, at this point, at 12:30 A.M., the conversation was cut off (after over two hours) by hotel staff, responding to guests’ complaints about the noise. Group discussions in Poland, although not programmed, do conform to certain patterns. Lessons can only be raised once the initial emotional needs and frustrations of the participants have been expressed. Any attempt by discussion leaders to shortcut the emotional expression phase by raising ideological or moral issues may short-circuit this process. Because the voyage hours are so long, and the discussions begin so late, few discussions proceed beyond the stage of emotional expressions. While a functionalist interpretation might view these discussions as a safety valve, enabling smooth running of the pressured trip and the unimpeded transmission of the State’s messages, we may also see the expressions of emotion as a way of personalizing the Shoah and relating it to their life-worlds of sorrow, loss, and solidarity (cf. Hazan 2001: 35–55). Such personalization may engender alternative positions, such as the expressed comment on anti-Semitism directed against Arabs.

Bus Travel, Ventilation, and Prayer—Day Three At 6:00 A.M., the students receive their wakeup call. The teachers make the rounds, knocking on students’ doors to ensure that the kids get out of bed. Each student must drag his own suitcase downstairs. The elevators are small and sometimes stall or take a long time to arrive. The bags of the five bus groups are strewn across the lobby. Two students from each bus struggle to keep the piles separate. When the buses arrive, they, along with the security personnel, check the inside of the bus and the underside of the vehicle for suspicious objects (see Figure 4.8). Once clearance is given, the students load their luggage onto the buses’ baggage compartments and

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4.8. A guide checking a bus for bombs and other suspicious objects

stagger into the dining room. Frequently, late-coming students will be chased out by group leaders before they have had time to finish breakfast. Some students try to exchange money before departure, and are delayed by the slowness and formality of the Polish service personnel. The resulting scene is a combination of sleep-wreathed, rushed chaos, followed by long waiting periods on the bus. At 7:15, the bus is ready to go, and the guide, Naomi, picks up the microphone: “Good morning!” “No, no! What did we do to you? Let us sleep!” Naomi presents a very brief map orientation and announces that the students have two and a half hours to sleep. The sleep deficit, a combination of the heavy program and the students’ desire to stay up late at night, is a constant feature of the trips. One survivor-witness said: “I told my son, it’s like in the Golani Brigade boot camp.” As the week continues and the sleep deficit accumulates, students’ ability to listen and absorb new information, as well as their capacity for judgment, will decrease, and the boundaries between the emotional self and the group will blur (H. Komem, pers. comm.). This may make it easier for students to break down in public towards the end of the trip. After the first shu-shu stop, Abraham Kapice concludes the testimony he began the previous day in Tykocin, accusing the Poles of wiping out the Jews of the village and then profiting from tourism to their synagogue. Most of the bus is asleep. The witness, facing

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forward in his seat, does not see them. His voice is distorted by the poor-quality microphone, competing with the drone of the bus motor and the participants’ fatigue. Furthermore, this testimony is disembodied; it has no visual reference to anchor it. It floats in the fogged space of the sealed bus environment somewhere in Poland. Kapice himself recognizes the importance of the visual: “Once a girl fell asleep and it got me very angry. Why am I coming to speak? But anyway, in Majdanek the eyes see. Then it’s hard for them. They cry. And then they understand.” For this witness too, tears are the most effective visible index that their stories have hit home. He ends his story: “We got to Israel in 1949. We got a room in a shikun with a kitchenette. For us, who came out of the camps, it was enough.” A student asks: “From where did you get the strength?” In response, he reads his son’s letter at the end of the autobiographical book he had published: “To this cursed earth which is sanctified by Jewish blood, we continue to come in spite of the intent of the final solution, to raise the flag of the State of Israel.... The tears flow and drip on the clods of earth, seep into the depths, and mingle with the blood of the murdered, as if to say ... through your death you commanded us life, and we shall continue the tradition” (Kapice 1994: 104). Almost all voyage testimonies end with Israel as their redemptive closure,12 which also expresses many witnesses’ lived experience. Almost the entire day was spent traveling on the bus. At one rest stop along the road, several young Poles made obscene remarks and gestures at members of the group. The group arrived at the Wieliczka salt mines, a major Polish tourist attraction, late in the day (about 3:30 P.M.) and was rushed through, in order to complete the program before Shabbat. An education administrator commented: “It’s embarrassing that they have to be rushed all the time.” Students enjoyed their visit to the mines, especially the highspeed shaft elevator that descended into the depths of the earth. They were noisy, boisterous, undisciplined and inattentive to the local Polish guide—like typical Israeli kids on a school trip. The entire day is framed as a ventilation day; most of the time is spent in the Israeli environmental bubble of the bus. Furthermore, the salt mines’ crowded elevator, crammed with Israeli bodies, is the closest approximation Poland can offer to inside enclaval space (see above, pp. 7781). In the salt mines, the students can act like Israeli teenagers.

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Kabbalat Shabbat: Orthodox Judaism as Safe Zionist Heritage The group arrives at their hotel in Cracow (except for the two Orthodox girls13), and had half an hour to get their bags upstairs, shower, change, and dash out to the buses for the ride to the synagogue. As a result, the group arrived nearly half an hour late at Friday evening services. The services are held at the Tempel, a liberal synagogue which survived the war (when it was used as a stable), and is currently in use by the local community for the High Holy Days and by Israeli delegation groups for Shabbat evening ceremonies. The synagogue was built at the beginning of the last century and, with its Moorish interior, high ceilings, and stained glass windows, retains some of the splendor of its past. The dim lighting, peeling paint, broken windows, and musty odors, however, impart a somewhat macabre air to the building. No attempt is made to integrate the local Jewish community into the prayer service. On the contrary, some group leaders remind students that the synagogue would be dead without them and that it is they, the young Israelis, who impart life to the dead building. Furthermore, although the halakha requires that prayers be conducted according to minhag hamakom (the local custom), students will pray using the Sephardi rite, as is most common in Israel. As far as the trip is concerned, the local community does not exist.14 Unlike many memorials, the synagogue has a distinctive musty smell, which conjures up emotions.15 Also, the European look and scale of the synagogue is foreign and exotic to most of the participants, some of whom have never been to a synagogue service in their lives! The synagogue was filled with members of three or four Ministry of Education delegations. The Sulam group arrived too late for the songs of Kabbalat Shabbat and participated only in the short evening prayer (ma’ariv). The leader of a religious delegation of the Ministry of Education said a few words about the synagogue (barely audible in the large space), but made no effort to explain the mostly unfamiliar prayer to the public. For many of the women, who had to go upstairs to the dark, drafty balcony, the synagogue was a negative experience. A teacher recorded in her diary: “We got organized quickly to ride, full of expectations, to the synagogue that is opened only for groups. We got there in the rain and the dark; the girls climb upstairs to a humiliating and maddening situation, to mildewy dark, to see what? No chairs, it’s ugly and smelly, and all because one schmuck from the other [religious] delegation said it bothers him

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that the girls are downstairs as usually is the case. I was eager that we feel together the power of the togetherness of the three delegations, but no togetherness, no song, no nothing” (d6, 8). Some secular students wrote of their being moved by the prayer service, even though they did not pray themselves. Later that evening, a lively discussion ensued among the guides and teachers on the subject of the service. Some felt that the traditional prayer service was inappropriate for many students who never attend synagogue and should be replaced by some sort of oneg Shabbat teaching and singing of Israeli songs. One teacher said: I come from a traditional home. Yesterday, I missed the Kabbalat Shabbat as it should be. The kids were lost… God, almighty!... Have we come here to Poland just to show them death? All this happened because of Judaism and that’s what we have to show them.… The salt mines are great, but for me, in Poland, the synagogue comes first. And I think for the kids too. The kids from Beersheba and Ashdod, many of them come from traditional homes, and they said, we came for this? A great missed opportunity! After the prayer—just one song. Are there no songs among the people of Israel??? A few songs, a hora or two! It was a missed opportunity. It’s a pity for the Jewish aspect.

The inclusion of the synagogue service as an obligatory part of the Poland itineraries (except for the antireligious Shomer Hatzair movement) illustrates both Zionism’s complex, ambivalent relationship to exile and Jewish religious practice and secular Israelis’ ambivalence towards Orthodoxy. For many secular Zionists, Jewish religious practice was seen as the prototypical mark of the Exile, which they desperately wanted to leave behind (Eisen 1986: 115). On the other hand, many Zionists accepted Ahad Ha’am’s understanding of the Jewish religion as the cement of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and as the expression of the conserving force that enabled the Jewish people to survive the two thousand-year—long period between the Kingdom of Judah and the State of Israel. Most present Israeli youth, however, are native-born and have never associated religiosity with the exile, nor is Diaspora Judaism a real presence in their lives. As Arnold Eisen wrote, “One can view the past far more dispassionately once one feels liberated from it. Israelis, having emerged from the trials of that liberation now seek a renewed connection to what they have cast off. Galut no longer represents so much of a threat.16 It is rather the raw material of which they and they alone will build the Jewish future” (Eisen 1986: 147). As the

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voyage in space is conceived by many as a time capsule, a voyage back in time, several thousand kilometers separate the student from religio-political struggles back home. In Poland, the black-hatted Hassid is “safe.” He is present mainly through tombstones and folkloric figurines, and offers no challenge to the Zionist narrative or to secular students’ world-views. He can thus be distinguished from his modern Israeli counterpart, the dos, viewed by many secular students as a welfare parasite, and as a threat to their lifestyle (“religious coercion”). Faced with so much emptiness and death around them, tradition may be sought as something transcendent, immobile, withstanding the ravages of time. This view is actively promoted by the Orthodox, both within their own camp and towards the outside world, although it masks far-reaching changes within the haredi world since the Shoah (Friedman 1994). Furthermore, many non-practicing Israeli Jews accept Orthodoxy as an authoritative representation of authentic Jewishness and bear an inferiority complex towards their own expressions of Jewishness, even if they choose not to adopt Orthodox practices and beliefs. One Orthodox student in the synagogue reported a secular girl telling her, “I envy you... My parents are really secular.” Secular students can thus feel comfortable singing Hassidic Shabbat songs that would embarrass them if sung in front of their friends at home (as occurred in one group I observed, when a tape of the singing was played in front of participants’ parents). In Poland, those songs are romantic yearnings for an imagined warm, stable past tradition. Where the Hassid is present only as a toy figurine (Lehrer 2003), the singing of his songs involves no commitment. What, in Israel, may stand for a threatening religious world-view, in Poland becomes an object of nostalgia or a form of play. Thus, the same teacher who complained about the lack of traditional songs in the synagogue reacted fiercely to a Hassid at Majdanek who requested charity and then rejected his donation as too meager: “How does he dare to defile this place? Religious? A blackie! A knitted kippa (skullcap) would never have done such a thing.” The promotion of the Orthodox Jew as the prominent representative of the exilic past also reinforces Jewish essentialism.17 The Polish Jew becomes distinguishable from his gentile counterpart (in the eyes of secular Israelis) through his dress, his food, his beard, his worship—his entire way of life. He is an alien in the Kingdom of Amalek, a people that dwells apart.” By minimizing the involvement of Jews in Polish culture, the voyage depicts Polish Jews merely as a particular case of worldwide past exilic Jewry. “Nationalism,” writes

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Bruce Kapferer, “makes culture into an object and a thing of worship.... The culture that is sacralized is highly distilled, spiritualized, and as the essence of the nation defines the conditions of its unity” (1988: 209). In the voyage’s presentation of Polish Jewish heritage, like in Israeli productions of Sephardi Jewish heritage (masoret), “people turn to (heritage) in their search for raw material for ‘Israeli society,’ and yet whitewash enough of their differences so that all that’s left are differences in local color” (Dominguez 1989: 152). The specific Polish-exilic and Liberal-Neolog features of the synagogue are effaced by the Israeli service. Thus, the teacher suggests that students ought to remember there that “(there) are songs in Israel” by “sing(ing) a few songs, a hora or two,” while the organizer reminds the students that it is they, the young Israelis, who bring life to the empty synagogue. At the same time, this presentation of the past also serves the National Religious orientations of many of the Ministry of Education organizers. Orthodox Judaism is glorified and legitimized as the historic Jewish life force and key to achdut Israel (Jewish unity). By providing a National Religious Israeli-style prayer service, it also projects modern Israeli Orthodoxy back on to Polish Jewish religious life. Thus, it legitimizes current modern Orthodoxy as the essential glue of the Jewish people, without arousing the opposition of secular students and educators. Yet the taken-for-granted assumptions about Judaism and Shabbat synagogue services of the prayer leaders and/or organizers may foster alienation. As the teacher relegated to the darkened balcony of the women’s section wrote: “No chairs, it’s ugly and smelly, and all because one shmuck from the other [religious] delegation said it bothers him that the girls are downstairs… no togetherness, no song, no nothing” (d6, 8). Upon their return to the hotel, many students lined up at the public phones to call their parents at home. The group then gathered together in the dining room for what was billed as a festive Shabbat meal. After the Shabbat blessing over the wine and the bread, they were served a meal in which the Polish herring, boiled or baked fish and chips were replaced by canned Israeli meatballs and soggy spaghetti. Perhaps the Israeli packaged food is meant to serve as the neshama yetera (the taste of the additional soul) that according to tradition, descends on each Jew at the beginning of the Shabbat. Perhaps for the Orthodox, whose weekday diet was restricted to salad vegetables, steamed fish, and boiled potatoes, even this change was welcome.

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When both religious and secular groups are present, they will usually sit at separate tables or even in separate dining halls. The secular will finish off their meal quickly and go to their rooms, whereas the Orthodox will remain at the table, singing Shabbat hymns. This further illustrates the different roles assigned dead Polish Jewish Orthodoxy and live Jewish practice by the voyage frame. In the Israeli space of the dining hall, a National Religious school group cannot be relegated to a sentimental past. There, secular students’ alienation from religious expression resurfaces. In this delegation, however, there were no Orthodox groups present, reflecting, among other things, the desire of the Orthodox to travel in homogeneous religious delegations. Omri commented: “We missed not having a religious bus along with us, as it lends character. They take upon themselves the responsibility for Kabalat Shabbat, and it takes on a traditional Israeli character.” For the group leader, it is Orthodox religious practice that provides tradition for Israeli life.

Shabbat Rest, Shabbat Shopping—Day Four Slouching through Cracow The Shabbat is a more leisurely day than the others. Wake up is at 7:30, as opposed to 6:00 most other days. There is little bus travel, the pace is slower, and students have free time for shopping,18 as well as two unscheduled hours for rest in the late afternoon. As many Jewish buildings in Cracow remain intact and no death camps are visited, the presence of death is not as imminent. This is in keeping with the religious injunctions of the Shabbat, on which mourning is prohibited. On the voyage, students lose track of the day of the week. On Shabbat, the peak day of the Jewish seven-day pulsating cycle (E. Zerubavel 1985: 114–120), home world time is allowed to break through the voyage’s interior construction of time (laga’at v’livro’ah –‘touch and recoil’ above, pp. 84-86). Paraphrasing Heschel’s characterization of the Shabbat as “a window in eternity that opens into time” (1979 [1951]: 16), we may say that the Shabbat is a window of Israeli time that opens into Poland. The programming of the Shabbat— Kabalat Shabbat at the synagogue, kiddush and zemirot at the table, synagogue visits on Saturday morning, shopping and napping on Saturday afternoon, and Eretz Israel songs on Saturday night—fashion an Israeli rest time in accordance with a particular cultural ideal.

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This morning, the weather is wet and rainy. The bus windows have misted over, and several students sprawl across the seats, dozing. Some of the teenagers have stayed up all night. Cracow is a bustling city, offering many temptations and distractions, and keeping the students together and attentive in rainy weather will offer a major challenge to the guides and teachers. On entering the bus, a student announces: “If we don’t do our shopping today, I’m flipping the channel.” There are four groups of sites to be visited on the Warsaw day, some at considerable walking distance from each other: Wawel Castle and shopping in the Sukenice, the old Jewish synagogues in Kazimierz, the Jewish ghetto sites in Podgorze, and a meeting with Polish youth at their school. The students travel by bus to the first stop, the Wawel—the Polish royal castle and cathedral. The delegation leader says: “We need to do this quickly, so that the government won’t fall, when they see us traveling. We received special permission to travel to the center so that you get time to do your shopping in the Sukenice.” The delegation leader, Omri said later: “There is rabbinic permission for those living on the periphery to travel on Shabbat.” A teacher then replied: “Well, maybe we should pay the rabbis a little bit more so that they give us permission to eat at McDonald’s too.” Naomi gives a ten to fifteen minute explanation on the Wawel from the bus. The students wander through the cathedral and the burial crypt of the Polish kings underneath. Tomasz, the Polish guide, gives a short explanation of the Cathedral and the coronation of the Kings of Poland. (This is the only time that he has been asked to explain anything to the group.) A teacher reminds students to respect the Christian holy sites. He speaks of relics as granting legitimacy to kings. Reasonable attention is given to the site, especially as this is “only” a Polish tourist site. In the Wawel courtyard, a student comments: “This would make a really cool football field.” “Picture taking is at the expense of your shopping time,” Naomi threatens. Street vendors approach the students, selling sweaters, wood carvings, and souvenirs. As the group arrives, a trio of Polish buskers begins to play “Hava Nagila.” The students arrive at the market for an hour and a half of shopping time. Students are officially restricted to the enclosed space of the Sukenice tourist market, ostensibly for security reasons. Students buy walking sticks, dolls, chess sets, boxes, sweaters, knives, and wood carvings. “How much did you pay?” The closed market is filled with Israeli delegation students. Some students express frustration with

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what they felt was insufficient time. Unlike in many groups, this time the motif of revenge is absent from shopping.19 Some kids express relief at the loosening of the restrictions of confined space: “Finally we felt like we’re in hutz la’aretz.” After shopping, students arrive at the parking lot and circle around the bus, buying painted wooden eggs from street vendors and comparing purchases. The bus then leaves for the site of the Cracow Ghetto in the quarter of Podgorze, arriving fifteen minutes later. On the bus, Naomi explains about the competing Polish resistance movements and their differing attitudes towards the Jews, about revolt and the righteous gentile Tadeusz Pankiewicz. Unexplicably, the pharmacy-museum is closed to visitors. Students get out and huddle under the umbrellas in the rain. Many students see nothing at all. Among their reactions: “Nu, for this we came here?” “Where is this pharmacy?” “Was there a ghetto here?” The tiredness, rain, cold, and fogged windows of the bus, the rustling of packaging and plastic bags of souvenirs and comparisons of purchases, creates an environment that shuts out the outside world completely. Students remount the bus, ride five minutes to the ghetto wall segment, snap pictures, and remount again. The bus deposits the group in the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz,20 where students pause for a lunch break. They amble in and around the bus, eating their sandwiches, and spend half an hour wandering fairly aimlessly between the old synagogues on the street. The fatigue of the group, perhaps combined with the lack of real interest in the subject on the part of the guide, lead her to cut short her explanations.21 The only persons to comment on the synagogues were the two religious girls, who walked there and back in the rain. One wrote: “The synagogues are all abandoned and yet they have a hidden radiance which distinguishes them from other abandoned buildings” (d2, 6a).

(Non)encounter with a Polish School Two bus groups (of the five in the delegation) travel to a Polish high school for a meeting with Polish youth in a school with a special Judaism study program. Many of the group had visited Israel previously. They were interested in Israel and Jewish topics. One student summarized the meeting as follows: The meeting was nice, they received us with songs and recitations, and then we broke up into groups and spoke in English; it was nice to find

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out things about them (they’re in the “Israel class,” and there they learn about Jewish culture) and they meet a group from Israel every two weeks. Some even know some Hebrew. What bothered me was that they don’t get excited about the whole thing—it was nothing special for them (like it was for us). We talked about all the things that they or we do, about the Shoah and other stuff! Then we left (after giving them their presents)” (d1, 13b–14a).

At the nighttime staff meeting, a teacher commented: “You could have a boy or girl prepare something in English. Prepare them more.” The delegation leader admitted: “It’s very problematic. We try to find classes that know English, and things will improve with time. They don’t know yet what to do with these meetings. We neither.” Even when good will is present, no effort has been made to integrate the meetings into the serious side of the trip. Certainly, with a Polish class that studies Jewish topics and has been to Israel, more could be done. The encounters remain a diversion, to be relegated to the “rest period” of Saturday afternoon (ventilation time). Some group leaders, organizers, and teachers, including almost all religious groups, will not meet with Polish youth.

Singing for Home After dinner, buses took the group to a rented auditorium for an Israeli song evening, attended by over five hundred participants of Israeli delegations in Poland. Immediately after the event, one girl wrote: “It was very moving to love ha’aretz and to long for it through song, and the evening helped lighten the charged emotional state everyone was immersed in; tomorrow, G-d willing, we’ll be in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and in fact, I don’t know what to wish for” (d2, 6b). Another recorded: “At first, we didn’t want to go, but then we found it was really awesome. We danced and sung, and it was gigantic, especially thinking that this happened in Poland, in the land where so many people died, it was fun to show everyone, like, that we’re here—the happiest there is and the most Israeli!” (d1, 14b). A third girl remarked: “There was the feeling as if we’re in the Histadrut (trade union—JF) headquarters in Migdal Ha’emek and not in an auditorium in the heart of Cracow. And we were really happy and we broke loose and sang songs that kids usually don’t dare sing in Israel out loud (‘folk songs’)” (d3, 8b–9a). As there are no onlookers, no visible outside, no Polish symbols, the auditorium is also an interior space, homologous with Israel. The song evening serves to reduce homesickness,22 to achieve further gibush of the delegation, to emphasize the role of Israel as giver

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of life and “charger of batteries” for the trip (especially just before visiting Auschwitz), to provide a transition back from the Shabbat rest to the weekday, and to impress the students with a show of Israeli force. The perception of the hostility of Poland enables students to rally around symbols of the homeland and sing “Eretz Israel” songs, or, songs with religious texts that they would consider to kitschy and uncool to sing at home in front of their friends. Songs that, in Israel, are seen as fit only for (Jewish) others—dosim (the Orthodox), new immigrants, or right-wing settlers—may become emblems of Israeli unity and longings for home in Poland. At one point, one survivor-witness came on stage to thank the participants. He later reported: “As far as tonight, I’m like a volcano. I was at a certain limit, and I couldn’t resist. I felt … that I had to say a few words. I felt I had to thank the kids for the joy they brought us.” Another witness said: “I was full of tears of joy for this youth, and sadness for the previous youth. I couldn’t control myself at the beginning. And it was a great experience for the kids.” For the older witness-survivors, the youthful spirits of the Israeli kids on the grounds of Poland is a sign of continued Jewish life. The sadness for the previous youth of the Shoah (including herself, as a teenager deprived of her childhood) is offset by joy for the present youth. They see the children, alive in a land of death, as the embodiment of their future.

After Midnight: The Staff Meeting Late that night, the staff is called together to attend an evaluation meeting. While the meeting is designed to further contact between the delegation staff and the teachers, it also serves as the occasion for airing grievances. In this case, some teachers complained of the hurried pace and the poor food and accommodations. The delegation leader defended the pace by arguing that the tour was both cheaper than its competitors and that the drawbacks were inherent in the official nature of the trip: “This is not a tour, it’s a masa (mission). Not a tiyul (tour). And on a masa, we behave like on a masa. And we are an official group. Whoever is not prepared to follow these rules shouldn’t go with the Ministry of Education. Let them go privately.” In order to promote the superiority of the Ministry’s “product” in an increasingly competitive market (cf. Ofir 1995: 11–12), Omri first cites the Ministry’s competitive edge. He then retreats from the language of commodities to an ideological high ground: comfort and quality of food is to be sacrificed for greater security, purity of ideology, and the kashrut regulations imposed by the official, represen-

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tative nature of the Ministry tour. Whereas the other groups go on tiyulim, the Ministry of Education provides a true masa (cf. Almog 1997: 268–277; above, pp. 61-63; Kacen and Shahar 2000). Finally, he returns to the language of the market: “This is the price we pay.” Another teacher gave voice to her students’ frustrations in failing to imagine and feel what they expected: “The kids did not succeed in getting to the depths of the experience... On the one hand, the psychologist said it’s ok if you don’t cry... But we didn’t have a single moment in which we had to pick up the pieces, to deal with difficult situations. And I ask, what about the experience?” Here, one of the witnesses replied: “As a former boxer, when you go into a fight, you need to warm up. If you take them the first day straight to Birkenau, you break them completely without reason. Here it’s well done. You bring them up slowly, just as they, may their name be blotted out, brought us, I don’t want to compare. There is a logic to the order… These things were, and they’ll see them [emphases mine]. You need patience” (Haim). The witness’s comparison of the Shoah voyage with the Shoah is an assertion of the pilgrimic nature (masa) of the voyage. The voyage is not an act of commemoration, but of reactualization of the Shoah event (Eliade 1959: 69). Students should get a taste of the cold, the deprivation, the discomfort, the loss, the frustrated hopes that the witnesses went through. Only when they are loaded with sufficient knowledge and sensory stimuli can they see what is not there behind the relics that are there. This seeing will trigger the emotions and enable them to experience Auschwitz. The delegation leader, on the other hand, replied: “There are eight purposes to the trip in Poland. A certain experience is only one of the eight according to the DGC, which determines the trip. Whoever doesn’t like those aims should go privately, not with the Ministry. “In Israel I said that the trip to Poland is a cumulative experience. Until the third day, usually, the coin doesn’t drop. They don’t know where they are. After the third day, they begin to absorb, I mean to begin to feel… In the following days, they advance in giant steps.” Finally, he turned on the teacher: “Such a generalization is an injustice towards what’s happening in your group (…) The problem with you,” he accused her, “is the poor preparation.” Amidst this conflict of authority, we should note that crying is accepted by all as an index of absorbing, feeling, and, in the end, seeing and coin dropping, and that the delegation leader argues that preparation—including tuning of expectations—is essential for conditioning the proper experience of the sites.

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The Heart of the Shoah: Auschwitz-Birkenau—Day Five The visit to Auschwitz is one of the high points of the voyage. Along with Majdanek and Treblinka, it provides the most intense encounter with the death world. Furthermore, Auschwitz serves as a stand-in for the entire Holocaust (cf. Kraushaar 1997: 73; Ezrahi 1996). It is the site students are most likely to associate with the Poland trip prior to their departure.23 The Ministry of Education places Auschwitz at center stage by devoting an entire day to the visit of the camp,24 more than at any other site—scheduling one or two ceremonies there; holding an evening discussion in preparation for and/or following the visit, and having an Auschwitz survivor tell his story to the entire group in situ there. Two closely linked sites are visited in the course of the day. The first is Auschwitz I, inaugurated in June 1940, as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners, Russian prisoners of war, and some Jews.25 The second site is Auschwitz II or Birkenau, built in 1941, three kilometers away, primarily to house Jews deported from all over Europe. The camp, seven times the size of Auschwitz I, consisted of about 250 (mostly) flimsy, “horse stable barracks,” housing 120,000 prisoners at its peak of operation, in 1943–1944. It is estimated today that about 1.4 million people were killed at Auschwitz. Over 90 percent were Jews. The vast majority were killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau. Unlike Auschwitz I, at Birkenau, restoration work has been limited to the minimum necessary to keep the remains from falling apart.26 Whereas Auschwitz I is visited by nearly a million tourists of all nationalities, (see figures 4.9, 4.10) Auschwitz II is visited by less than a third of that number (Szurek 1990a: 12), mainly Jews. The site of Auschwitz is extremely charged with emotions. Participants develop a set of expectations preceding their visit, including the fear of breaking down and crying, and a well-developed visual image of the camp, derived from documentary films and photographs.

Auschwitz I: Approaching the Contested Site of Memory Although no special preparation session was held for the students in this group, some linked the giddy exhilaration at the previous evening’s song session with the tense expectation of the encounter with the presence of death at Auschwitz. The students are woken at 5:30 A.M.27 Shortly before 7:00, the delegation leader chases the group out of the dining hall and on to the bus: “Yallah, yallah, we have to get to Auschwitz!” When students

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leave the hotel, it is still dark outside. The windows are fogged over. Ora, one of the witnesses, begins to tell her story on the way to Auschwitz. Within fifteen minutes, most of the bus is asleep; teachers make the rounds nudging students to wake up. The witness commented: “I felt in the bus, like I was in a train station and I had to say my words as the train is pulling out” (Ora, 16 September 1995). Without visual contextualization in the landscape, this testimony, like Kapice’s earlier testimony, is just another story. After an hour and a half’s ride, students arrive at the gateway to Auschwitz. The participants descend from the bus and enter the auditorium to view the 1945 Soviet documentary film. The film enables the students to people the empty buildings they will see later in the camp with the visual images of the dead and the dying.28 The students, like almost all other visitors, are unaware of how the memorial site is marked to exclude buildings that were originally part of the camp. Dwork and van Pelt suggest (1994: 236–237) that this “has to do with the role of the steel gate bearing the infamous inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei.’ For the post-Auschwitz generation, that gate symbolizes the threshold that separates the oikoumene (the human community) from the planet Auschwitz. It is a fixed point in our collective memory, and therefore, the canonical beginning of the tour through the camp.” The exhibitions inside the buildings are designed to present the Holocaust through the prism of Polish suffering. The same messages are emphasized by many of the Auschwitz Museum guides.29 The Auschwitz I site contains the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gate, and includes the general exhibition, depicting primarily Polish victims, the Wall of Death, and the adjoining cell dedicated to the beatified martyr-priest Maximilian Kolbe, the gallows, and the gas chamber. Thus, Auschwitz I, where mainly Poles were interned, is made to represent the Holocaust in its entirety: deportation, entry, disinfection, selection, suffering, extermination. A variety of strategies are employed in order to impose JewishIsraeli memory on the made-in-Poland memorial site: (1) selection of the sites to be visited; (2) replacing the Polish guide narrative with an Israeli one; (3) performance of ceremonies at loci of Jewish memory, away from sites shaped by Poles; (4) shifting emphasis from the morning visit to Auschwitz I to the afternoon visit/ceremony at Birkenau; (5) use of the witnesses’ narrative to reinvest the remains with a personalized Jewish memory; and (6) prominent display of Israeli national symbols.

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Manifesting Israel at Auschwitz Although the Auschwitz Museum requires that all tour groups be accompanied by a local Polish guide, the Israeli guide will usually ask her/him to remain silent. As Jonathan Webber pointed out (1992b: 51; 1992a), if Auschwitz is primarily a cemetery for many Jews, for others it may be a museum, a memorial site, or a tourist attraction (see Figures 9 and 10). For the vast majority of Israelis, the preexisting image of Auschwitz is not a memorial site, but massive grassy killing fields. Insofar as Auschwitz is a Jewish cemetery, the eulogy must be performed by a member of the family or a close friend of the deceased. Insofar as the visit is a national pilgrimage, the mediators of the holy site must be of the congregation. There is no room for any outsider’s commentary, much less a Polish one. For Jews, Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust, and symbolizes only the Holocaust. For Poles, Auschwitz is the symbol of the Nazi oppression of Poland, the “Golgotha of the nations.” As a Polish Jewish activist summarized: “There is no room for two chosen nations in the same

4.9. Auschwitz as an important tourist site

4.10. Advertisement for daily tours to Auschwitz

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land” (Krajewski in Polonsky 1990: 102–103). Furthermore, for most Israeli participants, the Poles are not fellow victims, but Holocaust bystanders or perpetrators. The delegation leader instructed the Israeli guides: “We come out of the film, we’ll attach the ‘talk-omats’ [local Polish guides] to you, do whatever you like.” Throughout their day’s visit, the students will wear blue-andwhite delegation sweatshirts. Each group carries several large Israeli flags. They will often be raised on high, or even draped around the shoulders like a tallit during the visit to Auschwitz (see cover photo). This rhetoric of manifesting presence is particularly important on a site where “the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II have long understood the importance of successful contestation over symbolic spaces, contestations that symbolize the very heart of spiritual struggle” (Charlesworth 1994: 591).30 The students also understand their display of the flag as part of the struggle over Holocaust memory. One student said: “When we walk with the flag and pass the Poles, even if they hate you, they can’t do anything to you, because we have the flag and we feel safe. It made me very angry that wherever we went at Auschwitz there was the Polish flag and not the flag of Israel.” The manifestation of presence is most evident during the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, when thousands of Israeli and Jewish students participate in the March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau (Kugelmass 1993; Rubenstein 1993; Kaufman 1994; Stier 1995). The understanding that the Auschwitz dead acquire redemptive meaning primarily through their link to the State even affects basic perceptions of the site. The evening following the visit, one student wrote: “Auschwitz is a huge area full of very green and tall trees—silence reigns over all and there is no life besides the sound of our feet” (emphasis mine). This, even though the place was packed full of Polish tourists on a Sunday visit! After leaving the film auditorium, a traffic jam ensues as many groups of students wait to take each others’ picture with the Israeli flag, alongside the Arbeit Macht Frei gate at the entrance to the site (see Figure 4.11). The displaying and photographing of the flag at Auschwitz is, first and foremost, a performed event of ritual appropriation (see Figure 4.12). As Susan Sontag writes (1977: 9): “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.” Second, the camera serves as a distancing mechanism. As Sontag notes (1977: 10): “The very activity of taking pictures is soothing,

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4.11. Photography by the Arbeit Macht Frei gate at Auschwitz

4.12. The display of the flag at Auschwitz

and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel [and here, I might add, by the presence of death] … most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.”

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Finally, the snapshots of participants at the death camps are “indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out ... a document (of) sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends and neighbors” (ibid.: 9). As each group seeks to perform anew the rituals of appropriation and testimony as prescribed by their predecessors, the images in the photo albums of the participants of the various delegations all look the same. Thus, these snapshots form the dominant bank of images for future voyage participants. They become icons for the school class, and determine future groups’ behavior at the site. Undoubtedly, such dynamics characterize tourism in general, as Dean MacCannell writes: “An authentic touristic experience involves not merely connecting a marker to a sight, but a participation in a collective ritual, in connecting one’s own marker to a sight already marked by others” (1976: 137). “It is the mechanical reproduction phase of (site) sacralization (through creation of prints, photographs, models or effigies) that is most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object. And he is not disappointed. Alongside of the copies of it, there has to be The Real Thing” (ibid.: 45). Here, however, the photographic record of the participant waving the flag is proof of the student’s status, not simply as an economically privileged member of the leisure class, but as witness and victorious survivor. In a later discussion, one teacher addressed the students: “Have you noticed that you have slowly turned into witnesses? [laughter] I’m not joking. You went and took photos… So aren’t we witnesses? Don’t we testify to what we saw? So, we were lucky and we didn’t live during the catastrophe, but we came afterwards and saw. Can’t we testify to what we saw?” He characterized his picture taking as “a record of the visit to the dead and the victorious return.” Thus, the taking and showing of Auschwitz photos becomes a moral imperative, a ritual performance of the obligation “to remember and never forget.” As they enter Auschwitz I, some students had difficulty “finding” the camp. For them, the real Auschwitz has wooden barracks (of Birkenau), as in the film on the liberation of the camp they watched before entering the site (Dwork and van Pelt 1993: 236). One girl wrote: “Even if we remove all the big trees that were there, and all the greenery and the reconstructions that were done on some of the places, it still looks too good, and not like I believed. Only later, in Birkenau, did I see the full picture, the original one, the way it was pictured in my head [emphasis mine] and as I believed” (d3, 9b–10a).

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4.13. The Jerusalem stone outside the Jewish pavilion at Auschwitz

At the beginning of this group’s visit of Auschwitz I, the students enter block 27, designated as the Jewish barracks. It is one of twelve national exhibits, and the only explicit monument to the Jews on the site of Auschwitz I.31 Its entrance is marked by a Jerusalem stone, inscribed with a verse from the book of Job, the menorah, the site symbol, and a dedication of the late Israeli President Haim Herzog— it was erected there on the occasion of his State visit to the camps in 1992 (see Figure 4.13).32 Students skip the exhibition of photos, entering the ceremonial room on the ground floor to conduct a ritual, at whose heart is the song, “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem,” and the reading of names of victims. The ceremony (described in chapter 5, pp. 204-208) personalizes the dead by linking them to individual families of the participants. The atmosphere of common mourning, sadness, and, sometimes, shock engendered by the ceremony will permeate the rest of the visit to Auschwitz I. After the ceremony, several students stopped to write in the guest book, but most lingered on the steps outside, many crying and hugging each other in small groups. Fifteen minutes passed in almost total silence before Naomi sensed that students had calmed down sufficiently to resume their tour of the camp.

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Visiting the Exhibition in Auschwitz I There are five general exhibition blocks open to the public: blocks 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11, and the adjoining Wall of Death, where many prisoners were executed, plus a series of barracks housing national pavilions of various countries, the Appelplatz, and a reconstructed gas chamber. The students will begin their visit with blocks 4, 5, 6, and 7. Block 4 contains explanations on the process of extermination, block 5 contains personal effects of the prisoners, block 6 documents the life of the prisoners, and block 7 details living and sanitary conditions; its walls are lined with photo portraits of Polish prisoners. Some students are particularly fascinated by the displays of suitcases, prostheses, toothbrushes, and broken dolls (see Brink 1995b: 57–74; and the discussion on Majdanek, below). One exhibit consists of piles of suitcases with the names of the victims written on them (mostly deportees from Theresienstadt). When students visit these remains shortly after reading the names of murdered family members at the “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony, they often express that they could have been there. Some students, however, are frustrated by the distance created by the display of the objects behind glass, the captions in foreign languages, and the constant flow of guided tour groups through the site. These remind the participants that they are seeing a museum exhibition, a selection and conscious arrangement of items. Furthermore, the buildings are well-ventilated; the objects have no smell and cannot be touched. A multisensory experience is essential to the students’ experience of authenticity, as I will discuss in analyzing the Majdanek visit. In addition, some participants remain numbed by the earlier ceremony. One girl wrote in her diary: (‘Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem’) was a ceremony full of tears—black and frightening—and in spite of so much crying I felt that I’m getting used to the sight of the horrors. After Treblinka where I cried so much, my heart has become, I think, more hardened towards the pictures of children and broken dolls. Tears welled up in my eyes but did not spill as usual. Perhaps the so called imperviousness is not a result of accumulated experience, but rather shock, as I couldn’t take the sight of the hair, and total nausea filled my throat at seeing the prostheses. From then on I walked in shock, and I climbed stairs with a weakness that filled my body (d2, 7b).

Afterwards, students move on to block 11, the “death block.” The barracks building contains tiny solitary confinement cells that were used for torturing prisoners and detaining those condemned to die at

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the Wall of Death, just outside. Most of those imprisoned in block 11 or killed at the Wall of Death outside were Poles. Parts of the barracks are fashioned as a Polish Catholic martyrium, dedicated to Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish (anti-Semitic) priest who volunteered to die in place of another condemned man, and was beatified by the Church. Devout Poles come on pilgrimage to Kolbe’s cell, lay wreaths and light tapers there. For the Poles, this site is a metonym for all of Auschwitz, signifying Catholic Poland as the martyr of the nations,33 or, in Pope John Paul II’s words, “the Golgotha of the contemporary world.” Most participants, however, are unaware of the significance of the site for Poles, and, if they are made aware of it, react negatively; Polish Catholic memory is seen as a competing hostile form, a 4.14. The side altar at Czestochowa dedicated to Maximillian Kolbe

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desecration of “our” dead. On this occasion, a Sunday morning, dense crowds of Polish visitors came to visit the site after church services. Many students see this as an intrusion: “Are you supposed to feel something, with all the people pushing and shouting in line?” one student asked at the evening discussion. Another responded: “I wandered around, and, all of a sudden, I hear German spoken, and see a German group. Though it was in Auschwitz, there I saw Poles too, and they could have done something else on Sunday... If they came and saw, and I hope they remember, that’s enough. And I wish more would come. Because if the message is to remember and not forget, that’s the point.” After the self-guided visit to block 11, the guide told a story about one of the Mengele twins who was the subject of medical experiments carried out in the (now closed) block 10. Between block 10 and block 11, at the Wall of Death, students wrote names on the paper wrappings of their yellow Yad Vashem memorial candles before lighting them. Some silently recited a chapter of Psalms. Others again had their pictures taken along with the flag. A few minutes later, one of them explained: “I felt pride at having the flag and anthem by the Wall of Death. When I come home I’ll go to the synagogue on Friday night even though I didn’t go before. Judaism is dying out, and my grandfather was religious. In our house, there was hardly any tradition. I think it’s very important to be Jewish.” The contact with artifacts of destruction (and, perhaps, the observation of Polish Catholic mourning practices) leads the student to declare her commitment to religious practice as a sign of fidelity to the dead. In between visits to exhibit buildings, a small group clusters around one of the witnesses (Ora), who tells of her life experiences in the camps as she walks. The witness Haim takes a small group to block 17 at Auschwitz I where he was imprisoned. A teacher recorded: “With wide hand movements, Haim explained where he stood, where he walked, where he slept, where he went to work, and things took on the significance of here, of reality and not of stories from a far off land, from history” (d6, 13; see also Figure 4.15). Haim said to them: “I feel in the air as if the air is full of floating souls, and the earth is soaked with blood and tears and Jewish suffering... After a few days the Poles asked, ‘Where are your parents?’ And we said, ‘Working.’ And they laughed and pointed to the crematoria fires and said, ‘There are your parents.’” For the witness, the dead are physically present everywhere. Their blood is in the earth, their ashes in the river, their smoke in the air. The witness becomes a kind of medium, through which the students come to sense these spirits of

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the dead present on site. Through his mediation, a quasi revelatory moment may occur, in which the students succeed in dissolving themselves into the Shoah picture. As one student described it: All the black-and-white pictures... We walked among all the barracks and they’re all empty, just air. And they talk with you about the terrible smell and you smell the smell of nothing. Of a house. And you see the pictures, and you see the people from forty years ago. Especially where the chimneys were, I see everything in black and white, in gray. I see all the people milling around and I felt like some disembodied spirit looking at them and returning where we are today. [Note the unconscious repetition of Haim’s words, “I feel in the air as if the air is full of floating souls”.] I thought maybe that’ll happen to me and in a hundred years people will come and say he was here, he was here, especially when the witnesses were talking, I saw a flash of a picture in black and white and then it was gone. It was really scary. The actuality of the situation.”

After the four-hour visit to Auschwitz I, the groups will take a half-hour break in the parking lot opposite the camp entrance to eat lunch and use the bathrooms. When some participants felt uncomfortable eating, Haim, one of the witnesses, grabbed a roll and held it up before the students: “Hevre, take a look, a roll in Auschwitz! Who could ever have imagined? Come on, give a bite!” And with that he bit into his soggy roll with exaggerated relish. 4.15. A witness-survivor on the steps of a barrack at Auschwitz 1.

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The witness legitimates the Israeli kids’ matter-of-fact youth, energy, and appetite, casting it as evidence of the survivors’ victory over death. Through the children, the witness proclaims, the survivors return as victors. Through the survivors, even the eating of a sandwich is integrated into a narrative of suffering, memory and victory. “A roll at Auschwitz! Who could ever have imagined?”34

Birkenau: The Heart of the Death Camp After lunch, the students ride five minutes to Birkenau. All pile out of the buses at the same time, and some climb up to the crowded guard room over the entrance. Each student wants to be the first to hold the flag and have his picture taken. A student lies on the tracks to get the proper photo angle. He then gets up and asks: “Where’s the flag?” The camera is a means of distancing as well as of appropriation, allowing the student to shift from a less mediated view of the site to a camera-distanced one. Only rarely do students feel uncomfortable with the voyeuristic aspect of photography. One student reported: “I didn’t have a camera, and I looked at the others who were taking pictures and you remove yourself outside and take pictures and... it’s difficult for me”.35 Although there is no directive to do so, many boys, as well as the male witnesses, put on kippot on entering Birkenau, even though it is not a consecrated cemetery. When asked about it, Haim answers, “Why do people wear kippot when they walk into a synagogue? Because it’s a holy place. I say that there is no place holier than this, where millions of our people were murdered.” After a short, diagram-assisted explanation on the structure of the camp, the students are herded into one of the long wooden “quarantine” barracks for a central presentation of testimony on Auschwitz. This is one of the only occasions, other than in ceremonies, when the entire group will be brought together at a site. On this occasion, the witness Haim spoke for nearly an hour. The students were squeezed into the long, narrow space between the bunk beds. Many remained standing throughout the testimony, leaning against the wooden bunk beds for support as they tired. Some sat curled up against each other atop the bare brick heating duct which runs down the middle of the long barracks building (and which, according to the witness, never functioned). Others stand on top of the duct in order to see or videotape the witness as he points to objects that he refers to: “Here, on these bunk beds,” “There, at the ramp.” Van der Abbeelle writes (1980: 8): “The illusion of authenticity depends upon the tourist’s feeling himself to be in an immediate

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relationship with the sight. This immediacy is assured by the sight’s presence, to which the tourist can point.” The witness, the incarnation of the dead, in pointing, designates the objects which surround the group as authentic material witnesses to his story. Furthermore, the setting may often evoke traumatic memories that were long hidden. As psychiatrists Van der Kolk and Van der Hart observe (1995: 183): “The more the contextual stimuli resemble conditions prevailing at the time of original storage, the more retrieval is likely. Thus, memories are reactivated when a person is exposed to a situation, or is in a somatic state, reminiscent of the one when the original memory was stored.” The witness frequently loses track of time. Sometimes, his voice breaks and he sobs or breathes deeply to regain composure. The witness’s on site performance is a sacred event. He may not be interrupted. Other visitors who inadvertently open the door to the barracks will inevitably shut it immediately, sensing that they are intruding on something intimate and sacred. The barracks are an unusual kind of voyage space. Although they are potent death sites, signifying the heart of the extermination process, they are interior sites, sheltered from the gaze of outsiders, and peopled with students’ bodies. It seems that the presence of the witness in this enclosed environment of horror, and the immediacy of his reference to the surrounding objects (“right here”), brings the outside death-world inside Auschwitz. The horror and fear of outside Poland pervades even the inner space of the group, and death and life spaces intermingle. This is one of the most significant ritual moments, where the student has a sense of reverting back to the illum temporum (cf. Eliade 1959: 68–113) of the event, the Shoah. Haim tells the students: “It moves me to tell you all I went through in the terrible years of the Shoah at a time when I was your age, seventeen years old, fifty years ago... Imagine, a boy of your age who thought he would be something in life. I was the son of a wealthy family, I had many plans, and I found myself here, alone at Auschwitz.” As the testimony drags on and the cold and discomfort increase, some students become restless. Sometimes, the voice of the older survivor itself takes on the tone of a litany, where the witness seems to enter a kind of trance, in which he reinvokes a frozen past, detached from present circumstances (cf. Langer 1991). Yet, the explanation is never interrupted or contradicted. I maintain that, more than the content of the explanation, which students may and do forget, it is the ritual of common presence (and shared physical

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discomfort) together with the representative of the dead, inside the barracks that counts. “The collective thought of the group of believers,” writes Halbwachs, “has the best chance of immobilizing itself and enduring when it concentrates on places, sealing itself within their confines and molding its character to theirs” (1992: 156).36 No students mention the content of the testimony in their diaries or evening discussions, although several mention the impact of their presence in the barracks with the witness. In an interview I conducted with a group of students who had traveled to Poland five years previous, several students concurred: “I don’t remember her story, but I remember that she told it to us in the cold, dark children’s barracks at Auschwitz. It was really scary!” (A.Y.H., interview, 27 April 1996). After leaving the barracks, the students continue to the site of the selection ramp. Haim continues: Look, here was the iron ramp. This earth is soaked with blood and tears of innocent people... There was a selection. For life or death... And at that time I was skinny and weak. The selection: where you’re standing now, there were the officers and they pointed left or right. There [the witness points] to the crematoria, or here [he points again] to work. And the officer stood there, and we had to pass here at a distance of five or six meters and not look him in the eye. And I passed at a run. That way I could show that I was fit to work, and he directed me to the left and I joined the group. And maybe it was my fate, so that I can tell you the story today.

He concludes: “You know, it is you who give me the strength so that I can go on, even until nightfall. Omri said, ‘Haim, you’re exhausted’; maybe he thinks that I don’t have the strength to transmit things that were hidden for fifty years. But I see that you’re thirsty to know, and that’s why we came, so that you can be witnesses to what they did to our people.” Students sense they are present at an event of creation of public collective memory. “Knowledge in the testimony,” writes psychologist Dori Laub, “is ... not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right” (1992: 62). Claude Lanzmann, who, in his film Shoah, brought survivors back to the scenes of their suffering and survival in order to film their testimony, expresses it as follows: “In a certain way, these people (the witnesses) had to be transformed into actors. It is their own story that they are telling. But it’s not enough to tell it. They have to act it out.... They have to be placed, not only in a particular mental state, but in a particular physical state. Not in

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order to make them speak, but so that their words suddenly become transmissible and charged with another dimension.... It is through the mise-en-scene that (the witnesses) become characters” (Lanzmann 1990: 301). After the witness’s testimony at the ramp, a small group of boys splits off from the larger school group to accompany the witness as he wanders through the camp. They recount: In Birkenau, things were so real. Until now they said to us, you’ll see there a monument, here a stone, a piece of wall, here a ceremony, there a song, and all of a sudden you see the reality of the things and someone comes and tells you exactly where he was and what he did and who talked to him and... It really affected me. We spoke of the inability to describe it. When we went with Haim, he said, “Here was the station, here I said good-bye to my father and my mother, and here my father shouted to my mother, ‘Tell them you’re younger than you are.’” And he walked with us, and he pointed out the place, not from afar. He stood there and said, here it was, and we sensed what happened and it was hard to feel what happened, and a bit frustrating, because he sees it with his eyes and feels it and we stand with him and understand but don’t feel. Sometimes we feel. When he went to the place where he slept with another five friends on half a bed, I got emotional, and he said where he was and what he touched fifty years ago and I looked at him and said, “He was here,” and it was moving how he knew about the crematoria and the gas chambers and what he did and what he told. Sometimes we asked him questions and he continued to tell his own story (without answering directly) and that helped.”

The force of this witness’s testimony is amplified through the frequent use of the deictic (“right here,” “look, there”) and his trance-like inability to respond to the students’ questions, which are understood as signs of its authenticity, as an unearthing of an archaeological fragment of trauma. As van der Kolk and van der Hart note (1995: 183): “Recital of traumatic memory is inflexible, whereas narrative memory is adaptive, integrated into other experiences, and, as a result, variable according to the audience addressed. Traumatic memory has no social component.” This traumatic memory, which corresponds to what Lawrence Langer (1991; 1995: 22–23) characterized as the “deep memory” of Holocaust survivors, is characterized by “durational time (which) relentlessly stalks the memory of the witness, imprinting there moments immune to the ebb and flow of chronological time.”37 The witness’s testimony at Birkenau is often a breaking through or a rising of traumatic memory into narrative memory (cf. Handelman 2004a: 171–199). The students’ mass

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presence at the original site enables this breakthrough to take place. It empowers the survivor to become a witness. After the witness’s long testimony, the guide Naomi says to the other guides: “By 4:30 (one hour later), I’ll finish the whole story of Birkenau. Enough! How much can they take?” Students scatter out; it becomes difficult to maintain cohesion or concentration. While walking along railroad tracks at Birkenau, some students converse about soccer teams. While the testimony in the barracks is a key moment for many, others may experience the “coin dropping” at other places; a few, not at all. A student asks why more people didn’t throw themselves on the electrified perimeter wire. One teacher suggests that perhaps they didn’t do so in order not to give the Nazis a victory. One student asks a teacher if the visit of the group carrying the Israeli flag is a victory. The teacher answers: “The fact that we remained alive and are visiting with the flag shows that we won, because they didn’t succeed in destroying us.” The student replies: “Even if we won, the price was too high.” This student’s reply is atypical but significant. Even at the times of the greatest emotional impact, resistance to the State narrative is possible. During the following hour, the students visit the selection ramp with the witness and several of the barracks and public latrines in the women’s camp before arriving at the ruins of the crematoria for the delegation-wide ceremony. Some students express frustration at the lack of time alone. Another was disappointed at finding that the gas chambers were destroyed: “We didn’t see any gas chambers!” “What about the one in block 11?” “Oh, yeah. But I was expecting something bigger. Why did they destroy them?” After an hour’s walk through the camp, the entire delegation reassembles for the group-wide ceremony atop the ruins of the crematoria of Birkenau (described in chapter 5, pp. 194-203). It begins with several long texts, and continues with the witness Haim reading an angry poem he wrote accusing God. He concludes by saying: “At the end of the ceremony and our visit, I would like to say a few words: You who are here in this place, know that you are the correct answer to Nazism and anti-Semitism. On the one side are the ovens, in which hundreds of thousands were burned. And now children, girls and boys, bring many new sons to the nation, so that we live forever.”38 The ceremony ends with Haim’s recitation of mourning prayers and the singing of Hatikvah with flags held aloft. Afterwards, indi-

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viduals cry and embrace and console each other. Some linger to light memorial candles in crematoria ruins. At 6:00 P.M., after nine hours in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the group boards the buses for the ride home. On the bus, the guide Naomi concludes with a speech delivered by Ehud Barak, then chief of staff during the Israeli Army’s visit to Birkenau: “We, the soldiers of the IDF, have arrived in Auschwitz, 50 years too late” (Caspi 1992: 20–24). In summary, note the sequencing of stations of testimony at Birkenau. First, the witness and students are sealed within the closed compartment of the Shoah—the barracks. Second is the ramp from which two roads emerge: the first to death and oblivion, the other to suffering, subsequent liberation, and the State of Israel—“my fate, so that I can tell you the story today.” Finally, the ruins of the crematoria become a platform upon which students and witness raise the flag together. From Holocaust death to the fork in the road of destiny, to resurrection and the future of the state. It is not that the sequence of sites and corresponding narratives is all foreseen in advance by the organizers. There is an arbitrariness in their logic. Yet there is also an aesthetic sense of what goes together with what and in what order—barracks, selection ramp, crematoria ruins, witness, blue-and-white sweatshirts, flags. As in the staging of the annual Holocaust Memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem, “Brought into conjunction, the interaction of these signs immediately beg[ins] to produce their own semiosis, to make emergent, perhaps unintended meaning” (Handelman 2004a: 112). Furthermore, by ordering the visit as a series of stations of testimony, a teleological narrative similar in form to the national narrative (Diner 1995) is shaped, thus remaking a Birkenau within Birkenau, while making Birkenau itself a station on the way home to Israel. The framing and sequencing of the stages of testimony encompasses the survivor-witness as well, pulling his testimony to a redemptive close and designating the students, as young Israelis, as a response to his suffering and as heirs to his legacy. On the bus, Ora takes up the microphone to complete the testimony she began in the morning. Students pay little attention. For them, the day has reached its climax at Birkenau. Without the visual “here,” this testimony is just another story.

“Honoring” the Righteous Gentile and the Witnesses That evening at 9:00, after dinner, the tired students are brought out of their rooms for a ceremony honoring the witnesses and the Righteous Gentiles (described in chapter 5, pp. 211-213). The fram-

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ing of the meeting—late at night, after the visit to Auschwitz, in the neutral interior space of the hotel, with loud music in the background—marginalizes its significance. None of the students in the group mentioned the ceremony in their diaries. Immediately afterwards, at 11:00 P.M., the groups are told to gather for discussion on the day’s events. Because of the late hour and the participants’ exhaustion, the discussion lasts for less than one hour. As in the postTreblinka discussion, the initial focus is on emotional reactions to the visit to the death camp. However, as the visit to Auschwitz was so long and intense, this remains the sole topic. The students’ interaction is greater than in the first discussion, and demonstrates how the group became more crystallized (megubash) (Katriel 1991: 11–34) through the shared emotional experience of Auschwitz and the voyage in general. The discussion is intense enough to overcome a long, moralizing and didactic speech by one of the teachers, and pick up the discussion where it left off. For most participants, the emotional and visual dissonance between site and expectation experienced in Warsaw and Treblinka was overcome in Auschwitz. As one student said: “In Treblinka, you have to imagine, put the model of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum in place, but when you get to Auschwitz, you have the picture in your eyes and that’s it. You see it.” Although some students speak of their crying, the question of who cried and who did not is not raised. All are still under the emotional impact of the Auschwitz visit. Perhaps those who remain frustrated at not crying were embarrassed to admit it in such a mood. Students agree that they had missed individual time at Birkenau. Several speak in appreciation of the witness, and cite his testimony as enabling them to visualize and identify. Others react to the ceremony in the Jewish barracks (see chapter 5, pp. 206-207). The discussion ends with one students’ proclamation of the moral lesson she drew from her visit: And about generalizations. It’s so important not to generalize, and it happens so much in Israel, especially with Arabs. Even after the terrorist attack and people go around the school saying, “Death to the Arabs,” and I feel so terrible about it. And when I talk to them, they say, no, no it’s different, because they’re Arabs and I say it’s not different at all and you can’t generalize... When we come back home, I think we should not only tell about the Holocaust, but we should open our own minds, and we should open other people’s minds. And if someone says, “Death to the Arabs,” eh, oh, death to the Arabs? What are we, Nazis?

The comment is accepted in silence, although similar comments aroused opposition in the post-Treblinka discussion, and will again

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in later discussions. Are the students too tired to disagree? Does the proximity to the Auschwitz visit give the girl’s argument overwhelming moral weight? Or do the students take care not to destroy the unifying atmosphere through divisive political arguments? In any case, these themes are not developed further in the course of the voyage.

Ventilazia: On the Road Again—Day Six The intense and extremely long day focused on “touching” Shoah death in Auschwitz, is followed by an easier “ventilation” and life day, with long bus voyages. The bus departs at 7:30 for Plaszow. As the drivers lose their way to the site in the fog, the fifteen-minute voyage lasts nearly an hour. Some of the drivers refuse to park alongside the road and insist on traveling further to the parking lot. Omri fumes and curses out the Polish guide. Later, he will cite the guide’s refusal to follow orders as an act designed to sabotage the trip. Another Polish tour guide later reacts to this incident: “Sometimes the Israeli tour guides insist that we stop in places where it is forbidden for the drivers to stop, and if we don’t do as they say, they think it’s because the Poles are anti-Semites.” The Plaszow concentration camp, just outside of Cracow, has become recognizable to some, thanks to Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. The camp, leveled by the Nazis before the end of the war, now consists of a large expanse of grass-covered hill and marsh, and one rock scarp of the former quarry. Only two monuments, a large Polish one and a smaller Jewish stone, mark the site. Some students refuse to wake up and get out in the cold and damp to climb the hillock overlooking the (empty) site. Omri and the teachers attempt to get the students off the bus. The following conversation is overheard: Teacher: “But your parents paid good money for this trip.” Student: “Yeah, and we still haven’t gone through the experience.” Even after Auschwitz, some students remain frustrated at not yet having undergone the moment of transformation, of coin dropping that epitomizes the experience they expect. One student wrote: “The monument shows tightly squeezed together stone figures in whose heart is a deep rift. The cold froze our emotions and so, to my regret, we were not particularly enthusiastic about the place” (d6, 22). As nothing visual remains, the thing remembered most about the place was the cold and damp; for some,

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that serves as a link between the experience of the prisoners and that of the students. Students return to the bus, talk, curl up with their Walkmans, fall asleep. Some joke or sing. They reenter the inside of the Israeli bus world. The bus travels about three hours from Plaszow to Lancut, where students pile into an old synagogue with well-preserved drawings (similar to Tykocin) and poor acoustics. In order to save time, one guide explains about the history of the synagogue and the community to several bus groups together. Most students pay little attention. There is a shortage of bathrooms, and the one outhouse is filthy. Some students defecate among the bushes on the park grounds nearby. On the road between Lancut and Lizhansk (about one hour), Ora finishes the testimony she began on the bus the previous day: (After liberation) we wandered among Arab villages, oy vey, I mean, German villages in the surrounding area. May we make a thousand distinctions... The Allied hospitals couldn’t take the overload of sick Arabs [sic]... We then came on Aliyah B and were sent to be interned in Cyprus. We came on aliyah in time for the War [of Independence], and settled on a young kibbutz. In Israel, too, we didn’t lick honey, but it’s ours and it’s all we’ve got. And my sons are in the army, and in the reserves. And it’s ours. And you’ll come back home tomorrow and it’s yours. And this you’ll be able to appreciate better after what you’ve heard here.

This is the redemptive close of the long bus testimony begun before the visit to Auschwitz. In her narrative, Germans and Arabs are confused twice. Israel’s struggle in a hostile world is fused with the struggles of the Holocaust victims/survivors. The struggle continues through the children of the survivor who are in the Israeli army, and should continue through the actions of the students, who will discharge their duty toward the past through their future military service. The purpose of the visit to the Shoah sites, according to the witness, is to make students appreciate their taken-for-granted existence in Israel more, and joyfully accept their obligations towards the State. “It’s all we’ve got, but it’s ours.” At about 4:00 P.M., the group arrives at the small town of Lizhansk/Lezajsk to visit the tomb of the Hassidic Rabbi Elimelekh. The tomb is a popular place of pilgrimage for both Hassidim and Orthodox Jews throughout the world, as well as for Polish peasants who believe in the rabbi’s miraculous powers (cf. Cala 1995; Shemer 1995). The ohel (the building over the tomb) is maintained by a local gentile Polish woman, who expects a contribution for her guardian-

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ship of the site. The delegation leader gets into a shouting argument with the caretaker, who is dissatisfied with the size of the contribution offered her. He later curses the Polish guide for not having mediated to arrange payment. Several people write notes or read the inscriptions on the nearby tombstones. It is interesting to compare the reactions of secular and religious participants in the group. A secular student said to me: “You wanna know how it was. It was dumb. A teacher standing by the bus and directing traffic. Muscle cramps. The entire day on the road. The bus is filthy.” A religious student wrote: “The most moving part of the day was at the tomb of Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhansk which was in the village Lizhansk. There I lit a memorial candle and placed a note with requests. A girl played “Yedid Nefesh” on the harmonica and turned the atmosphere into a really Hassidic one” (d2, 8b).39 A student summed up the day in his diary: “Most of the day we traveled (almost ten hours) and nevertheless, emotional relief enveloped us; there was a beautiful garden in front of the synagogue which had gardens of falling autumn leaves and beautiful palaces” (d2, 8b). At 8:45 P.M., the buses finally arrive at the Isabella Hotel, Pulawy—a dump by any standards. Some students express longing for their homes. The delegation leader has prepared the group by repeatedly describing the hotel in the worst possible terms. The technique works. One student wrote: “This place is falling apart, it really stinks, the elevator is broken, the water is freezing, no water comes out of the shower nozzle. In short, pure entertainment” (d6, 22). One student, however, linked the poor conditions with the Shoah: “A sadder conclusion was the stay at the Isabella-Trauma: so Polish, so silent” (d2, 8b). After dinner, the guides meet with the group leader to discuss the next day’s program. The group leader decides to cut short a visit to the tombstone wall at Kazimierz Dolny and eliminate the visit to Yeshivat Hachmei Lublin, a former yeshiva, now a dental school—a “must” site for the Orthodox. They discuss how to rapidly move the group through the built-up city of Lublin, as well as the logistics of the visit to Majdanek. (Naomi: “We can’t all enter the gas chambers at once.” Omri: “So you wait at another station [sic!], and as the other group comes out, you advance.”) Omri announces that group discussions should be held after dinner in Warsaw, in spite of the late hour, and that they will be followed by a concluding staff discussion.

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Touching the Icons of Death: Majdanek—Day Seven The group leaves the Isabella Hotel at 7:20. Half an hour later, the group arrives at a memorial wall on the outskirts of Kazimierz Dolny. The wall, in front of a small forest, consists of fragments of tombstones, arranged along a 25-meter–long wall with a large fissure in the middle (see Figure 4.16; Young 1993: 185, 200–203). Students get out, snap pictures, and are ushered back onto the bus. By marginalizing the visit to the tombstone memorial, the “life” nature of the morning remains intact. After five minutes’ drive, the bus arrives at the old town square (Stary Rynek) in Kazimierz Dolny. The town, on the banks of the Wistula River, served as a summer resort for many Warsaw Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. Students disperse through the square to shop for souvenirs. It is a market day, and some of the vendors take advantage of the unexpected wave of tourists to raise their prices. Girl: “I look and I understand how they could have taken away 50 percent of the town and no one would have cared.” Students purchase large pencils, stuffed animals, alarm clocks, and funny hats (see Figure 4.17). Before returning to the bus, students photograph each other at the river and in the marketplace.

4.16. A broken tombstone wall on the outskirts of Kazimierz Dolny

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4.17. A participant trying on a hat in the market of Kazimierz Dolny

On the road to Lublin, the third witness, Sarah, tells the group of her experiences in hiding during the Shoah. Because of Sarah’s minor tone, because there is little physical suffering or overt heroism in her story, and because it is not grounded in any place or site visited in the course of the trip, this disembodied story is the least remembered of the three witnesses. Here again, most students fall asleep. Sarah ends her testimony saying: “And now, you kids make my heart warm. You’ve done me good. I hope you achieve what you desire. And that there be many continuations. And that you have it good.” After another hour’s ride, the students arrive in the bustling town of Lublin and are urged to come quickly off the bus. Naomi: “Come on, guys, Lublin is important, because here you see what a ghetto really is.” After an introduction at a World War II monument at a busy intersection, the tired students straggle through the streets of the town to the ghetto. Few can hear the guide over the surrounding noise. One group goes into the Zamek fortress/prison and a girl poses for a touristic picture with the town in the background (see Figure 4.18). No connection is made between the site and its use as SS headquarters of Odillo Globocnik, executor of Operation Reinhardt, the major operation deporting Jews to the death camps. Without the

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4.18. Posing for a photo in the Lublin Ghetto

proper frame, even the Lublin Ghetto sites become just old houses. A handful of students gather around the Polish guide at the outlook point by the fortress, locating with him the relative positions of the Majdanek death camp and Lublin on the map and on the ground.40

The Visit to Majdanek Entering the Site

After half an hour’s ride, students arrive at the entrance to Majdanek, and take a break for lunch and bathrooms before beginning. The visit begins by the monument with Naomi’s reading of the poem “Tree of Life,” The last stanza reads: This is the heroism of the tree of life That it knows how to stand... To stand amongst thorns and bushes To stand in the storm and whirlwind And to see always the road going forward But never to see its end.

Naomi frequently uses poetry to remind students that they are crossing a threshold, as at the beginning of the voyage or at the entrance (Treblinka) or exit (Birkenau) of death camps. She attempts to inspire the students to see themselves as branches of the tree of life. In this traditional Jewish metaphor, if the past is like a weath-

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ered tree, the preservation of memory and the creation of a lineage of carriers of memory entails further sacrifices of the students as, in the future, they too “stand in the storm and the whirlwind” (Kidron 2003: 527). Most students aren’t listening. The students eat instant soups outside the bus and complain about their sandwiches. As they have not yet “officially” entered through the ceremonial monument gate, they perceive no incongruity in eating lunch on the grounds of the camp.41 Naomi says, “Yallah! Everyone, hurry up! Otherwise, we won’t have time!” The group assembles underneath the monumental, often fearinspiring gateway, constructed by Victor Tolkien (Young 1993: 124). One student reported: In the beginning it was most difficult for me at Auschwitz, because most of my family was there. And today at Majdanek, when we saw the stones at the beginning, I thought like there were people in the stones, and the people were trying to come out of the stones, and that’s why the stone was deformed. And I looked at the large sculpture and didn’t understand how the people got in there, and then I came in and saw the camp spread out in front of me and I felt as if there were masses of people there, and I wanted to dig in the earth and see what was hiding there.

At this point, a young Polish group comes running through. Student: “What, were Poles killed here too?” One participant insists that all pose for a group picture, just as they did at the entrance to Auschwitz I. Naomi uses a diagram of the camp to explain about the founding and planned extent of Majdanek. Students have difficulty linking the diagram with the few visible buildings. Naomi says: “I ask that we get up silently, that we walk slowly and in complete silence behind me.” The guide seeks to intensify the ritual movement of crossing the threshold. Students hold the Israeli flags on high during the tenminute walk from the monument, down the steps, and across the open ground to the first buildings, and keep them raised throughout their visit in the gas chambers. A teacher remarks: “It kills me to see how people open their windows of the houses here and see the camp opposite. Even the memorial—all is fashioned by the Poles, without considering us. And I feel this is ours.” The proximity of the camp to the town is an important issue in the contextualization of Majdanek. Whereas the Poles cite this as evidence of the Nazis’ use of Majdanek as an instrument of terror against the surrounding Polish population,42 the guides explain

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4.19. The three survivor-witnesses seated at the base of the watchtower at Majdanek

this as evidence of the indifference of the local population to the plight of the Jews. At the entrance to the inner area of the camp, three witnesses of various delegations are seated at the base of the watchtower (see Figure 4.19). The others take their picture. Witness: “Do we disturb you here?” Teacher: “On the contrary, it’s very symbolic. Le repos des guerriers.” Witness: “Thank you. We are here.”

The most insignificant acts of the witnesses are vested with sacred meaning. They are symbolic types who are never seen as being “offstage.” Their bodies, not just their stories, bear witness. The witness here accepts the role assigned by the voyage through the response, “We are here.”

The Gas Chambers Outside the building of the gas chambers, Naomi explains about the selection process. She interrupts her explanation: “I told you, don’t take pictures before I give the explanation.” Afterwards, the students enter in silence. In the first room of the gas chamber, students place flowers or light memorial candles, especially at the openings where hot air was pumped in to speed up the extermination process. After

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the students leave, the wall looks like a sacred altar or a zaddik’s tomb (see Figures 4.20 and 4.21). Students are told that the blue on the walls are remnants created by contact with the gas. Many take pictures. Several break down in tears. One girl explained that evening: From the beginning of the trip, the visits to the camps intensified as the trip went on. I feel like crying now too. At Treblinka I cried like I cry at Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies, at Auschwitz I cried like I cry at films, today I cried from shock, more than at what I saw. I couldn’t go in to see the shoes, and except for the gas chambers, I didn’t see anything real. I heard about the operating table, but after the gas chambers, that was enough, I felt like I was going crazy, I felt like hitting someone in the chest and screaming at him that they stop, that they stop killing us, and that they’re only children, and that you stop taking pictures. I told Omri in the gas chambers that they stop taking pictures of dead people. There were scratches on the walls and everyone’s taking pictures, and I felt that I’m falling apart.

Here we see the students’ perception of the voyage as a constructed progression that enables the breaking into tears to take place. As the witness Haim commented earlier, “You need to warm up. If you take them the first day straight to Birkenau, you break them completely without reason.” Each death site becomes increasingly multisensory, the 4.20. Students leave flowers and memorial candles on the floor of the gas chamber at Majdanek

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4.21. The gas chamber’s appearance as a sacred altar

signs of death more immediate—in the girl’s analogy: from ceremony to film to shock (sensory and emotional overload). The surrounding physicality of the intact gas chambers, the small booth for the supervisor of the gas chamber, and the blue marks on the ceiling arouse emotional reactions with physiological manifestations. Another girl reported that evening: “And then we went into the gas chambers and I choked and I couldn’t breathe there... And I wanted to cry but it didn’t come out.” The students breathe and embody the experience. One girl reported that evening: I had many breaking points today... I stood by one of the bushes and thought how much I would have liked to meet all those people, and I imagined myself being there, and it was terrible, and it caused me to look at things differently... In spite of all the preparations and all, it made me think, what we have, the Land [of Israel] (ha’aretz), is such a strong thing that... it shouldn’t happen (assur shezeh yikreh). The flag didn’t really help me, but I wanted to come back to Israel and smell the flowers, and without being around all this death. And the support of friends was very important for me. I think everyone needs support at those parts, and they knew how to give it.

During the visit, the students holding the flags inside the gas chamber building raised them on high. The raising of the flag is a possibility of communication upwards, out of the depths. Perhaps it serves as the physical reminder of an elsewhere, a home where one “can smell the flowers.” As a boy added in the evening discussion,

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“When we carried the flag… It’s important for me to know that we’re going back home to Israel and it’ll be good, and we’re not staying here in Poland.” It reaffirms the nation as the symbolic center of the supportive group while charging the flag with the emotions generated in the gas chambers, establishing it as an axis mundi, a center of life (see further below, chapter 5, pp. 215-218).

Shoes as Relics: Odor and Authenticity The guide gives students forty-five minutes to see the barracks of prisoners’ personal effects (Effektenbarracken) on their own. Several emotionally agitated students do not visit the other exhibition barracks, but remain outside crying or sitting on the ground. Students progress procession-like from the first barracks until the last, meeting up again at the end of the row. A group of Polish kids run by laughing on what seems to be, for them, a leisurely visit. One girl commented that evening: “What really, really frustrated me, was to see those Poles there looking, just as I would look in an art museum. They look. Very nice. It was so frustrating. I think only the fear of Felix (the security person) kept me from grabbing one of them, and showing him, look what was here, open your eyes and see what was there. But that was the school kids. But there were other people who came alone, so something must have moved them to come. That’s some consolation.” The first barracks visited contains an exhibit on prison conditions, captioned mostly in Polish, with some summaries in English. In these exhibits, the executioners are represented by diagrams of the bureaucratic chain of command in the Nazi concentration camp administration. The victims, on the other hand, are primarily represented by huge photographs of death and suffering, original personal objects such as mess tins, prisoners’ wooden spoons, and the striped uniforms they wore.43 If the preservation of written records in Majdanek was the privilege of the powerful—the Nazis, the relics allow the victims to be represented (Lowenthal 1985: 244). In her analysis of concentration camp exhibits, Cornelia Brink writes (1995a: 63), “What we see and believe we comprehend at first glance, is what attracts our attention and provokes our curiosity.... Thus, the text and the object compete against each other with the object winning out.” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett sees this as typical of most contemporary museum visitors: “Ethnographic objects, those material fragments that we can carry away, are accorded a higher quotient of realness. All the rest is mimetic, second order, an account undeniably of our own making” (1998: 30). The direct

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availability of physical objects to our senses endows the relic with greater authority: “Although it is now evident that artifacts are as easily altered as chronicles, public faith in their veracity endures; a tangible relic seems ipso facto real” (Lowenthal 1985: 244).44 The personal effects—spoons, uniforms, shoes—displayed at Majdanek remember the dead in a way very different from museum artifacts of previous eras. Edith Wyschogrod characterizes this difference, citing Rilke on the cherished possessions of childhood: “This Something, worthless as it was, prepared your relationships with the world, it guided you into happening and among people, and further: you experienced through it, through its existence, through its final smashing or its anyhow departure, all that is human, right into the depths of death” (Rilke in Wyschogrod 1985: 14). Wyschogrod explains, “By accepting death as part of life we open ourselves to the fullness of experience.... When the death in things—not the death produced by them, but the death that is in them—is shut out, they can only be meaningless mechanical objects” (ibid.). The items like those displayed in Majdanek, on the other hand, which are fragments of the death-world, undermine the romantic nature of the artifact: An irony appears in this understanding of things when it is applied to the depleted environments which make up the newly cordoned-off centers of mass death. Deprived of the minimal technologies required for sustaining life, living conditions in the death-world make a mockery of the idea of Dinge: implements in the death-world, if they can be fashioned at all, are of the simplest sort, replete with human input but hopelessly inadequate for their destined use. Moreover, the belongings of the victims of man-made mass death which derive from their old lives (most frequently objects of human use least marked by advanced technology) constitute instantly recognizable symbols of death. Instead of the thing holding life and death in equipoise to create a microcosm of human meaning, death streams forth from these piled-up ownerless possessions. They become the symbols of displacement and alienation, tropes for the pure annihilation of the death-world (ibid.).

The Majdanek artifacts present the memory of the victims entirely through their deaths, and not through any hint at the content of their lives. It is this very fascination with death that makes these objects seductive. Many students approach their visit to Majdanek with tremendous expectations of “finally seeing the horrors.” Brink reports that in her study of other concentration camp exhibits, she saw many visitors lie down on the torture rack. The object of torture (like the gas chambers) appears as functionally complete in itself. Thus, it calls forth the desire to experience for oneself (Wünsch

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nach Selbsterleben). This fascination with death and suffering attracts people to “chambers of horrors” and collections of skeletons and skulls as well; as Peter Odermatt (1993: 49) suggests, “The ‘desire’ for the suffering of others is a means of reassuring oneself that ‘I still live’” (cf. Miles 2002). Furthermore, the expectation of many visitors to find a chamber of horrors causes the visitor to construct an “imaginary world out of their pre-conceived expectations,” and obstructs any understanding of the context of the torture. As a result, “The special fascination that is emitted by the relic obscures the perception of the inevitable historical and logical difference—that a memorial site is not a concentration camp, and every presentation of history is a construction” (Brink 1995a: 66). The exhibit depicts a closed world, sensorily detached from the outside light, sound, and smells. The texts that ostensibly provide the context for the prisoners suffering and death, portray the official hierarchy and inhumanity of the commandants. The result is the depiction of “another planet” inhabited by starving, suffering victims and bureaucratized, mechanical Nazi-androids.45 Some students direct some of their anger towards the Poles: “It’s impossible to know, even, what happened here. Jews were killed in the gas chambers, yet nothing here is written in Hebrew.” What is missing here? A comprehensible historical description or the Hebrew label that will confirm that the nameless object is “one of ours”? One of the most intense moments of the trip is the visit to the barracks of shoes, three adjacent wooden barracks with huge, cagelike bins, filled to the brim with old shoes. As one enters, the floorboards creak. The buildings are badly lit and poorly ventilated. The stench of old, decaying shoes fills the dark. The intense smell of the putrefying shoes evokes death and rotting corpses. The visit is described at length by one of the students in her diary: The barracks was entirely dark, with very little light from the few, small windows that were there. Very similar to the previous barracks, except that here everything that was there before was emptied out of it in order to put in it all the shoes of the prisoners that were in the camps; worn-out shoes, very old, in all possible colors and sizes. Most of them black or brown, and from afar they looked identical. Closed in a metal grid, in rows, running the length of the barracks. How many rows were there? Three, four rows, continuing... to the depths of the barracks, there I didn’t dare to go because it was dark there and there were no windows. I felt sort of safe at the beginning of the barracks, because there there’s light from the outside, but as you go further inside, among the rows of shoes, it gets darker and darker, somber, more damp and dark—and dangerous. Everything closes in on you inside there. So, I

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dared go to only half the depth of the barracks. Suddenly, an unexplainable urge took hold of me, unexplainable but really strong, to touch one of the shoes, as if only then I’d know that all the thousands of pairs of shoes really exist, are tangible, and not some hallucination. But I was scared, as if I’m stretching out my hand to the world of the dead, as if through touching I’ll feel the soul of the corpse that left this shoe behind. But the urge to touch, to feel, was too strong, so I stretched out my hand; carefully, I lightly touched one of the shoes that was there among the tall shoes. And then—I don’t know how—the shoe, that apparently wasn’t so stable on top, fell and tumbled down a bit... It was hardly a second, but how it frightened me! Because everything was static, unmoving, everything arranged in place, behind the glass (like in Auschwitz), not to touch, just to look with the eyes. And all of a sudden, through my touching, I felt, touched with my hands in order to see if everything is true (as if to be convinced...), and to see the past move before your eyes, almost turns it into the present! It almost finished me off (gamar oti), and then, after the shock came the tears... Apparently when the past becomes present and they joined up at the same spot, this was my breaking point, because until then everything was, like I said, antique and arranged in its place, waiting for the dust to be shaken off it. And then, when the shoe took on “its own life,” in that split second—it struck me as nothing else ever did and frightened me more than anything in my life until then (d3, 12a–13a).

Although the shoes were gathered into the bins by the Polish museum authorities and are occasionally removed to be polished (Längerer 1990: 161), their seemingly random arrangement in large bins makes the visitor believe that they were placed there by the Nazis and have remained untouched ever since.46 The arrangement of shoes is not meant to convey information, but to create physical sensations and identification. More than any other artifact, the shoes individuate mass death and provide a focus for identification with the victims. Shoes are the bottoms of people, objects one ordinarily does not notice, but, in a sense, their foundation. Here, the foundation is highlighted, but with nothing to support it but empty space. Thus, visually, absence is made present. In their imaginations, the students “fill” the empty shoes and clothes with their own bodies and those of their families. As another girl wrote: “Finally I am ‘worthy’ to see with my own eyes an authentic prisoners’ barracks… in reality, without the need to imagine the place, the details. Here is the barracks, here are the bunks, and here are the prisoners themselves, and I almost suspected that they would appear before my eyes and fill the old striped clothes on the bunkers... It was a most powerful experience” (d3, 11b–12a). An essential element of the students’ experience was the smell. Historically, it is felt that, of all sense stimuli, smells are the most

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intrinsic to the objects that emit them. “To encounter a scent was to encounter proof of a material presence, a trail of existence which could be traced to its source” (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994: 205). When Auschwitz was in operation, the overcrowded barracks and cells emitted a suffocating stench. Furthermore, smell is seen as practically incapable of being contained or falsified. As Auschwitz commander Höss testified: “During bad weather or when a strong wind was blowing, the stench of burning flesh was carried for many miles and caused the whole neighborhood to talk about the burning of Jews, despite official counter-propaganda” (Höss in Bezwinska 1984: 122). One survivor-witness told the Poland guides: “I always tell the students, ‘Whatever you see, add one more sense to it— smell. Without it, there is no Auschwitz and no Birkenau. I tell you that without stink—bodies, excrement, lysol, the stench of urine, unwashed bodies—it’s not the same camp’” (S. W., lecture to Poland guides, 10 July 1997). In the students’ perception, the smell of the rotting shoes is proof of their authenticity. The desire to experience and the expectation of “experiencing the horrors as they were” at Majdanek is so great, that the smell of the rotting, mildewed shoes serves, for many, as a final verification of “having been there.” The barracks of shoes is cited by many students, even long after the voyage, as one of the most significant sites.47 Some students treat the shoes as sacred relics (cf. Brown 1982: 87–88). Thus, in the summer of 1996, an article appeared in the daily newspaper about a student who was reprimanded for stealing a shoe from the barracks at Majdanek. She explained to the teachers that she wanted to set up a commemorative Holocaust corner in her own home. Although the Majdanek shoes are not seen as possessing miracle-working powers, the contact with these objects does effect a psychological transformation, the “dropping of the coin” promoted by many guides and students as the key experience of the voyage. The monotonous repetition of the exhibit, three almost identical barracks full of shoes, gives a sense of the enormity of the mass executions. The visitor’s path becomes an awe-stricken ritual procession through a realm of darkness, along a series of stations, each marked by the same moldy and smelly shoes, engendering a cumulative dread. As one participant wrote, “When I recovered, I left the barracks for the next one, expecting to see some new additional fragment of testimony... I was surprised to find that the second barracks was also full of shoes! And there were also babies’ shoes, in such small sizes, and so many of those shoes … And so I continued

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with everyone, silently, barracks after barracks, everyone walking by himself and with his own thoughts... until there were no more barracks” (d3, 13a). Like the barracks at Auschwitz, the barracks of shoes at Majdanek is one of the few sites that is both an interior site and a center of death; it is a place where the distinctions between interior and exterior dissolve. Participants are isolated from the sensory stimuli of their daily world, and, through total sensory immersion— darkness, the smell of the putrefying leather, and, for many, the feel of the shoes—the student enters the interior of the Shoah. As one student wrote, there “the past becomes present.” Both the barracks at Auschwitz and the barracks of shoes at Majdanek correspond to a preconceived image of what the Shoah should look like: another planet, detached from the outside world; black, gray, and white; where time stands still. This “time outside of time” is permeated by dark and odor. The common passage through the odor of the shoes has a uniting force: “An integrative power is also usually attributed to smell, making scent an excellent means of uniting the participants in a ritual, who all breathe in and are developed by the same aroma. The boundary-crossing nature of smell, in turn, is often made use of to help participants in a rite of passage—for example, a funeral—cross over from one stage to the next: they are symbolically wafted along with the olfactory flow” (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994: 123). At that evening’s discussion, one boy said: So Auschwitz was very difficult for me, but I got through it... Today we came to Majdanek, and I said it’s heavy, and I thought, somewhere in the middle, I couldn’t take it any more.... It’s so real. You see it with such intensity, barracks after barracks, and people fall opposite you, and it happens to you too, and you say it’s not happening to me, I’m just thinking about it. You say, I’m getting so emotional, oo-ah, another one. And the survivors said, I don’t know how to feel. And those who lived there, didn’t feel. I felt as if I left there, you know, like if you’ve run twelve kilometers and you feel exhausted, that’s how I felt emotionally. As if I don’t have a drop of strength left.

What the witness does in the Auschwitz barracks, the children’s shoes do in Majdanek: they individuate the death of the mass of victims and enable the students to place themselves in the position of the victim or fill the shoes of the dead children. The visits to Auschwitz and Majdanek complement and refer to each other. The student at Majdanek fills in the gaps in the context of the artifacts

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with the testimony of the witness given at Auschwitz. Similarly, the witnesses recognize that their testimony may only become complete after the sensory immersion at Majdanek. As survivor-witness Kapice said earlier, “Why am I coming to speak? But anyway, in Majdanek the eyes see. Then it’s hard for them. They cry. And then they understand” (A. K., bus, day three). A veteran delegation leader summed up: “It doesn’t matter what order they’re in (Auschwitz and Majdanek). The coin always drops at the second camp.” (N. S., September 1995). The loading with emotional charge is cumulative, so that the sensory immersion in the shoe barracks may be a kind of last straw, triggering the awaited breaking down (shvira)—the students’ loss of control over their emotions and succumbing to tears. The isolating darkness and the sounds of some participants crying and of creaking floorboards act as a trigger to bring forth tears, tears which boys as well as girls may shed, under cover of darkness. One boy told: When I was in the shoes [sic!], all the time I felt the need to touch. If I haven’t touched it, then I wasn’t really there. So I went and though I didn’t plan it, I put my fingers in and flipped over one of the shoes. I flipped it over and it frightened me so much what I did, like you did something bad when you were small and they yell at you that it’s forbidden, I don’t understand it, as if I touched something more pure than I or something like that, and it was so scary and it gave me a terrible feeling. At that point, like Naomi said, the coin dropped.

The moment of transformation takes place. In crying together, the students’ powerlessness and numbness and the Shoah victims’ powerlessness and numbness are perceived as one. Furthermore, the crying is contagious; the breaking down of some students encourages others to cry as well. One student wrote: “The path leading to a kind of station with a bench, where everyone sat, completely broken after everything, and cried. One by one, all the boys and girls came, sat on the ground in silence next to the other friends, in a closed posture, and cried. Crying, it was impossible not to cry. It was simply a breaking point for everyone, especially for me, because only then did everything ‘land’ upon me, and take on color and smell and become so incredibly concrete” (d3, 13a–b). The focus on relics and the senses in the voyage and in Majdanek, in particular, promotes emotional identification over conceptual understanding, and ignores the very normal bureaucratic and historical contexts that made Majdanek possible. Andreas Huyssen (1994: 16) writes: “Post-Holocaust generations, it seems to me, can only

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approach that core (of the Shoah) by what I would call mimetic approximation … (which) can only be achieved if we sustain the tension between the numbing totality of the Holocaust and the stories of the individual victims, families, and communities. Exclusive focus … on the latter may provide facile, cathartic empathy and may forget the frightening conclusion that the Holocaust as historical event resulted … from an exceptional combination of normal processes.” A second moral concern arising from the focus on relics was voiced by James Young (1993: 132–133), who inquires, “Beyond affect, what does our knowledge of these objects—a bent spoon, children’s shoes, crusty old striped uniforms—have to do with our knowledge of historical events?... In a perversely ironic twist, these artifacts also force us to recall the victims as the Germans have remembered them to us: in the collected debris of a destroyed civilization.... Nowhere among this debris do we find traces of what bound these people together into a civilization, a nation, a culture.” The marginalization of the context of the Shoah in German history combined with the marginalization of the lives of pre-War Jewry, “what bound these people into a civilization,” enables the Shoah to be seen as a meta-historical manifestation of eternal anti-Semitism, which, in turn becomes the constitutive force of the nation. After fifteen minutes, the guide continues, ushering the group into block 17 to explain about prisoners’ hardships. Few are listening. Most are too shocked. The group continues to the memorialmausoleum built over a huge hill of ashes, and from there to a three-room building with a huge chimney. One room contains a table for the dissection of corpses (to remove valuables that might be concealed inside the bodies of dead prisoners), the second, a small memorial containing some bones and ashes of the victims, and the third, crematoria ovens and a bathtub for the head of the crematorium staff. The crematorium looks completely intact, with what seem to be ashes inside and hundreds of candles lit there by visitors. Whereas in many groups, the crematorium is a focus for ritual commemorative activity (see Figure 4.22), or else a place for a halfhour long silent visit, this group is pressured to go through quickly in order to join the rest of the delegation waiting outside to begin a group ceremony.48 Naomi concludes her explanation of Majdanek with a poem written by a student, describing her emotional reactions to Majdanek. One girl reported: “By a monument in the room adjoining the crematoria, a Polish group had placed a wreath of flowers. Haim, the witness, took the Polish flower wreath apart, throwing the flowers one by one into the great mound of ashes, and placing a

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4.22. Students place memorial candles in the openings of the crematoria ovens at Majdanek

single flower in each of the openings of the crematoria.” This ritual act is one of reclamation of contested memory. Through his performance, the witness effaced the collective Polish commemoration of the dead as Polish national or Catholic martyrs, replacing it by an individuating commemoration of Jews who died and were burned one by one by one. As Yehuda Amichai wrote: We have no tomb of the unknown soldier. Whoever wants to lay his wreath Must separate his wreath Into many flowers and separate them into petals and scatter them. And all the dead return home And they all have names... (Amichai 1975: 25).

Two participants voiced an interesting perspective in their reactions that evening: I’m looking at the mountain (of ashes), and I think wow, people, how much do the ashes of someone who weighs thirty kilos weigh, and look how many ashes, and just as I say, this is my people, these are my parents, I can say, just a hill ... I can say here is a sandbox. And I could just as easily ride my bike there and speak Polish, I have no problem understanding the Polish kids who did that. There there are flower wreaths, memorial candles, but if we remove all of that, and if there was just the hill, I could come to it and climb it and

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roll down it and lie on it, just as anywhere else. It could be the same thing. You can’t know the difference, and it’s terrible.

The anonymity of the huge mound of ashes, following the experience of the pile of shoes, now represents the total annihilation of individual identity, and increases the horror and fear at the site. At the same time, the last students’ comments may reflect a (usually repressed) playfulness in destroying and recreating form and order. As Handelman writes (1990: 67): “Terror and play [here, the product of a playful imagination—JF] are forceful modes of introducing uncertainty, and their affinities are undeniable.” The arbitrariness of what is (mounds of ashes/sandbox) acts as a reminder of the precariousness of all that is. It is not surprising that uncertainty and playfulness surface at the most intense moments of emotion and transformation, as uncertainty is a feature of the liminal stage of rites of transformation (cf. Handelman 1990: 63–81).

“We’re the Same Children Who Were There at the End” The students then gather in the plaza between the mound of ashes and the crematorium building for a group ceremony. A student recorded in her diary: I wanted to stand there a little longer, and to continue to search and to find things that were in the huge hill of ash, and I felt I missed something in that I didn’t have time to be there as long as I liked, because that point [at the monument] was supposed to be, for me, the peak of my visit in Majdanek, and the peak of the whole trip. So I regretted it somewhat, but in the end, I don’t think that it detracted from the great and horrifying “experience,” and I was satisfied that something broke (nishbar) there, I was really happy for that. I was happy that I reached the understanding and the recognition that I wanted to reach, and I was—I have to confess—a bit frustrated in the beginning, at the first camps and even at Auschwitz. And I was sure then that something was missing, that I did not completely understand as I should have. But, like I said, every person and his understandings, and his own breaking point, and his own points of perception; the same site can affect him in a really meaningful way, to sharpen a certain recognition in him, whereas for someone else it will be affected only moderately. But there’s no arguing that the fact that what we saw at Majdanek affected significantly all of us; there was no one that didn’t cry, no one in whom something didn’t break, that wasn’t in pain... Of all the places and things that I’ll probably forget when I return home, to my quiet and normal life, when the memory perhaps will fade, this day I’ll never, ever forget (d3, 13b–14b emphasis in original).

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The ceremony concludes with the loud singing of the Hatikvah, with all flags held aloft. The raised flag at the close of the visit creates a frame referring back to the raised flag procession at the entry to the camp: And when they performed the ceremony, all kinds of tourists saw us. They all have to see. And it was some consolation when they took pictures of us, and at the end, at the Hatikvah, many people stood and watched us... And, finally, with respect to walking with the flag, it reminded me a lot of what we saw in the film on Janusz Korczak, when they walk in slow motion with the flag with the Star of David, and when we walked through all the camps, I felt this, the pride with which we walk with the flag. We’re the same children who were there at the end [of the film] [emphasis mine].

Note that even the strongest feelings of direct contemporaneity are mediated by media images—here, the closing scene of Andrzei Wajda’s film, Korczak. At the close of the group ceremony, one school gathers in a circle to perform a short service in memory of two students of the school killed in the previous year. This ceremony and the flag symbolism will be further discussed in chapter 5. Subsequently, most students linger silent or crying, loath to return to the bus. Some students insist that the witness Haim ride on their bus back to Cracow. Others ask if the behavior of some of their friends on the bus (who already have their Walkmans on) might not be offensive. The teacher replies: “If the witnesses see us singing and dancing, it gives them strength.” Indeed, when he comes on the bus, Haim takes the microphone and thanks the students, saying: “You give us strength through your identification and your understanding.” On the bus, the teacher summed up her feelings in her notebook: “I didn’t want to leave there; I simply didn’t want to leave, because I knew that the meaning of the trip ends here. Tomorrow we’ll be in the market in Warsaw and again we’ll drink coffee with a cigarette, and then we’ll go back home to work and who has the force and I wanted to stick tight to all of this, to this emotional tempest, but how much can we cry?” (d6, 27). In the initial quiet immediately following the visit, one male student wrote: Now I’m on the bus after Majdanek, but I’m not the same Hezi. It’s over... Something big, uncontrollable: every time something happens to me, I’ll compare it with what I saw today. Today I saw a factory for

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murdering human beings, an oiled machine of creatures, I don’t know what they were. How were they? How could they look at themselves in the mirror, how did they remove this from their consciousness, they didn’t think about it, they turned into unfeeling machines, psychopaths, human animals, barbarians, I don’t have enough expressions for them, and I don’t think they’re worth it... I am today in a condition that I never was before, I am wrecked and powerless through and through, but I want to know two main things: One, why? A question that’s impossible to answer. And the second, that disturbed me later even more, from where? Where does the hatred towards us come from; how can they hate people like that and why? I can’t absorb it, I don’t understand... I am now sitting in the bus half an hour after leaving the camp, and people are sitting and eating and playing Tetris. They argue and talk and I don’t understand how they can make the switch, I can’t do it, and now I don’t understand them and I’m a tolerant person. What can I do, I must be mistaken (d4, 8–9).

Not all are comfortable with the rapid mood swings inscribed in the voyage construction.

Closing the Circle: The Final Evening Discussion After dinner, student discussion groups begin. Here again, the session begins with the expression of emotional reactions to the sites and thanks to fellow students for their support. But as Majdanek was, for most, the most visually concrete and the most moving site on the trip,49 and as this is the last evening of the voyage, the frustration of cognitive and emotional dissonance is replaced by a sense of climax and of the “closing of the circle.” Students compare Majdanek and their reactions to it with their experiences at previous camps, reflect back on the progression of the trip, and proclaim the transformatory power of their experience. They affirm their sense of belonging to the school and the nation, and begin to think of how to perform the act of witnessing to their schoolmates and fellow Israelis back home. One girl said: “The ceremony was very difficult and the visit in general was hard for all, but was made much easier because the whole group helped and supported me and everyone else.” Another recounted: “We went into the gas chambers and I choked and I couldn’t breathe there... And I wanted to cry, but it didn’t come out. The camp was very strong, maybe I’ll feel it when I get home. And I feel like I have to go back to Israel and bring other people here, it’s so important that they see the things. Now I understand what they said, if you don’t go there, you can’t understand what they’re talking about.”

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One boy reflected: In Auschwitz, the yoke was heavy. But in Majdanek it was very heavy. It was the highest peak in terms of difficulty. Furthermore, you spoke of the flag and how it gave you strength to keep going. I didn’t hold the flag. I have a small book of Psalms in my pocket, and I always carry it, and that’s what gives me the strength to keep going. During all the time in Majdanek, I remained on my feet, out of respect to the dead. From respect and from pride that I’m Jewish and that people survived and I respect them too.

Not all the participants, however, affirmed the redemptive mood. One said: Many said they felt as if they’d won. And I didn’t feel victory. I said, you know, they can take me, they can take the State of Israel, they can take the flag, they can take it all, if they could only bring back the force of life of the six million, those people, and give them their normal, everyday, boring lives, that they watch TV every day and die at age seventy-two, without doing a thing…. And every time I ask why, I don’t have an answer, and I never will have. And I ask from where do people get such hatred, such bestiality, and I see that I simply don’t understand these feelings, and it’s a waste of time for me to try... And I’m not angry, I don’t even hate them either, I just have pity that a human being can reach such a level, that he becomes such a human being. What would it help if I hated him? It wouldn’t help. [some applause] I felt worthless.

A lone participant expressed continued frustration at not feeling the coin drop, as well as the peer pressure to make himself feel shocked: “I’m talking about my feelings, that I can be completely closed off, and I don’t know if I’m insensitive, and I force myself to feel. Perhaps because I see that everyone else is shocked, I should be shocked. Perhaps I won’t get anything out of this trip, except wandering around and making myself feel shocked.” When he expressed the same feelings at a follow-up meeting two weeks after the voyage, the other students reacted with anger, as they felt it threatened the authenticity of their own emotional reactions (see chapter 5, pp. 221-222). The discussion concludes with several lessons that may serve in their future witnessing: “I thought of how could I save people in my house. Hiding places, how much food, how much clothing. Because I’m sure that next time it happens, I’m sure I’ll do it, I’ll try to help, and resist, and if not to commit suicide. Cause what I saw these people, I don’t know how they withstood it without committing suicide.”

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Another girl said: And by the gas chambers, I didn’t want to stay there on my own. Besides that, when we heard the section on how the Germans played with the Jews as with a punching bag and the gas chambers and all. I thought about serial killers, crazy people, like Charles Manson... And I thought how did they manage to raise an entire nation of serial killers? And they’re not just killers, they’re serial killers. They’re psychopaths, they’re inhuman. I don’t understand it, I don’t think I can understand it, and that’s what I thought about. Today I hated them as I’ve never hated them before.

Going Home: From Warsaw to Tel Aviv—Day Eight After a late evening, students wake up late, the morning organization is slack, and students depart from the hotel at 9:00. The entire day is anticlimactic. Naomi announces on the bus: “This is our last day in Poland,” and is greeted by applause. Students sense that the voyage has peaked in Majdanek. Tension drops, and the cumulative sleep deficit kicks in—with a vengeance. Furthermore, some are terribly homesick. The focus on this day will be the voyage home. Naomi warns to beware of pickpockets and not get lost. This day, too, is framed as a ventilation day, even though there are still Warsaw Ghetto sites and a Jewish cemetery to visit.

Confronting the Not-Yet-Dead Diaspora The first stop, after a fifteen minute ride, is at the Nozhik synagogue, the last active synagogue of the Warsaw Jewish community. The large group arrives after morning prayers, when the synagogue is peopled by a sexton and a handful of old beggars (see Figure 4.23). In the synagogue, I act as the Yiddish-Hebrew interpreter of the following conversation: Female student: “Why don’t you come to Israel?” Beggar: “I come twice a year to visit.” Student: “Where were you in Israel?” Beggar: “In Jerusalem, in Bnei Brak, I danced by the Kotel on Shavuot.” Student (turning to me): “That’s not the question. He didn’t understand the question. Why does he stay in Poland?” Beggar: “I live here. Everyone has their burden. It is bashert (foreordained) in the heavens.” Student: “I don’t understand—why doesn’t he come on aliya?”

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4.23. Beggars soliciting contributions from students at the Nozhik synagogue in Warsaw

Student Two (an immigrant from the Ukraine): “An old man like that should come on aliya? This is his home. What should he do in Israel? Go to an absorption center in B.?”

Among the most important messages of the voyage are that Poland is a Jewish cemetery and a hostile anti-Semitic country, and that the continuation of Diaspora Jewish life is in Israel. Consequently, the girl is perplexed by the old man’s living presence in the land of death. The old man (who understood the question perfectly well50) first asserts: “I’m just as good as the American Jews; I too can go and dance at the Kotel and come back.” When the girl refuses to accept the response (“he didn’t understand the question”), the beggar’s second response is to confirm an Israeli stereotype of the galut Jew (and, perhaps, the American Jewish stereotype of the shtetl Jew): “I have my burden (pekl), it is decreed in heaven (bashert).” This line may even be a beggar’s tool of the trade. By presenting himself as a poor beggar, bowed with years and the weight of (divinely decreed) destiny, he conforms to a folkloric image of the shtetl beggar, and can arouse both nostalgia and pity, thus increasing his charity take from visiting Diaspora Jews. The second student’s reply also recognizes Poland as a Jewish cemetery, but is willing to extend its applicability to the almost-dead, in light of the difficulties of migration and absorption in Israel. The students’ attitude expresses the dominant ideology of the trip (and of the larger Israeli society) towards the

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living Eastern European Diaspora communities.51 As Jack Kugelmass put it (1994: 182), “Poland’s viability as a stage is enhanced by the fact that the country is nearly devoid of actors who might contest the presence of these foreign visitors or attempt to control the performance.” The Diaspora must be dead for students to be able to appropriate it for themselves as representatives of the State. The students leave the synagogue and enter a residential courtyard of an intact building of the ghetto on Prozna Street. Naomi reminds them that the voyage began with a description of conditions in the ghetto and that they have come full circle (geographically and symbolically) in the trip. She thus tries to reinforce the larger cyclical rhythm of the voyage, beyond that of alternation between death camps and past Jewish life/modern tourism (laga’at v’livro’ah). This cycle is referred to as segirat ma’agal (the closing of the circle). The Warsaw Ghetto is the entry portal from Israel to the Shoah, and the reentry point to Israel. The students joke and attract some hostile comments on the part of Polish residents of the courtyard. A teacher argues with a security person who insists that she remain with the bus and the packed luggage. Students board the bus and gaze out the window sleepily. One says to those around him: “It seems that this entire country is falling apart. There are cracks in the buildings everywhere.”

The Route of Victory As the bus arrives at the Umschlagplatz, the deportation square monument (see description of day one), participants are told that an adult and two students must remain with the bus for security reasons. Many request to remain on the bus and sleep. The rest, along with the other four bus groups in the delegation, will walk the Memorial Route of Jewish Martyrdom and Struggle to the Warsaw Ghetto Monument. The processional path, dedicated in 1988, is marked by a series of nineteen inscribed, highly polished granite stones dedicated to Warsaw Ghetto figures, and has been sanctified by the many groups that have walked it over the last ten years. It contains, however, no visible remains and few “original” locations. It was designed to “link the already existing monuments (the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, Mila 18 and the Umschlagplatz) ... and include them in the symbolic landscape of Warsaw” (Young 1993: 179; cf. Gebert 1994: 128–129). This is an instance of a site defined almost entirely through its site markers (cf. MacCannell 1976: 44–45). Although the route was designed to begin near the Rapaport (Warsaw Ghetto) Memorial at

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the Tree of Common Remembrance of Jews and Poles and end at the deportation place, in my ten visits to the Umschlagplatz, I do not recall ever having been shown the Tree of Common Rememberance.52 The students, like all Israeli delegation participants, will walk the path in reverse, from the Umschlagplatz to the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, progressing from martyrdom and destruction to revolt. The route is known by participants only as derekh hagevurah (The Route of Heroism) or derekh hanitzahon (The Route of Victory). The students, dressed in their blue-and-white delegation sweatshirts, proceed through the streets of Warsaw, Israeli flags held aloft. Often, Polish passersby or apartment dwellers look on from the opposite sidewalks or windows and scowl. The witness Haim tells the students: “When we worked here clearing away the ruins [in 1944], we dreamt that one day we would come here as free men. So many of the places we passed here in Warsaw I recognize.” The five bus groups mingle as they slouch their way down the path. Many students are hooked up to Walkmans. Some throw a ball to each other across the road. Some look at the stones and try to decipher the inscriptions (the glare on the polished surface of the stones makes them hard to read). At a stop by the stone commemorating Yitzhak Nissenbaum, Naomi provides a short explanation of the notion of kiddush hahayim (the sanctification of life). In the middle of her explanation, the ball falls in the middle of the road. Naomi screams: “What are you doing? I won’t allow it!” A teacher retorts: “A Polonez (automobile) will come and run them over.” Discipline has broken down; the atmosphere resembles more a school day trip than a pilgrimage to Holocaust Poland. The students arrive at the mound covering the site of Mila 18, the bunker of Mordechai Anliewicz and the last Warsaw Ghetto fighters. A woman pushing a baby carriage lounges at a seat nearby. The students sprawl on the grassy slope covering the mound. Naomi explains about the youth movements and the development of the revolt: “The difference between the youth movements and others was that they lived together, did many activities together and tried to maintain this sense of community in the ghetto. Thus, they were the ones to set up the Jewish fighting organization... The bunker had no emergency exits, so they were fighting for the honor of the people of Israel.” Her speech falls on deaf ears. Many students are asleep on the grass. One student lights a candle by Mila 18 for his family, who had lived at Mila 26. He says that he has lit eight candles in the course

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of the trip, all in places linked to his own family history. “Nothing remains,” he says. “Even the path of the streets has changed.” Naomi completes her narrative and says: “Guys, hurry up because we’re late.” A teacher replies: “Of this it was said, ‘The dead shall praise thee, O Lord, and all who go down to slumber.’” The group arrives at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, a rectangle of huge blocks of stone, standing on a massive empty platform in an open square enclosed by gray apartment blocks. This monument, with its bas-relief depiction of the victims “sunken” into the back of the pedestal, and the upward-thrusting heroes in front, depicts a movement through the stone, from back to front, from martyrdom to heroism. Mounted on the stone are bronze figures of seven heroically sculpted men and women (kibbutzniks served as models! [Young 1993: 168]), seeming to fight their way out of the granite blocks (ibid.:173–174). At the center is the muscular figure of the young Mordechai Anielewicz, leader of the ghetto revolt, clutching a homemade grenade. This is the only Shoah monument in the voyage that speaks overtly of struggle and heroism. The eyes of the figures are raised in pride. Even the dead hero on the monument is tranquil. No blood or bones are visible. The horror of death is masked. For the students, until now, the presence of the victims has been most effectively evoked through their suitcases, empty shoes, prostheses, and toothbrushes. The larger than life statues of the fighters, on the other hand, “proclaim triumphantly ... that ‘their sacrifice is not in vain’” (Dwork and van Pelt 1994: 247). Furthermore, as the monument is familiar to students from its nearly life-sized replica at Yad Vashem, it serves as a mnemonic pointing towards the Land of Israel. On every other voyage I have witnessed, the march of the blueand-white clad teenagers along the Route of Heroism concluded with a delegation-wide ceremony performed at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial (see Figure 4.24). On this trip, although the march along the Route of Heroism may have been intended as a show of national strength and pride, the straggling mass of youngsters looked more like a disgruntled group of soldiers at the end of a forced fitness march (masa kumta). The monument became a short stop before free time in the Old City of Warsaw. If the minor tone of the visit to the Warsaw Ghetto Monument is exceptional (for Poland voyages), the minor role given physical resistance in the overall text of the voyage is, by contrast, typical.53 Center stage is given to spiritual resistance, which includes smug-

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4.24. A ceremony at the Warsaw Ghetto (Rapaport) Memorial

gling, praying, outsmarting the Nazis, organizing, self-help, and, in fact, anything that is perceived as having enabled the survivors to survive. All survival is portrayed as heroism. The students are brought to the Old Marketplace (Stary Rynek) and given about an hour and a half to wander around. After the marketplace, students mount the bus and travel to the Warsaw Jewish cemetery. The cemetery contains several hundred thousand graves of Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including many of the dominant personalities of Polish Jewry. It also contains a mass grave of those who died of disease or starvation during the ghetto years. The students are led between the tombstones, as the guide tries in vain to make herself heard above the pouring rain, and to make herself visible above a sea of umbrellas. In spite of the guide’s explanation, some students in the group (as in many other groups) come away thinking that all the graves of the cemetery are those of Holocaust victims.

Final Ceremony: The Little Guy Sends Us on Our Way! As the rain continues to come down steadily, the delegation leader, following a hurried telephone conference with the Ministry of Education coordinator in Poland, decides to move the final ceremony indoors to the Nozhik synagogue. The staging of the final ceremony inside, in a synagogue, conflicts with the message conveyed by its texts. The interior space of the synagogue provides no icons to glorify heroism, and no Polish onlookers to which the participants can

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manifest their identity and presence. Yet no changes are introduced to adapt the ceremony to the religious building. Outside of its appropriate geographical context, the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial (see figure 4.24), the ceremony cannot effectively function to effect the transition from Shoah Poland to Israel, from victorious survivors to olim to Israel (see chapter 5, p. 224). Furthermore, the group is divided into two parts (downstairs and balcony), acoustics in the building are poor, and the crowding of flags onto the small bimah reduce their representational effect. Rather than a proclamation of victory, the ceremony becomes a boring delay on the way to the airport. The delegation leader’s last comments are followed by one student’s outcry: “Finally! The little guy is sending us back home!” After the final singing of Hatikvah, delegation leader Omri and the witness Haim close the ceremony with a final benediction for the participants, reminding them of their role and status as victors and witnesses: “But last, and most dear of all, that’s you. You have given us the motivation to continue.” Immediately after the ceremony, one of the group’s teachers springs up to thank Omri: “Now I understand. I had to travel thousands of kilometers in order to find the beautiful Land of Israel.” The students then board the buses for the airport. After passing through security and check-in procedures, the students sit on the floor of the duty-free area singing, “the whole wide world is (delegation) 75d,” to the melody of a popular Hassidic tune. The plane ride is marked by giddy rowdiness. The students have left Poland, the “valley of death” behind, and are now being released back to life. They arrive in Tel Aviv in the middle of the night, touching down with a great shout of joy and singing of “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem”.

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Notes 1. For details on ethnographic methodology, see chapter 1, pp. 21-24. When quoted, the six diaries are referred to as d1 through d6. Diaries 1 through 5 were kept by five different students on the trip: four girls and one boy (d4). Diary 6 is a teacher’s diary. I might note that there were more girls than boys in this group, as in most Poland voyage groups. In my citations, the number after the comma refers to the page number in the diary. 2. For similar practices with respect to food on Israeli youth exchange programs in Germany, see Lessing 2004. 3. Special thanks are due to Dr. Sharona Komem, who provided me with some of the insights that developmental psychology can bring to an understanding of the voyage. My thanks also to Dr. Robert King, who provided me with a bibliography on the psychology of adolescence and death. There is certainly a need for a developmental psychology perspective on the voyage. 4. For the broader argument on the voyages and the logic of the enclave, see Feldman 2002. 5. In a briefing to another Poland delegation, a security officer detailed the many dangers of skinheads, anti-Semites, and drunks. He concluded: “We can’t promise you that nothing will happen, but if you follow instructions, the danger will be minimized.” 6. For a detailed discussion of the ceremonies, see chapter 5. 7. My thanks to the anonymous reader of Berghahn Books for this insight. 8. This personalization of the stones is not uncommon. Claude Lanzmann said: “I have filmed these stones of the Treblinka camp for days and days in every season.... And I remember my camera man telling me, ‘But you are insane! We have already hundreds of shots of these stones, what do you want to do with it? They are only stones!’ But the stones were for me the killed Jews, the human beings. I have nothing else to film except the stones, and I filmed them with such a feeling of emergency that they became for me human beings and that they have become now for the viewers the human beings” (Lanzmann in Felman 1992b: 256–257, n. 36; see also Gantheret and Lanzmann 1990: 281–282). 9. The sequence of texts and the raising of the flag will be further analyzed in chapter 5. 10. For more on the unique features of Orthodox school groups, see the appendix. 11. For a discussion of the relation of hatred of the Other as expressed by Israeli students towards Poles and Arabs, see Litvak n.d.; Gur-Ze’ev 1999. 12. On redemptive closure and survivors’ narratives, see Langer 1991; and the critique of Langer in LaCapra 1994: 187–221. For more on the influence of physical surroundings in shaping of survivor-witnesses’ narratives, see Feldman forthcoming. 13. The Orthodox girls, who do not travel on Shabbat, split off from the group after Wieliczka and were brought to another hotel. The separation of Orthodox participants takes place whenever the hotel that the group is staying in is beyond walking distance of the synagogues. 14. The local Polish Jewish congregation holds their services at the Remo Synagogue nearby. Although logistic considerations rule out the use of the Remo, no effort is made to integrate the local Polish Jewish community. (My thanks to

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15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

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Jonathan Webber for the insight on minhag hamakom.) After the head of the Cracow Jewish community, Jakobowicz, passed away in the spring of1997, a memorial plaque was placed in the synagogue by the Ministry of Education. The shiny brass plaque is completely out of place in the decor of the Moorishstyle synagogue, and the symbols of the state and the Ministry of Education are far more prominent than the name of the deceased. More than honoring Jakobowicz, the state thus honors itself. The intimate, emotionally charged nature of the olfactory experience ensures that such value-coded odors are interiorized by the members of society in a deeply personal way (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994: 3). In addition, immigrants from Arab and Asian countries, whose descendants make up the majority of Israel’s current population today (but the minority of voyage participants), shared little of Zionism’s ambivalence towards the past and bore generally positive attitudes towards Jewish tradition. A similar tendency to minimize differences and paint a romantic, united image of the past is prominent in yizker bicher, memorial books composed by survivors of Eastern European communities (Baumel 1995: 151). I have yet to understand the anomalies of ‘official’ Shabbat observance on the trips to Poland. On other trips, superior Israeli purchasing power was seen as an act of divine justice. Shoplifting is also common (though not recorded in this group), and is sometimes overlooked or excused by teachers and group leaders as an act of just revenge. National-Religious sponsored Bnei Akiva trips are explicitly organized so that students have no time at all for shopping in Poland (E. Hartman, interview, 27 May 1996). For a fascinating look at how Kazimierz is being recreated as a Jewish Quarter without Jews for the benefit of foreign tourists and as an element in the construction of current Polish identity, see Kugelmass and Orla-Bukowska 1998; for the larger European context, see Gruber 2002. On some other trips, the major focus of interest on the street of the synagogues in old Kazimierz was the street that served as the locale for filming several scenes in Schindler’s List. (The actual Cracow ghetto was in far less–picturesque Podgórze.) The aura of the site derives from its being a “real life movie set”! The sites thus acquire authenticity to the extent that they conform with their previously known representations. For a celebration of this practice, see Levy and Sznaider 2006: 137–139. Compare with the song evenings of Israeli immigrants in New York, as described by Moshe Shokeid (1998). Based on informal questions posed to the voyage participants and questionnaires distributed to other groups prior to their departure, Roumi and Lev (2004: 236) report that returning students rated the death camps as the most important sites on the voyage (94.6%). On alternate years, on visits scheduled for the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, groups will visit Auschwitz twice: once for the ceremonial March of the Living, and again for the day-long visit. For a description of the site, see Dwork and Van Pelt 1994: 232–236; Berg1996: 33–35; Young 1993: 119-154; Mezga 1990; Szurek 1990a. This maintenance work can be quite extensive, since the buildings were not built to last. Special roof tiles need to be ordered from an artisan; the “original”

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barbed wire must be replaced every few years. See Szurek 1990: 13–14. 27. Auschwitz, the most important site of the tour (along with Majdanek), was preceded by the shortest scheduled sleep time (five hours). Is this accidental? 28. On the influence of the photographs of the camps on seeing and understanding Holocaust sites, see Cornelia Brink 1995a; 1995b; 2000. See also Sontag 1977: 1–29; Zelizer 1998. 29. The narrative of the local guides at Oswiecim-Auschwitz, in interaction with different groups (Poles, Germans, Israelis, Russians, American Jews), warrants an independent study. 30. Andrew Charlesworth (1994: 579–593) argues that the selective display, erection of symbols, and performance of rituals at the site of Auschwitz is a very conscious, highly politicized expropriation of memory, promoting communist, Polish, nationalist, and Catholic agendas (not always at the same periods). In particular, he takes issue with James Young (1993: 117) who writes that “the problem is not that Poles deliberately displace Jewish memory of the Holocaust with their own, but that as a country bereft of Jews, the memorials can do little but cultivate Polish memory.... Polish Catholics will remember as Polish Catholics, even when they remember Jewish victims.” The ongoing conflict over the erection of crosses on the perimeter of Birkenau (in the years 1998–1999) supports Charlesworth’s emphasis on the conjunction of extreme Polish nationalism, Catholic conservatism, and anti-Semitism, while ongoing Polish museum staff participation in Yad Vashem seminars support Young’s. Other commemorative ceremonies, such as the January 2005 one, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, make room for Jewish memory alongside other memory forms. Many of the issues came to a head in the dispute over the Carmelite Monastery at Auschwitz (see Bartoszewski 1990; Klein 1991). 31. On the Jewish barracks exhibition, see Szurek 1990a; Webber 1992a: 13–14; Webber 1992b; Young 1993: 130. 32. The stone implicitly acknowledges the State of Israel’s role as bearer of Jewish memory. Although, semantically, the symbol of the Israeli president’s Jerusalem stone at Auschwitz is quite rich, it is not always noticed by participants, seldom photographed, and almost never mentioned in evening group discussions or diary entries. Apparently, the stone was placed there after the Polish site officials refused permission to place it on the selection ramp at Birkenau. (My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.) 33. A painting of Kolbe and an altar covered with a black-and-white–striped cloth with his Auschwitz prisoner number occupies a prominent place in the Polish Catholic shrine at Czestochowa (see Figure 4.14). Just on the other side of the barbed wire adjoining block 11, the controversial Carmelite cloister was installed. On the cloister, see Young 1993: 145–150; Szurek 1990a: 21; Bartoszewski 1990; Klein 1991. 34. Karen Shawn, an educator who has accompanied several American Jewish groups to Poland, told me that participants frequently feel survival guilt when eating a sandwich or feeling warm in the bus after witnessing the remains of the camps and hearing the story of the witness’s suffering. I suggest that the Israeli identity of the Ministry of Education groups makes it easier for the witnesses to frame the mass presence and the natural exuberance of and appetite of the participants as an act of victory or revenge.

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35. I cannot overestimate the importance students assign to picture taking. On a previous trip that I guided, I requested that no cameras be brought to Birkenau, and nearly provoked a mutiny. I finally had to agree to allow one teacher to take group photos by the entrance and the crematoria. Susan Sontag writes (1977: 24): “Needing to have reality confirmed and enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.... Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.” 36. Claudia Koonz applies some of Halbwachs’ observations on Holy Land sites and pilgrimages to exhibitions in concentration camps (1994: 258–280). 37. While I accept Langer’s distinction between different types of survivors’ memory narratives (deep (i.e., traumatic) memory/surface memory), I join LaCapra in taking exception to his outright rejection of the authenticity or value of survivors’ nontraumatic memory narratives (1994: 196, 198): “[Langer] tends to downplay, see as flatly contradictory, or even discount as illusory, testimony that either insists on acts of defiance and resistance during the Shoah or perhaps tensely combines the reliving of a traumatic past with a counterideological attempt to recount a history, reconstruct a sense of agency, and rebuild a life.... There is no simple opposition between depth and surface.... Langer is justifiably concerned with righting an imbalance created by salvationist attempts to make us feel good by portraying the experience of Holocaust victims as an uplifting testimony to the heroic strength of the spirit and the indomitable human will, but at times he may go too far in the opposite yet complementary direction.” For more on the construction of witness testimony on the voyages, see Feldman forthcoming. On social construction of Holocaust testimony, see Kidron 2003. 38. Some listeners took Haim’s words in a figurative sense, while others understood it literally and felt slightly uncomfortable. Other witnesses will express redemptive closure in other words. For a further account of the witness’s ritual role at Auschwitz, see chapter 5, pp. 199-201, and Feldman forthcoming. 39. For further comparison with Orthodox reactions to the site, see the appendix. 40. This action is exceptional. It is the only serious attempt undertaken by members of the group to orient themselves geographically and link the death sites to the geography and topography of Poland (with the help of the Polish guide!). In general, the death camps remain another planet. 41. As we find when, during the March of the Living, lunch was eaten immediately after the visit to Majdanek. See Stier 1995: 62; and during the Auschwitz visit, above, p. 145-146. 42. For a (Polish) explanation of the logistic reasons for the Nazis’ construction of the camp in proximity to Lublin, see Marszalek 1986: 18–23. On the function of the camp as a means of terrorizing the local population, see Marszalek 1986: 58. 43. Where such objects have not remained intact or cannot be preserved, they are sometimes replaced by (marked) reproductions. Thus, one exhibit contained a plastic block, the same size, shape, and look as the bread ration given prisoners at Majdanek. 44. The fabrication of relics is, of course, not a recent phenomenon. It was extremely prevalent in the late antique and medieval worlds, where relics consecrated sacred buildings and endowed their possessors with considerable power and prestige. See Brown 1982.

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45. For critical views on the moral consequences of the depiction of Auschwitz as another planet, see Meron 1994; Carmon 1988; Ofir 1986. 46. Actually, a good deal of the exhibited area at Majdanek is reconstructed, including the crematorium building, which was hit by a Russian bomb and later burned down by the fleeing crematorium staff on 22 July 1944 (Marszalek 1986: 183; photo, p. 144y). 47. One of the categories suggested by the Ministry of Education in their survey of returning voyagers was “the sights, voices, and smells.” Students rated it as the third most important category (75.3%) (Romi and Lev 2003: 232). 48. In other groups, students often remain seated in stunned silence for twenty or thirty minutes, staring at the candles lit in the crematoria. Although full-scale ceremonies are almost never held there, some groups will quietly recite El Mole Rachamim or Kaddish. 49. Many quotes from this discussion have been incorporated into the description of the Majdanek visit, above. 50. I had translated her question as “Far vus kimsti nisht lebn kain eretz yisruel?” 51. In an interview I conducted with Stanislaw Krajewski, a local Polish Jewish activist, he complained about the exclusion of the local Jewish community from March of the Living, and the lack of consideration of their needs on the part of Israeli groups. 52. Only two out of eight veteran Israeli guides to Poland asked about the Tree of Common Remembrance were able to identify it.

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CHAPTER

5

The Ceremonies of the Poland Voyages

On finding a bus ticket at Plaszów On the face of the earth at Plaszów Wild wheat waves. Skilled was the hand That held the plow, That held the scythe. The harvest was gathered in To the storehouses for seven fat years. And then the masters from Germany Saw that its whiteness be covered Under tons of fertile Polish soil. Slash and burn, Slash and burn, Even the stubble was razed. Today one can no longer hear The crunch of bone underfoot. Fog above, sod below And the rain The rain The rain. The road there, friend, is short. Take the bus from Kraków Central For only 48 zloty. Buy a return ticket And you’ll get a 50% discount.

Notes for this section begin on page 224.

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Introduction: What Makes Ceremonies Different? Ceremonies are an essential activity in the Ministry of Education’s program for the Poland voyages, and are frequently mentioned by students afterwards among the most significant aspects of the trip.1 A group will perform between three and eight group ceremonies in the course of an eight-day trip. The ceremonies take in the fragmentation of the sites, absorb it, tame it, and turn it into a collective expression. They communicate the themes through a dense, compelling ritual language of symbolic display and dramatization. According to an instructor of the Ministry of Education’s training course for guides, ceremonies are designed to create unity in feeling and a sense of community through repetition of central symbols and songs. They manifest strength and survival through massive common presence on Polish soil and stake claims to memory disputed by the Poles. They offer participants an opportunity to summarize and bring closure to what was previously witnessed (lisgor ma’agal) through active commemoration, and provide liturgical triggers for the accumulated emotional charge (S. S., Poland guide course, 25 June 1992). Whereas the students are mostly passive listeners throughout the voyage, here they are actor-performers. Richard Schechner writes (1993: 144): “Performing a ritual … is both narrative (cognitive) and affective. These work together to form the experience of ritualizing.… The affective states aroused by ritual are necessarily nested within a narrative frame. But from within—the experience of a person performing—the narrative frame dissolves, the action is just ‘done’, not thought about.” The attention to the creation of emotion, expression of meaning, and transmission of memory through a limited repertoire of bodily gestures, public recitation of texts, and music distinguishes ceremonies from the other voyage activities discussed in chapter 4. David Kertzer writes (1988: 2–3) that “through participation in the rites, the citizen of the modern state identifies with larger political forces that can only be seen in symbolic form.” The visual redundancy of central symbols and the repetition of texts, songs, and symbols are designed to “create an emotional state that makes the message incontestable because it is framed in such a way as to be seen as inherent in the way things are” (ibid.: 99–100). Thus, ritual may produce solidarity, even in the absence of common beliefs. The dense crowding and the participants’ sense of isolation from the hostile death world all around them, create favorable conditions

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for the “contagion” of emotion, which is cathected into the centrally placed symbols. In the intensity of ritual, people focus their attention on a limited range of symbols, and in a state of emotional excitement, make sweeping generalizations in categorizing other people. “Carried to an extreme,” writes Kertzer (1988: 82), “the emotionallycharged individual may operate with an overriding cognitive division of people into just two categories: ‘with me’ and ‘against me.’” The students see each other getting emotional and perceive that the State, made present through its symbols, is the “natural” precipitant of the common emotional charge, and the unifying force of the physically discrete bodies.2 They are also conscious of their being performers, both for other Israeli youth, as well as for Polish onlookers outside the tightly drawn circle of the group. At the same time, as we will see, ritual, even when planned by hegemonic forces, has subversive potential, as power holders cannot entirely control ritual and traces of rebellion may infiltrate it. As I demonstrated in chapter 4, the movement of participants through space to the ceremonial site, the mnemonics of the ruins and relics, and the narrative of the survivor create the sentiment of compression of time, which enables the students to sense that they were “there” and came out as victors. Consequently, although the texts and songs of most of the ceremonies are derived from Israeli Shoah commemorations, which (like most State rituals) are “mirrors” (Handelman 1990; cf. chapter 1, above, pp. 7-9), commemorative rites of presentation, many of the ceremonies in Poland are frequently creative rites of transformation (models), agents of change. I will suggest that, some rituals, like the small-group ceremony in the Jewish barracks at Auschwitz, are primarily rites of transformation, while others, such as the ceremony for the Righteous Gentiles, are clearly rites of presentation. Still others lie somewhere along the continuum between the two. But even the rites of presentation are inserted within the larger ritual unit of the voyage, which is designed to transform participants from high school students to passive, powerless victims to responsible, victorious Israeli survivors. Thus, they can also become agents of change. By employing a microscopic analysis of the form of the ceremonies, I will show how and to what extent these transformations take place, and how personal feelings and aims interact with the goals of the State. After briefly contextualizing the ceremonies within the frame of Israeli school ceremonies and the space-time of the voyage, I will analyze four ritual configurations of voyage ceremonies. I conclude the chapter with a synthesis of several phenomena prominent in the

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ceremonies: the recital of religious texts, the raising of the flag, the singing of the national anthem, and the dynamics of public weeping.

Contexts of Voyage Ceremonies School Ceremonies in Poland and Israel As I describe in chapter 2, school ceremonies are one of the most important means of socialization of the Israeli public to the dominant national understandings of the Shoah. The school ceremonies and the ceremonies performed in Poland interact in three ways: 1. The Poland voyage calendar is synchronized with the Israeli commemorative cycle. Many youth groups traveling to Poland are scheduled to be there on Holocaust Remembrance Day and return to Israel in time for Memorial Day for the Fallen Israeli Soldiers. They will join Diaspora Jewish youth in the March of the Living procession from Auschwitz to Birkenau, which is broadcast on Israeli television.3 While in Poland, Israeli groups will stop the bus along the road at 10:00 A.M. local time to stand at attention while the community in the Land of Israel listens to the siren. In simultaneity lies political communion (Kertzer 1988: 23). 2. The texts, songs, ritual postures, and sequences of Israeli school ceremonies are used in the ceremonies that take place in Poland. Although the choice of texts and music is mostly left to the discretion of the individual teacher or students, they usually follow fixed patterns set in school commemorations. The authority of the place, the presence of the witness, and the overall ritual frame of the voyage may, however, produce, different effects in Poland. 3. Veterans of the Poland trip often become the cadres of the school Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies upon their return (c.f. Landau 1999). The Poland delegation sweatshirt is increasingly becoming the official dress of performers of the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony. Often, descriptions of participants’ voyage experiences are included in the ceremony. The video film of the voyage may be shown to classes in the days preceding Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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Sites, Times, and Configurations of Ceremonies The ceremonies are, almost without exception, performed at Holocaust sites, not at Jewish life sites or Polish sites. This demonstrates that it is death, not Jewish life, that is being commemorated. When rituals do take place at Jewish life sites, they are strictly religious in nature, such as recital of daily prayers (by the Orthodox). But such rituals, common among National Religious youth groups (see appendix), make no explicit reference to the Jewish dead in the prayer, even though the synagogue is a traditional setting for the recital of Kaddish. Even among the Orthodox, we find a clear separation and hierarchy of death over Jewish life.4 Mass ceremonies are usually performed in the open, where the mass of Israeli participants with their flags can best be seen by a large public, both participants and outsiders. Held in symbolically significant space, they can thus be interpreted as the symbolic capturing of a city or capital (Berger in Kertzer 1988: 120). This is particularly pertinent in the cases of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto, which are claimed as important symbols by both Jews and Poles. In other places, the groups will deliberately avoid memorial sites erected by the Poles. The preferred place of commemoration is where the body or ashes of the dead can serve as witness. As Don Handelman and Lea Shamgar-Handelman (1997) write, successful memorialism turns the absence of presence into the presence of absence. The highest degree of presence is where the body of the dead is in place, and can lend the ground—and the State that sanctifies it—its authority. Unlike at Israeli memorial ceremonies, however, Poland is neither the national homeland of the victims, nor of the commemorators. The victims did not die for Poland; many never even lived there. Furthermore, the violence committed on their incinerated bodies makes the notion of repose in the earth impossible for the mourners. Thus, in the ceremonies, rather than “repose in peace,” a commonly cited invocation, is “earth, cover not your blood,” invoking Cain’s murder of Abel. In the blood-soaked soil of Poland, the ashes of the dead speak of discontinuity between body and land, past and present. For the commemorators, the dead can achieve proper repose, not in the “cursed earth,” but through the upraised flag of the Israeli mourners, pointing towards the proper resting place for Jews—hamenucha v’hanachala (the repose and the inheritance), the Land of Israel. Through display of the (mobile) symbols of the State of Israel, the reading of their names, and the performance of ceremonies, the young participants who come to embody their memory

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seek to take their souls back with them to the homeland, Israel.5 Where no bones/ashes are available, the commemoration will take place at the site of their extermination (gas chamber ruins at Auschwitz, camp at Treblinka). Most preferable is a place that contains both bodily remains and the place of slaughter. The Righteous Gentile ceremony (see below) is the exception that proves the rule. The ceremonies will always be performed at the end of visits to the various death sites, except for the “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony. The Warsaw Ghetto Ceremony will almost always take place on the last day of the trip, if possible, at the last moment before boarding the planes for the return to Israel (cf. Feldman 1997: 126–128). The order of the ceremonies describes a progression from victimhood to survival, heroism, and aliya.6 In the voyages, I found four types of ceremonies,7 differing in the size of the group participating, location, and degree of institutionalization: 1. Delegation-wide ceremonies, attended by the 120 to 150 persons, and prepared by one of the schools. The Ministry of Education recommends that at least two delegation-wide ceremonies be held on each trip—one in the camps (in practice, at Auschwitz) and one at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. As a Ministry of Education official explained: “The two ceremonies are of different natures. The camps are contemplation (hityahadut) and memory. Rapaport is ghettos, heroism, and rebellion” (Y. Levi, interview, 31 July 1994).8 On the trip I observed, five such ceremonies took place: four planned by the delegation leaders—Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Warsaw, and one organized by a teacher and witness at Tykocin. 2. Smaller ceremonies performed by bus groups (about thirty persons) or school groups (about fifteen persons) at various sites throughout the trip. On almost all voyages, one such ceremony will take place at block 27 in Auschwitz. Some groups will perform several short, somewhat impromptu ceremonies at various sites in the course of the voyage. 3. Evening ceremonies of homage, held at inside sites such as the hotel dining room or auditorium. These include the ceremonies honoring Righteous Gentiles and the witnesssurvivors. 4. In addition, spontaneous ritual acts may be performed by individuals or small groups: reading a poem, placing a stone

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or note (kvittel) on a tomb, whispering a prayer, lighting a candle, posing a flower, taking a shoe from the pile of victims’ shoes at Majdanek as a souvenir, and so forth.

Representative Examples of Ceremony Types Delegation-wide Ceremonies Above the Death Pits, beneath the Flag of Israel: The Ceremony at Birkenau

The nine-hour visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau ends with a delegationwide ceremony atop the ruins of the crematoria.9 The twenty-five students of the school group assigned to perform the ceremony, dressed in identical blue-and-white delegation sweatshirts, line up facing the others, holding five flags whose staffs are planted in the ground. It is as if they have covered the crematoria with a human flag. The flags are repeated in the blue-and-white Star of David (with the word “zakhor” [“remember”] in the middle) on the text folders held at chest level. A witness stands on either side of the line of students. The flags anchor the students with national presence. The witnesses (to the Shoah and to their own survival and aliyah) frame the students and the flags on either side, like sentinels guarding a sacred flame. One person crouches left-of-center with a guitar. The ceremony formation looks like this:

In spite of their exhaustion, students in the audience will remain standing and at attention throughout the nearly hour-long ceremony. Many boys, though not all, don kippot.10 The ceremony begins with Ora, who retells her story. Haim takes the flagstaff from one of the students and sticks it into the ruins of the crematoria. The first text is the Vision of the Dry Bones from the Book of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:1–14). This introduces the framework of death to resurrection that will dominate the ceremony. This is followed by a series of texts describing the gas chambers and the horrors of the camps:

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The gas chambers. The heavy metal door creaks in refusal. Refusing to reveal the past. Here people suffocated. Were suffocated. Slowly, slowly the meaning of the word “suffocated” enters your conscience. It’s not a word. It is a labyrinth. They squirm, gasp, struggle to breathe. A dying mother hugs her dead child, choked and blue… It happened, whispers to you with poison the Nazi whip. It happened, whisper the thousands of pairs of shoes. It happened, squeaks the human jaw, whose golden teeth were extracted. It happened, agree the ovens with a mouth full of ashes. It happened, it happened, it happened… The children, stricken by hunger, they wandered helplessly. The parents were taken and the brothers were no more. Like lanterns, straining their eyes, they wandered aimlessly, in fields and forests to find a safe shore. The abandoned children of God called in vain, mummy, daddy, brothers, where are you?

Several other readings follow, describing the monstrosity of the Nazi oppressors, the helplessness of the victims, and the gruesomeness of their deaths. None provides any historico-social context. The lack of concrete places, dates, names, makes it easier for the students to relate the events and the emotions to their own life-stories and feelings. Those readings are followed by the song, “Dust and Ashes,” by Yehuda Poliker, sung by several participants and accompanied by guitar: “And if you’re going, where are you going? Eternity is but ashes and dust. Where are you going? Where are you going? Years gone by and nothing is forgotten.” The poem, “I Was There,” is recited, each verse spoken in turn by one of the seven participating students: I was there. And I did not rebel and I did not fight and I did not scream and I did not escape and I did not protest.. I was there and I did not rebel and I did not fight. Why? Don’t ask why. Whoever was not there, let him not ask.

All respond in unison: “I was there.” The next poem reads: In Poland I met God, he too came to the graves of the fathers. On the way I asked him where were you then? He looked at me confused and his eyes shed tears. Maybe he regretted what he had done, or what he had not done. At Auschwitz and Birkenau he didn’t arrive. Even God has a limited capacity for suffering.

These texts are followed by Haim Gouri’s poem, “From that Fire”: From that fire, which seared your tortured burnt bodies, we took the flame—a torch illuminating our souls, and with it we lit the bonfire of freedom with which we went to the battles for our land.

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The next, Shlonsky’s “Vow,” is repeated at almost every Shoah commemoration: By the knowledge of my eyes who witnessed the deaths, and heaped cries upon my weeping heart, By the knowledge of my mercy which taught me to forgive, until days arrived that were too terrible to forgive, I took a vow: to remember all, to remember—and not forget a thing.

The students’ task is both expressed and effected through the vow that they “remember and never forget.” The ceremony continues as Haim, one of the witnesses, reads a poem he wrote (see Figure 5.1).11 Raising his eyes to heaven, he accuses God of abandoning his suffering people in the Shoah. He concludes by saying: “At the end of the ceremony and our visit, I would like to say a few words. You who are here in this place, know that you are the correct answer to Nazism and anti-Semitism. On the one side are the ovens, in which hundreds of thousands were burnt. And now children, girls and boys, bring many new sons to the nation, so that we live forever.” The ceremony ends with Haim’s recitation of the mourning prayers of the Kaddish and El Mole Rachamim, another Poliker song, and the singing of Hatikvah with flags held aloft. 5.1. Haim reading out a poem he wrote accusing God of abandoning His people

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This testimony of the witness repeats the same themes expressed in the framing of symbols on stage and in the sequence of texts. The survivors frame the students on either side, while the flags, waving above participants, survivor-witnesses, and ruins (and worn in the form of sweatshirts), provide a canopy covering all. The sequence of songs/prayers repeats again. The questioning of God and the reaffirmation of His name is also repeated here. After Haim’s poem, “How Long, God?” he then recites the Kaddish, extolling His name. While God’s presence is both denied and affirmed, it is the State of Israel that closes the ceremony that began with the Vision of the Dry Bones. The State has taken God’s place (in Ezekiel) in ensuring the resurrection of the Jewish people after catastrophe. Afterwards, Haim is given water to drink. He seems tired, but smiling and relaxed. He later addresses a group of students: “I remember the planes that bombed the Munich area, in groups of seven, like the pelicans we saw here during the ceremony at Birkenau—do you remember?” He thus implores the students to join their memory of what they have seen (at the ceremony) to his (as prisoner)—“Do you remember?” Some individuals cry and are hugged by others in the group. Some linger to light memorial candles in crematoria ruins, say silent prayers, or perform other private rituals alongside the larger group one. A girl related: “The ceremony was very moving. Everyone felt it. The witnesses: it drove me crazy. Every time he said something, ‘They hit me,’ then, ‘Not important, no time.’ Every time he said, ‘Not important,’ I wanted to cry. He looked at us and planted the flag in the blown-up ruins of the crematoria; I felt, I wonder what he thought, and then I thought who are you to understand what he thinks? What moved me was when he asked, ‘Why?’ Today he said, ‘Why? I don’t know.’ That moved me very much” (discussion, 17 September 1995). Another wrote: We stood on the ruins of the crematoria and performed a ceremony against the background of the nauseating train rails. In the sky, it was as if the souls hovered and at the moment that the ceremony ended and Dorit Reuveni sang, “Where Are You Traveling?” I broke out in hysterical crying. I embraced U., who was screaming, “I want to go home,” and I in my heart cried out, “Enough death, enough! I don’t want to see any more tombstones or stones and don’t want to hear any more about the dead—I want life!” These were frustrating moments, imprisoned, persecuted, and I hated Auschwitz and maybe I didn’t hate it—because I couldn’t feel anything any more—I simply didn’t see it. As much as I looked, I couldn’t see (d2, 7b–8a).

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Although many of the texts and songs are well-known, even banal, this ceremony is charged with transformatory potential by: (1) the sequential situation of the ceremony, (2) the authority of the place, and (3) the active participation of the survivor-witness: 1. Students have been previously tuned to identify with the dead through the preceding “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony (see below, pp 204-8). This tuning is amplified through the repeated litany of death words in the ceremony, as well as the reminders of the obligation to remember: “Auschwitz,” “gas chambers,” “suffocate,” “children,” “crying and hungry,” “murdered,” “buried alive,” “remember and never forget.” This repetition, like the singing, creates harmonic resonances which bypass cognitive mechanisms in creating emotion (cf. S. Langer 1948: 189). The participants’ active doing of this memory work creates an atmosphere which is more memorable and important that the specific content of the words (Connerton 1989: 52; Handelman 1998: xiii).12 2. The ceremony takes place in Auschwitz, which is seen as a Jewish graveyard. Not just a dead landscape, but a living deathscape, the place of the conjunction of incinerated bodies/witnesses/living bodies. In a certain sense “the voice of the blood of your brother” (Genesis 4:10—the inscription on the wall of block 27) cries out, speak out, commands there. As the witness reminds them, the spirits of the dead are present there. 3. The witnesses perform a shamanic, priestly function—they invoke those spirits, they cross the border between the living and the dead. Their authority comes from what they experienced, who they were, not just from what they saw. The victims are dead, but through the witness who, earlier in the barracks, authenticates the site and speaks in their name, their voices travel from the dead to the living. From the living to the dead as well. As Auerhahn and Laub write, “The testimony that speaks about the dead also speaks to the dead, as a vehicle of reunion. Ultimately the survivor … asserts to the dead, ‘I still keep you here with me. You are not alone; I am not alone’” (Auerhahn and Laub in Felman and Laub 1992: 14).

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There’s a naturalness about the voice of the victim-survivor. The participants stand as a group at attention, prepared to be commanded. The victim gives voice to the dead, and commands: “Therefore, you should listen.” At the ceremony, they recite together, “We were there…” Their common ritual practice at the death site places witness and student in the same imagined community—“those who were there.” Now, throughout the course of their visit and participation in the ceremony, the witnesses display a change in which the students are assigned an active role. Danieli, a psychologist specializing in PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) asks (1992: 311): “How can such complex and emotionally difficult memories be commemorated through the medium of civic ceremony, characterized by redundancy, oversimplification, symbolic reduction, and constriction of feeling that distances the participants from the core experience?” She answers that individual therapy is insufficient without so-called social reparation: “The (victims) need to know that their society as a whole acknowledges what happened to them.… Social reparation is thus … simultaneously a sociopolitical and a psychological process” (ibid.: 311). The survivors need to know that their community exists; in the voyage and the ceremonies, they see that community taking shape before their eyes. The frame of the ceremony casts the students in the role of grandchildren. The delegation group can serve as a metaphor for the “family of Israel.” “That metaphor,” Lucia Rudenberg (1994: 211) reminds us, “has powerful associations: of common ancestry, of a close relationship between kinship and membership, of the warmth and support of kin relations, of the oneness and protectiveness of family spirit, of the relatively small number of kin roles that the family structure offers, and of a hierarchical internal structure that is intergenerational and therefore that projects itself into the future.” It is that future that reminds the witness that he is not alone. No one has scripted what the witness will say. But, placed by the program in Birkenau, before a uniformed, attentive group of 150 young Israelis, strong in body and soul, what can he say? Looking down at the crematoria ruins, the survivor is reminded of his dead. But when he looks out at the “living flags” in front of him, the blue-and-white clad Israeli youth, his eyes are directed upwards to the raised Israeli flags and to the auspicious pelicans flying overhead. At that moment, can he do other than see the Israeli youth as a response to his suffering, as a guarantor of the future of a Jewish people, and as a carrier of his memory? The students thus

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empower the survivor to become an effective witness, who testifies on behalf of his dead to a new generation. He even addresses the students as fellow witnesses, asking if they remember the soaring pelicans that flew overhead, like the Allied bombers over Munich. The students have become witnesses to and agents of the transformation of the survivor from victim to victorious witness. Auschwitz is thus recreated as a live death world—a death world that calls for continuity and renewal, not just destruction. And that call is issued to the students from the most authoritative voice available: that of the witness, the voice of the dead. But this witnessing is not a passive act of observation. If the witness is a kind of priest, a mediator to the world of the Shoah dead, he now confers upon the students with a special status and role—to become “witnesses of the witness.” Through their empathetic presence at the site of their suffering, they have become the creators of their grandparents—the witnesses. The witness gives the students a genealogy of victory that protrudes forward, out of catastrophe. The survivor looks to the heavens, accusing God of having provided no answer to the voice of the dead. He then turns to the flag sweatshirt–clad students and tells them that as embodiments of the nation’s force, they provide the answer—the guarantee of the Jewish people’s continued existence: “Bring many sons to the nation, so that the people of Israel live forever.” By presenting the listeners to the witness to be addressed in a ritual context in which their visible presence as multiple, abundant “living flags” is juxtaposed against the crematoria, the voyage presents the students as the “fertile center” of the nation (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 216–220). This makes it likely that the survivor will confer witnessing authority, entrust the “family” legacy, and assign the responsibility for the future to the students, and express that endowment in terms of the nation. One student wrote: What is amazing here, is that in spite of their “defeat” in the Shoah (“as sheep to the slaughter,” etc.), they actually came out the great winners in the end of the battle, since they succeeded in giving birth to a continuing generation. They had children, opposed to the aims of the Nazis: to destroy them, so that they have no progeny… And they won with a bonus: six million “went.” A double and quadruple number of young Jews returned (to Poland), healthy and strong they came to Poland as living proof of the victory of the latter. So is that a victory or is that a victory? What to do, the people of Israel will continue to exist forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s simply an eternal people.

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And what’s amazing is, that the more they try to exterminate it, the more strength it gathers on its return. It’s almost superhuman, isn’t it? (d3, 10a–10b).

This transformative movement is also expressed through the sequence of texts, which progresses from the description of suffering and helplessness to empowerment through the State of Israel, to the obligation of memory and survival as a people. As the ceremony progresses, we see a shift in pronouns from “they squirm,” to “where are you going,” to “I was there,” to “we lit the bonfire,” and culminating in the Hatikvah, sung by the entire crowd in unison: “to be a free people in our land.” Paul Connerton writes (1989: 58–59), “Liturgical language makes special use of ‘us’ and ‘those’; the plural form in ‘we’ and ‘us’, indicates that there are a number of speakers, but that they are acting collectively, as if they were only one speaker, a kind of corporate personality. Prior to the pronominal utterance there exists an undifferentiated preparedness, expressed by the presence of all the participants in the place where the liturgy is to be celebrated.… In pronouncing the ‘we’ the participants meet not only in an externally definable space but in a kind of ideal space determined by their speech acts.” In the physical space atop the crematoria, the uttered “we” includes witness and student in the same imagined community—“those who were there.” Furthermore, as Connerton reminds us, in commemorative rituals, “Curses, blessings and oaths … presuppose certain attitudes … which come into effect at the moment when, by virtue of the annunciation of the sentence, the corresponding act takes place … they effectively bring those attitudes into existence through the enunciation” (ibid.: 58). As one teacher addressed them that evening: “You have been witnesses to a process, you were in a certain place. You are ambassadors. There was a certain text [Shlonsky’s ‘Vow,’ above p. 196] where there was a vow, and I took the vow and I hope that all of you took this same vow, not to remain silent but to tell and tell and tell…. And that is our job, your job too, mine, all who are here” (Z., evening discussion, 17 September 1995). The transformation that occurs in the ceremony is also expressed in the positions of the flags. At the beginning of the ceremony, the students gather atop the crematoria wearing blue-and-white sweatshirts, holding folders printed with a blue-and-white flag. Both are examples of what Marvin and Ingle (1999: 216) refer to as “parsed vernacular flags”—“every flag that refashions the shape, color or design of the standard flag in a way that refers unmistakably to it.”

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Whereas these popular flags stand for the fertile center, conferring abundance and multiplicity, the raised flag, they claim, signifies willing bodily sacrifice for the nation (ibid.: 220). When they arrive at the crematoria, they (students and witness alike) plant the flagstaffs in the ground of the crematoria ruins. Symbolically, they proclaim that the Israeli present is rooted in the ashes of the Shoah. At the end of the ceremony, when Hatikvah is sung, the flags are held high aloft, like a torch of memory, an arrow towards the future, the embodiment of Hatikvah, the hope. The importance of this ceremony and its consecration of the flag is underlined by voyage initiator, Oded Cohen, who chose it as the theme for the introduction to the student guidebooks: As we stand by the crematoria … our heart sorrows and our eyes shed tears for the terrible destruction of European Jewry, and Polish Jewry among them.… But opposite the flag of Israel raised on high and over the death pits and ovens of destruction, we stand erect and our lips whisper—the people of Israel lives!… And we swear to the millions of our murdered brethren—if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its strength! In the ears of our spirit we hear their souls calling to us—through our death we have commanded you to live! Guard and protect the State of Israel like the apple of your eye! And we answer wholeheartedly—long live the State of Israel forever!” (Israel Ministry of Education 1989: 3).

As the bus pulls out of Auschwitz, the guide reads the speech made by former chief of staff Ehud Barak on an official visit to Auschwitz, heading a delegation of uniformed Israeli soldiers: “We, the soldiers of the IDF, have arrived at Auschwitz; fifty years too late.” As guardians of the flame of memory, their future military service is presented as a moral duty which can provide a posthumous victory over Hitler. Ceremonies similar in content and sequencing were also performed at Majdanek, Treblinka, and Tykocin. Their transformative power depended on factors such as the dramatic skill of the performers, and even the weather and acoustic conditions. The timing and location of the ceremonies—at the end of the visit, by the ashes/remains of the dead—was the same in each case. The theme of transformation of student victim survivor witness is repeated over and over in modular units and in multiple forms in the public ceremonies. The redundancy of the texts, intoned with the same cadences in several ceremonies, repeated in several ceremonies in the course of the week, is of the essence of

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nationalist religion. As Bruce Kapferer writes (1988: 20), “The gathering tide of redundancy in the meaning of nationalist ontology drowns out a hitherto great diversity of meaning, and thus action in a variety of contexts becomes driven, often destructively, in the force of a nationalist logic which has become the only truth.” Warsaw: A Ceremony That Failed

Usually, the trip closes with a ceremony at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. Unlike the other memorial sites, this one is dominated by a figurative sculpture emphasizing heroism rather than death. On most visits, the mass presence of the flag-bearing, flag-wearing Israelis singing the Partisans’ Song (“We Are Here”) is a show of strength to the participants themselves as well as to Polish onlookers. The ceremony celebrates physical (and secondarily, spiritual) resistance, and expresses commitment to sacrifice.13 It is the appropriate gateway and reentry point from the Holocaust to Israel. The Warsaw Ghetto ceremony is placed at the close of the voyage, to complete the transformation effected at the Auschwitz ceremony, by transforming the participants from victorious survivors into olim (immigrants/ascenders) to Israel.14 It also reminds them of the sacrifice expected of them—to fight for the sake of Jewish honor, as future Israeli soldiers. On this occasion, heavy rain forced a move to the inside of the Nozhik synagogue. The bodies of the dead, the place of burial, and the site of their suffering are all absent. Nothing in the synagogue speaks of heroism or points to the ghetto fighters or the life world of Israel. On the contrary, for many secular students, the functioning synagogue is a typically Diasporic locale. The outwardly directed ceremony is now held in an interior space completely filled by the group. There is no “stage” there, where the performers can line up facing the group. No Pole from outside to whom one can proclaim victory or possession. The eye wanders over the building. The synagogue’s poor acoustics minimize the ceremony’s impact. The flags are visually lost amidst the architecture of the synagogue. The locale further diminishes the role assigned physical resistance as part of the overall text of the trip and as marker of the transition between galut and geula (exile and redemption). In a questionnaire filled out by students six weeks after their return, nearly half the students wrote that the Nozhik synagogue ceremony was superfluous or ineffective. In his final words, at the close of the ceremony, the delegation leader recites:

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And sometimes it is I that suffocated in the gas chambers, And a minute later, I am the partisan in the forests… And I am the Mussulman, And I am the IDF paratrooper taking revenge against his enemies.… And I know That the strength of this memory Is what makes me what I am, what gives me the strength And the power and the courage, and the right, The right and the obligation, to remember, to do and to march onwards (Omti, 20 September 1995).

Although the texts and songs of the ceremony speak of revolt, strength, victory, and homeland, the building speaks of Diaspora, religion, and loss. In Ronald Grimes’ terminology (Grimes 1996: 217–235), a misapplication takes place: the rite is performed in inappropriate circumstances. As a result, it does not succeed in creating the feeling of uplift and strength that would cast students’ return trip to Israel as an aliyah and create a ritual link between the battle for Jewish honor in the ghettos and the students’ future battles in the IDF.

Bus-group Ceremonies: “Every Person Has a Name” Although not considered obligatory by the Ministry of Education, the “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony at block 27 at Auschwitz has become a standard part of every voyage. The custom of reading the names of the murdered victims began with the Dutch Jewish Immigrants Association in 1988, and over the past years, has become part of the official Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration. In the 1992 guide course, the course coordinator introduced the ceremony to future guides as something taken for granted: Whoever visited Auschwitz knows that there is the Jewish exhibit, where you hear El Mole Rachamim. A kind of museum. It plays in the soul and causes the voice to tremble. Now there are groups who feel the need to light candles there. So they sit on the floor there, and someone reads the poem (“Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem”—“every person has a name”), and they light the candle and put the memorial candle there. And there too, it’s impossible to get up. It’s emotional, very direct, and as every person has a name and one of the purposes of our trip is to mention these names… With students that I travel with, I ask them to bring names even if they don’t have any names. If they know neighbors or people, or else, I give them names from a book in which there are names of murdered children. A million children were murdered in the Shoah, and… I simply give them so that they can feel, a very emotional thing (T. H., 24 June 1992).

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Sometime during the visit to Auschwitz I, the students enter a darkened room on the ground floor of block 27. On the walls of exposed brick, a Biblical verse is mounted in large metal letters in Hebrew and Polish: “And the Lord spoke to Cain, the voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth.” At the center of the darkened room, set into the floor, is a glass panel. Underneath it are several stone slabs, ashes of Shoah victims, and a metal Star of David. Some flowers are placed in a vase near the floor panel. The only light comes from the illumination of the floor panel and the flickering flames of memorial candles. As the students enter, the guide and the nurse cover the heads of each bare-headed male participant with the hood of his sweatshirt. The students sit on the floor around the glass panel and along the brick walls, as a recorded voice tearfully intones “Lord Full of Mercy,” the prayer for the dead. The guide reads a short poem. The pupils then read lists of names of family or friends of the family killed in the Shoah and light candles in their memory. The lengthy reading of names is followed by Kaddish and the song “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem”: Every person has a name which was given him by God and given him by his father and mother, Every person has a name that was given him by the sea and given him by his death.

The Jewish barracks provides a unique time out of time for reflection. It is one of the few sites in which the Shoah enters an inside space, isolated from outside Poland, a kind of deeper journey into the “Shoah sensorium.”15 The room is dark. The loud, tearful mourning prayer fills the senses. As Susan Langer states (1948: 189; cf. 165–199), “Music affects the emotions directly, without being filtered through narrative and articulates forms which language cannot set forth.” The focus within the room is the pane of light, set into the floor like an open tomb. Students sit around it on the floor, as when sitting shiv’a, in mourning. Physically, they face each other, in close, family-like proximity, huddled around the signs of death. There is no stage, no outsider before whom the students can present themselves as representing the State. The students speak and perform for themselves and their families. The memorial candles, the recorded mourning prayer, and the inscription on the wall reify the presence of personalized, individual death. The names of the dead are read by all. All light candles. The reading of the long lists of family names personalizes the enormity of the loss, the anonymity of the ashes and shoes. The biological

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descendants of survivors or victims enjoy no privileged position in the performance of the ceremony. All become fellow mourners, fellow consolers. The ritual earnestness of the candle lighting becomes evident if we compare it with the candle lighting part of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) commemoration in New York. There, survivor parent-child pairs are called up to light their candles on stage. The candles are blown out immediately after the ceremony. The WAGRO ceremony is “theatrical, frontal, not participatory, and has the characteristic coldness and solemnity of official ceremonies which are usually imposed from above by an established interest group; one attends them rather than visits them, [unlike] places of refuge, sanctuaries of devotion, or sites of pilgrimage” (Rudenberg 1994: 298; cf. Feldman 2000: 365–367). In the ceremony in block 27, there is no stage, no proclaiming, “I am lighting the candle in memory of…” The candles are lit by all after the names are read. Kaddish will be recited in a low voice by many of the students, not by a cantor on a podium. Finally, the students will make efforts to see that their candle wicks catch fire and protect them from drafts. They will be left burning until they burn out, as “real” Yizkor candles.16 The “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony is thus a traditional rite of mourning. The students are reminded that irrespective of their own lineage, as Jewish Israelis they are all “family of the bereaved.” Inevitably, the students cry together. One girl said that evening: “Six million is a big number, but also a very distant one. And when you hear the names, the holes open. And that’s what happened today at the ceremony. When I read the names and see the personal names in parentheses, Moshe, like that, something broke within me and burst. And I was happy that there were people there to support me [voice choking]” (17 September 1995). As a student on an earlier Poland voyage formulated it: “This was … the moment I actually understood the meaning of the concept Shoah” (G., Kiryat Gat trip book, 1993: 40). The “meaning” mentioned is the absence becoming present, the “holes opening,” the sensory concretization and individuation of what was previously just a concept—six million. The sounds of prayer and weeping, the tearfully intoned music, generate “a kind of understanding … directly reflected in the pattern of physical reaction, impulse and instinct” (S. Langer 1948: 79). The sniffling and choking sounds of some participants flood the senses and surround the students, while the darkness isolates them from each other’s critical gaze and enables them to succumb to tears. The ceremony provides a socially legitimate occa-

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sion to cry, while for many, the flowing of tears is a physiological verification that something “real” has happened to them. One student said that evening: “When we did the ‘Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem,’ when you think of the six million it doesn’t say that much, but when it’s a member of the family, an individual… All of a sudden, I trembled like that. That was really good. You need to get into it more, more together, to get into things. If we meet after we come out of a difficult site and talk about it” (19 July 1995). The crying is also cathartic and relieves frustrations and pent-up feelings unrelated to loss of family members. As one student said: “When we were in the barracks and everyone came apart, and it was very difficult, I cried not only for that, but for several other things too. It signified for me a certain ending, a climax, nothing greater can come after that.” Unlike almost all other ceremonies, this ceremony does not end with a ringing chorus of Hatikvah. If it is sung at all by other groups, it is sung softly. The words trail off into silence, the palpable presence of absence. The students shuffle out of the building into the light. They sit in small clusters, on the steps and on the ground, crying, consoling and hugging each other. The small flag placed on the glass panel is lost amidst the dozens of flickering memorial candles. President Herzog’s stone remains abandoned at the entrance, outside in the light. There is no raised flag. The only consolation is provided by the prayers and the feel of other bodies—the presence and hugging of fellow participants. The ceremony is not a proclamation of the sacrifice and victory, but a mourning rite of a family of pilgrims. The group that performs the ritual together, and cries and consoles each other afterwards, sees itself as a community of mourners representing families rather than citizens of the State, celebrants of national independence. But the emotions expressed in the event will be re-evoked and recharged in the delegation-wide ceremony taking place several hours later at Birkenau (see above, pp. 194-203), which encompasses the individual families within the constructed national one. The sequence of obligatory voyage ceremonies inscribes a trajectory consisting of three stages of transformation, even if students are not “locked” into a particular status in in-between stages (as in most rites of passage). As one leader put it, “The coin drops for everyone at a different time.” Nevertheless, this unvarying sequence (“Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem”/Birkenau crematoria ceremony/Warsaw Ghetto Memorial ceremony) does structure the liminal time of the voyage. At block 27 at Auschwitz, the ceremony is designed to transform

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students from onlookers into an extended family of mourners. The ceremony over the crematoria ruins at Birkenau then transforms them from family mourners into victorious survivors, the spiritual offspring of the dead. Finally, the Warsaw Ghetto ceremony transforms the child-survivors into olim and casts their return home as a symbolic ascent to freedom and as a prelude to military service.

Individual Ritual Acts During the course of the voyage, a number of ritual acts are performed by individuals or small groups. Some reflect a desire to establish an individual relationship with a site visited by the entire group. Examples would be the caressing of the stones of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, the touching of the shoes in the Majdanek barracks, and the recital of prayers, lighting of candles, and placing of pebbles at memorial sites.17 Through these activities, individuals appropriate sites through ritual action and leave their own memory trace behind there. Some sites may be of personal significance to individuals, though not to the group as a whole. While secular students may find even a short visit to the tomb of Rabbi Elimelech superfluous, traditional students may wish to say a prayer, sing a song, or write a supplicatory note (kvitl) there. Another example is the performance of a private ritual at a site where an individual student’s family members lived or were killed. Examples described in the previous chapter include one girl’s “adoption” of a stone at Treblinka, and a boy’s lighting of a candle and reciting of Psalms at Mila 18 near the place where his family had lived. In such ceremonies, students will often take pains to keep their candles lit in the wind (see Figure 26) or relight those of previous pilgrim-visitors that have gone out, in accordance with Jewish mourning customs (Sperber 1994: vol. 3, 140–155).18 As one girl related of her visit to Majdanek: “What influenced most, was the monument where they hid the ashes, they’re actually people. And I lit the candle that went out, and I felt I had to light it again and again.” The concentration camps are seen by participants as holy sites, vested with relics and real presence. Students see their candle lighting as an act of mourning and treat the candles with ritual respect. A clustering of ritual activities around the same sight may create a residue or trace which enhances the sanctity of the site for other participants. Thus, so many people light memorial candles or leave flowers in the crematoria openings and gas chamber at Majdanek that the rooms take on the aura of a religious shrine (see Figures 4.20, 4.21, and 4.22 in chapter 4) for subsequent groups visiting those sites.

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5.2. Students protect the flames of their memorial candles from blowing out in the wind

Another individual activity is the taking of relics or souvenirs from the site. The most publicized example, a girl’s stealing of a shoe from Majdanek in order to set up a Shoah corner at home, was mentioned earlier in chapter 4. Such souvenirs and mementos are “concrete reminder(s) or tangible way(s) of capturing or freezing a nonor extra-ordinary experience” (Gordon 1988: 137). The prosaic item, “taken away and brought into a living room setting … becomes transformed into a significant icon. It becomes sacralized in the new context, and is imbued with all the power of the associations made with its original environment” (ibid.: 142). In some cases, found relics serve as proof of the authenticity of the site. As one girl wrote, “It was told that one of the Israeli security personnel who sifted the earth of Treblinka found a tooth [!] of a human, which turned out to be extremely authentic!”(d3, 4a–4b).

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A variant of relic-taking emphasizes the aliyah of the remnant to Israel, especially if it involves the act of replanting. One of the teachers reported: “I took two stones that were brought (to Auschwitz), according to the guides, by the workers of the place who worked in the quarry, and a piece of moss. I wet Z.’s handkerchief, and I hope very much that it will survive until home, because I want to grow a piece of Auschwitz for myself, a real piece of moss, growing on the earth of the crematoria, maybe nourished by the ashes”(d6, 22). This memento or relic is not a piece of Auschwitz, frozen in time; rather, it is to “survive” the arduous journey in a wet handkerchief and to continue to grow in the Land of Israel. The remnant of the Diaspora Jewish past can now take root, “home” in the Land of Israel (though in an enclosed glass terrarium—somewhat like a reliquary). Similarly, Oren Stier relates that on the March of the Living, participants were told to “plant” plaques with names of the dead in the ruins of the crematoria; this planting was linked with the planting of trees by the participants in Israel later in their voyage.19 One of the March participants described the two plantings as a contrast between darkness and light, death and new life (Stier 1995: 60–61). A survivor in Israel asked the guide of the group I observed to bring her back a handful of ashes from Auschwitz, so they could be buried in Israel and serve her as a “grave I can go to say Kaddish.” Although the exhumation of the dead and their reburial in Israel has been practiced in Jewish tradition at least since the third century C.E., in recent years, the practice is intimately linked to the rooting of Diaspora communities in the Land of Israel (see Ben-Ari and Bilu 1987; 1997). The sites of the first Holocaust memorials in Israel, at the Cellar of the Holocaust on Mount Zion and at Ohel Yizkor at Yad Vashem, were consecrated by reinterring ashes of the victims there, brought from the concentration camps.20 Some ritual acts are subversive; they undermine meanings assigned to the site by others and substitute their own understandings in place. For example, the dismantling of wreaths of flowers placed by a Polish group at the memorial site at Majdanek by the witness Haim (chapter 4, p. 170-171), who then tosses them one by one onto the mound of ashes. Through his performance, the witness dismembers the collective Polish commemoration, replacing it with an invividualizing Jewish one. Another subversive ritual act is the short small-group ceremony performed by students of a school from the Beersheba area by the execution pits at Majdanek immediately after the group ceremony. The ceremony is held in memory of two of their classmates, one

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killed in a stampede at a rock concert, the other by a friend in a shooting accident. The students sit in a circle around an Israeli flag spread on the ground, while some softly sing songs written by the students in memory of their dead classmate. Hatikvah is not sung. Their teacher explains: “The two [dead students] should have been here with them, and they wanted to perform a ceremony here. So that they too are part of it.” The assistant delegation leader comments: “They insisted on having the ceremony, even though I said that we don’t mix two kinds of mourning.” The group leader objected to the marking of unsanctified death, at a rock concert or by accident, on the site of sanctified death of the Shoah victims who died because they were Jews. The students answer: “We feel that they should be here with us.” This confirms a teacher’s earlier comment: “They’re not just crying over the dead; they’re crying over everything.” Like Shoah commemorations in Israel, the ceremonies are often an occasion for general mourning or catharsis.21 This is in keeping with the tendency noted by Edna Lomsky-Feder (2003: 366) in her study of Israeli school Memorial Day ceremonies in the 1990s, in which ceremonies were expanded to include other dead, beyond those fallen in battle. This expansion can be tolerated as long as the commemoration explicitly declares itself as memorializing the sanctified dead of the Shoah, and on condition that the additional dead (e.g., terror victims) are legitimized by a national sacrificial narrative. If however, the memorialized dead threaten to dilute the exclusivity of the nation as the object of sacrifice (cf. Levy and Barkai 1998) or ignore the sacrificial context entirely (as here), objections will be raised. Were the ceremony to be repeated several times in the course of the trip, the administration might take steps to suppress it.

“Honoring” Ceremonies for Righteous Gentiles and Witnesses Unlike other ceremonies, commonly referred to as tiksei zikaron (memorial ceremonies), the ceremony for the Righteous Gentiles22 and witness people is called a tekes hokarah (an honoring ceremony). It is the only one held in an inside space, homologous with Israel. This ceremony is entirely a rite of presentation, whose focus is on Israel as sovereign State, reaffirming its legitimacy through its honoring of others. Indeed, were the ceremony to take place in Israel, it would look no different. On this voyage, the honoring of the Righteous Gentile and the homage to the witnesses were combined in a single ceremony.

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Late at night, after the emotionally exhausting visit to Majdanek, the tired students are brought out of their rooms to the dining hall. The ceremony begins with five minutes of recorded music. The survivors, the witness people, are invited to come up to a dais-like table. The Polish Righteous Gentile is ushered in late to take his place. Students are crammed into tightly arranged rows of seats. Polish folk music coming from the other side of the wall disturbs an already restless and fatigued crowd. The witnesses tell a part of their stories referring to righteous gentiles. One witness tells of how one Greek in his hometown turned his back on him, while another risked his life to try to get him out of the ghetto to join the partisans. Another witness reminds the students that she was saved thanks to Poles. The invited Polish Righteous Gentile then tells his story (in Polish) which is translated into Hebrew. A student reads Haim Hefer’s poem on the righteous gentiles. A few words of thanks are offered by several designated students to both the witnesses and the Righteous Gentile. Many students doze off; there is some murmuring and restlessness in the crowd. The Righteous Gentile leaves before the end of the ceremony, receiving prepared packages of candies and coffee and insignias of the State and the schools’ municipalities. The witnesses receive personalized albums with letters written them by students in the course of the trip, as well as a Chanukah candelabrum, inscribed with the words: “With appreciation from the Poland delegation—September 1995.” The meeting with the Righteous Gentile could potentially offer alternative messages: that the world is not divided into Jewish victims and Gentile anti-Semitic persecutors. A meaningful dialogue with the Polish Righteous Gentile might question the dichotomous categories promoted by the ritualized voyage (cf. Feldman 2002). This meeting, however, is scheduled when students’ attention span is minimal. Rather than being heard in situ, where the site could lend authority to his story, framing it as authentic testimony (“Here’s where I hid them”23), the Gentile is engulfed in inside Israeli space. He is placed on stage as an object to be honored (though inferior to the three Israeli survivor-witnesses), rather than as a subject to be heard and understood. Students are reminded that it is the State that has recognized him as a righteous among the nations. Thus, the moral authority of the State of Israel, as the entity that recognizes and rewards good in the world, is reinforced. After the Righteous Gentile’s story is related to the group, one of the survivor-witnesses addresses the participants: “People like

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him…. are exceptional people…. These are people who risked their lives, their families, in order to help. Not like all their neighbors, there were many informers among them, there were some people who were collaborators. Those exceptions to the rule did the things that they did.… I want to thank, in the name of all those who could not be here, all those victims, for we know that if there were more people like them, our people’s suffering would have been much less” (Haim, 17 September 1995; emphases mine). Whereas the witnesses’ survival is depicted as exemplary, the Righteous Gentile’s conduct is seen as exceptional. In the words of Haim Hefer’s poem read in his honor, he is the “tzaddik in Sodom,” the exception that proves the rule. Thus, the voyage categories remain unchallenged: “us” = Israel = victim/survivor; “them” = Pole/ gentile = persecutor or bystander. The ceremony closes with the reading of a student’s poem reiterating the themes of identification with the witness and students as empowered witnesses: The witness people are soldiers without weapons. The witness people are a regiment without uniforms.24 The witness people are a special force, Whose every sentence causes deep shuddering… The witness people are the embers of the Shoah, The witness people are the dignitaries of the voyage… And now we the witnesses who have seen here, We the witnesses who have heard here Sights we shall never forget, Have taken an oath to tell everyone What happened when the world was silent.

At a meeting after the ceremony, the delegation leader was surprised to hear that the guides considered the Righteous Gentile ceremony a failure. “Why was the Righteous Gentile ceremony a flop?” he asked. A guide replied: “It was after Auschwitz. The orchestra [in the next room] made noise. What was said [to the Righteous Gentile] by Naomi and others was not relevant. Not after AuschwitzBirkenau. Not in the hotel.” The delegation leader replied: “They (the Righteous Gentiles) always say the same thing. Nothing you can do.” The delegation leader fails to focus on the inadequacies of the ritual frame; for him the message of the Righteous Gentile is either incommunicable or unimportant: “Nothing you can do.”

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Religious Texts and the Commemorative Ceremonies After Hatikvah, the most common texts in the ceremonies are Kaddish and El Mole Rachamim (“Lord Full of Mercy”). How do these religious mourning texts contribute to and influence the State civil ceremony? The reciting of these prayers (especially by the survivor) lends the ceremony authority as an act of mourning. The mournful tones of those prayers resonate to create an emotional mood of loss. But by encompassing those prayers within a sequence that ends with Hatikvah, the ceremony assigns Jewish religious practice the role of representative of the pre-State past. The national anthem points to the future. This reflects the tendency of adopting traditional Jewish forms for civil religious commemorations (cf. Liebman and DonYehiya 1984; Aronoff 1985; Cohen 1995) and the assertion of the centrality of the Jewish people in the constitution of the polity (Kimmerling 1985). At the same time, the sequence of texts reminds us that, once the State of Israel was founded, the role of religion in exile is now served through identification with the State.25 The use of religious symbols is acceptable to the participants on condition that those texts are not examined too carefully, taken too literally. Since each performance carries the weight of past performances, Kaddish has been rendered natural for secular youth through its previous recitals in military and Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies. It is the atmosphere that counts more than the meaning of the Aramaic words, which most students (and many traditional worshippers) do not understand.26 If those texts are taken literally, however, they may create fissures in the (desired) consensus along religious-secular lines.27 A delegation leader provided one example: In my group there was a girl, who every time when El Mole Rachamim was read, went into hysterics. She would cry and scream, “It was not a God full of mercy, it’s impossible to read El Mole Rachamim at a place where millions of children were killed,” simply eh-eh-eh, she was about to wreck the ceremony for an entire plane group. Here, I couldn’t reach any compromise, nor did I want to. There are cases where students can’t decide for us what to do in the ceremony. So I explained to her that there are certain rules that govern ceremonies. Just as you demand tolerance from others, so I demand tolerance from you. If you don’t like it, step aside” (T. H., 25 June 1992).

In general, ceremonial frames discourage controversy, articulate collective identity rather than individual experience, and stress unity rather than difference. Consensus is maintained because the prayer

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is engulfed in a multisensory ritual context, where its literal meaning is eclipsed by its performative history. As the self-regulating functioning of the system is broken by the student’s protest, the system reacts violently to expel the threat. In one of the voyage ceremonies I observed, an Orthodox teacher complained: “The song ‘Demaot Shel Malakhim’ [sung at the death pits of Tykocin] bothered me. I understand the reciting of Kaddish. Most of the people there were religious. They would want us to say Kaddish in their memory. But this song isn’t Jewish at all. It’s Israeli. It doesn’t go together, even if what’s Israeli is Jewish, too, today” (13 September 1997). While secular youth (and many National Religious) might feel the quiet mood of the song does make it appropriate, the National Religious teacher proposes a different criterion for commemoration. For her, the will of the dead demands that a commemoration be a reenactment28 of what she thinks they would have wanted.29 In mixed National Religious/secular groups, tensions may arise over the large (or insufficient) number of performed religious rites and commemorations. In some delegations, religious groups objected to dances incorporated into the ceremonies or to tight clothes worn by girls during dances. In mixed groups, the religious usually follow a variant itinerary with additional visits to religious sites, where they may perform their own bus-group ceremonies. Where the delegation leader is aware of possible conflicts, he may ask to vet the texts, songs, and dances before their performance.

The Close of the Ceremony: Hatikvah and the Flag As we have seen, all group ceremonies (except the “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” service) end with the raising of flags and the singing of the national anthem, Hatikvah.30 If students are seated previously, they will rise to their feet to sing. Marvin and Ingle, in their study of American flag ritual (1999: 43), conceptualize the flag as an emblem which expresses the body and is invested with the body’s powers and vulnerabilities: “The flag is not an ornament to be waved … it is a living creature.” The flag held high, they theorize, is the sign of willing sacrifice (ibid.: 75). “When flags are waving,” they write, “borders are in transition.… Flag waving makes community boundaries permeable, the necessary condition for turning insiders into sacrificial outsiders and reassimilating those who have touched death” (ibid.: 218). Thus, we frequently

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find flag waving at the opening and close of battles and military ceremonies, as we do at death camp visits in Poland. A student described her entrance to Treblinka: “I’m walking in the same road to death, where people were led like animals, but I’m walking with a delegation sweatshirt and waving the flag as if in the sweaty face of Adolph Hitler” (d5, 5). At the entrance to Auschwitz, all stop to take pictures of themselves with the flag at the Arbeit Macht Frei entrance gate. At Majdanek, too, students hold the Israeli flags high during the ten-minute walk from the monument to the first buildings and throughout their visit to the gas chambers. At the close of each death camp ceremony, flags are flown high as a symbol of pride (rather than lowered as a symbol of mourning). Flag raising serves to reintegrate the participants into the community and return them to a more “secular” time, after having “touched death” (Zeiler in Bressler 1990). Amidst the moral chaos of the death camps, the raised flags become an affirmation of hope, a vertical thrust (see Figure 5.3), a closure, a so-called happy end to the Shoah. 5.3. A student holds an Israeli flag aloft during the ceremonies

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After the ceremony at Majdanek, a teacher turned to one of the students: “How high you held the flag!” He answered: “It seemed so black in there. How good it is to be outside.” Although the students may appropriate the flag as a life buoy or as a reminder of open space and freedom, they do so within the larger systemic construction of the voyage. The voyage allows for private beliefs and interpretations, as long as participants demonstrate public assent to group symbols through common performance (cf. Marvin and Ingle 1999: 27). One girl commented at an evening discussion: “In the beginning, when they argued as to who would hold the flag, it seemed childish. But when I walked with it, it seemed so big. The flag is pride. All the delegations should be there at the same time so they can see. It’s funny that it’s a real act of bravery to walk with the flag” (19 September 1995). At the places of death, students reclaim the territory of sacrificial death and the legacy of the victims for the nation by planting the flagstaffs in the soil/ash/ruins. In such places, pledges and acts of solidarity with the flag are more heartfelt because the hostile Other, the villain, is so clearly identified. If, as Kertzer aptly puts it (1988: 184), “It’s hard to argue with a flag unless you have another flag to hoist,” we might add that the real or imagined presence of other flags, other claims (e.g., that of the Poles), rallies the group around their flag. The boundaries are further demarcated by the “parsed flag” (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 216) sweatshirts worn by the participants, sometimes supplemented by large flags draped around participants’ shoulders (see cover photo). Because the boundaries are so clear, the performance of these flag rituals cannot be understood by participants as a partisan political act. Reflecting back on the trip a week later, one girl said: “In Israel, when we raise the flag, I have the feeling that it’s a symbol of the Right. More nationalistic than national. But in Poland… I feel that in Poland, it was really in place, and really unites us. Here we’re really all Jewish and all alike and it’s not important what the opinions are. And the problems which we argue about in Israel seem quite marginal, because the war that was most essential we won, because we’re still alive and a free people” (1 November 1995). The density of symbols in the ceremonies and their spatiotemporal framing paint a picture of the world that places the flag beyond debate. The raised flag of sacrifice, the planted flag of territorial claims, and the body-wrapping flag of multiplicity and fertility (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 53–56) are conjoined, each charging the

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other with passion. Upon seeing them all together, the witness says, “Bring many sons to the nation, so that we live forever.” Almost every voyage ceremony, including all the delegationwide ones, concludes with the singing of the Hatikvah. Among the participants of the guide course, discussion of the issue lasted half a minute: Z.: “About Hatikvah, since it was brought up. Spontaneous or not spontaneous, Hatikvah is approved. At every ceremony. And it would seem necessary. Necessary.” Others: “Yes, right” (guide course discussion, 24 June 1992).

Like the flag, the national anthem, which is often devoid of emotional association at home, becomes invested with feeling. It is seen by many as the source of pride, provoker of tears, and symbol of revenge (see above, chapter 4, p. 114): After the Birkenau closing ceremony, one teacher commented: I saw one of the guys there with an Israeli flag raised as high as he could hold it, passing it from one hand to the other, and not giving up, and holding it as high as he could. And at the Hatikvah, another few raising the flag as high as they could. And I first heard Hatikvah at a volume that comes out of the soul. In school we perform many ceremonies. I hear murmurings during Hatikvah, students moving around, and here I feel at Hatikvah how it uplifts everyone and connects us from a collection of individuals to a single conglomerate, to one nation. And here I felt this power. And we have power. And this force should accompany us everywhere.

Ariel Hirschfeld suggests (1997: 1) that Hatikvah possesses a dual nature: Even in the most vapid official assemblies…. Hatikvah maintains its ambiguity and uncertainty: the very existence of the song expresses officialness (mamlakhtiyut) and identification with the State institution, while the content inherent in its melody expresses suffering and wandering…. On a conscious, intellectual level, expressed through its text, [Hatikvah] expresses an enthusiastic response to the urgent challenges of the Zionist movement and its images, while on an emotional level, linked to the music, it refused them and maintained a link to the “exilic” place of the songs … the text expresses a movement “kadima”— forward and to the East … whereas the music expresses a nostalgic, regressive backward movement. In this respect, it is unique among national anthems.”

I would suggest that the “exilic” content of the song makes it an excellent liturgical means of effecting the transition from deep suf-

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fering in exile to freedom in the Land of Israel, from interiorization (“deep in the heart,” “Jewish soul”) to exterior collective expression (“to be a free people in her land”), and from childhood dreaming (“eye to Zion”) through ordeal to adulthood and realization. Hatikvah is ideal as closure for the ceremonies and as leitmotif for the entire voyage; its true hero is the young Israeli who returns home— not primarily as tzabar (native), but as oleh (immigrant/ascender). Hatikvah is repeated each time with the upturned eyes of hope, the raised arms of victory, and the warmth and security of tightly massed bodies. Wearing their blue-and-white uniforms, rising to their feet, raising the flag, and singing the anthem, the discrete bodies are shaped into a community that embodies the nation. As the response to death, the anthem and flag are charged with a thick web of associations and sensations that can later be recalled when the Hatikvah is played and the flag displayed back home.

Ceremonies as “Triggers”: Group Crying and Consolation Although breaking down in tears is both expected and encouraged, there are more and less legitimate times for crying. A boy who breaks out in tears in the middle of the visit to the Wieliczka salt mines or during shopping in Cracow would be considered weird. If a girl goes off to cry alone in her room, teachers will worry and the doctor may be alerted. Voyage teachers and organizers will not allow a crying student to remain on his or her own, even for a moderate length of time. Crying should be done together, or at least, within view of the group. Probably the most legitimate time for crying together is at the ceremonies. One of the explicit aims of the ceremonies, which are usually scheduled immediately after emotionally intense visits to the death sites, is to trigger and release stored-up emotion, often through crying (S. S., Poland guide course, 25 June 1992). The physical density of the crowd at the ceremonies and their isolation from their surroundings are conducive to group crying. Helmut Plessner (1970: 147) suggests that “the blurring of boundaries between individuals make the latter susceptible to ‘group emotions’ and collective reactions…. Human beings remain always exposed to such danger of contagion, with the corresponding suppression of inhibition in all phases of their expressional life—in crying as much as in laughing.” He adds, “More forcefully than any other expressive pattern, the laughing and crying of our fellow man grip us and make us partners of his agitation without our knowing why” (ibid.: 56).

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The overpowering of the body and the self, which results in crying, gives the participants the sense of “objectivity” of the site and of the “reality” of the Shoah. As Plessner writes: “Not all feelings can make us cry … but only those in which we become aware of a superior force against which we can do nothing. This awareness of our own impotence takes the form of feeling; it must take hold of us and grip us in order to trigger the act of inner surrender which causes us to weep … the superior force lies, neither in the intensity, nor in the centrality, nor yet in the degree of excitation of the feeling, but in the ‘objective reality’ to which it immediately binds us” (ibid. :132). On the voyage, crying is not a personal idiosyncrasy, but a group phenomenon. The transformations built in to the voyage demands that the voyagers display evidence of their occurrence. If a students cries, if his or her mind has been bypassed, if the student’s control mechanisms have been overwhelmed, then the student, too, “was there.” Many educators encourage crying. A psychologist who accompanied the students’ preparation process said: “It is no shame to cry… On the contrary, the more one breaks down (nishbarim) and cries, the more one is strengthened” (Zeiler in Bressler 1990: 23). For many guides, tears serve as an indication of the authenticity of the experience, which, in turn, provides the guide with greater motivation and energy. It reassures the guide that his or her work has not been in vain, that the coin dropped and the trip “got to them.” Some guides resort to outright emotional manipulation, playing specific music tapes at specific gruesome sites, or telling particularly horrific stories with the express purpose of causing shvira (breaking down into tears). But even among those guides who downplay the importance of public crying, the messages they transmit are often ambivalent. Thus, at one discussion, Naomi said: “The mission to Poland is not a mission of crying. I don’t think a person’s emotions should be measured by whether or not he cries… But the coin drops for everyone at a different time… Maybe you’ll arrive at Auschwitz and not feel a thing. And some stood by the gas chambers at Majdanek and didn’t feel a thing, if that was their first camp. There’ll be some that’ll cry in a month from now, and some that won’t cry at all, and that’s okay. Everyone must give himself the legitimation to react in his own way” (N., 19 September 1995). Yet later, she concluded the visit to Majdanek with the following poem:

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I wanted to scream— But I knew they would not hear me. I tried to hide my tears— but in vain… And a tear breaks out, And suddenly it’s hard for me to breathe, Because I was there too— In the same place. And I touched, and smelled, And I just wanted to say— But I choked, And nothing came out… I remember shoes, clothes, braids, dust, That’s all that’s left (Orly Atzmon, 28 March 1992).

The structure of the voyage is sufficiently flexible to enable the calibration of the tendencies of the individual with the goal of transformation. Thus, the shevira may happen to different people at different times within the sealed environmental bubble of the journey. Yet there is the expectation that the absorption and comprehension of the journey be manifested through the body, especially through crying. Because their expectation of crying is often so great, students who do not cry often worry that there is something wrong with them, that they have not empathized or internalized sufficiently, or else that there is something wrong with “their” trip. At an evening discussion, one boy said: “In Auschwitz, people broke down and cried and everything, and I watch and see them crying and I wondered… How come they’re crying and I’m not? All the time, I have the expectation that I’m going to cry, but if not, not, and I should accept it and not force myself to cry. But it was very frustrating” (Z., 19 September 1995). At that point, the student was comforted by his classmates, who encouraged him to be patient and not push himself to cry if he did not feel like it. Ten days after the voyage, that same student complained: “All the time, they said, it’ll come to you. It’ll come to you at Auschwitz, it’ll come to you at Majdanek, it’ll come to you when you discover that you’re all out of dollars, it’ll come to you [laughter] when you come home and look at the pictures. Enough. It’ll come, won’t come, enough! If it doesn’t come, I don’t care. Enough. It doesn’t matter” (Z., 1 October 1995). By that time, some of the students were clearly bothered by his response. To them, Z.’s expressed lack of tears questioned the authenticity of their own experience. Either their own tears were

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inauthentic, they felt, or Z. must be deceiving himself. In his response to a questionnaire several weeks later, Z. wrote: “After the voyage, I said the issue (that the voyage doesn’t make me cry) doesn’t bother me anymore. That’s only part of the truth. I still ask why I am different from the others” (Z., November 1995). On the other hand, resistance to crying, particularly among boys (cf. chapter 3, p. 74), may be viewed as a sign of strength. As the voyage progresses, greater legitimacy is granted to crying in public. This is reflected in the group discussions: before the voyage and during its first days, students will usually employ the word “nishbarti” (“I broke [down]”). For some, this total loss of control and inner surrender has a negative connotation. As the voyage advances, students will usually shift to the more neutral word “bakhiti” (“I cried”), which admits of emotional effect without total loss of control. Thus, one male participant wrote in the Auschwitz block 27 visitors’ book: “They tried to break me (lishbor), they managed to wring out a tear. We are erect and proud” (visitors’ book, block 27, 17 September 1995). The emphasis on crying has educational consequences. As one American Jewish Holocaust educator, Karen Shawn, put it: “For twenty years I measured my success by the numbers of children who cried. But I just kept the kids quiet. The problem with catharsis is that it finishes the process. ‘I cried, I paid my dues, now I understand’” (Yad Vashem seminar, 14 July 1997). Although, as I argue above, crying has functions other than catharsis, the excessive focus on crying may bring a sense of closure and accomplishment, at the expense of further exploration and questioning. As Shawn summarized her understanding of Holocaust education, “It is not my duty to comfort the afflicted, but to afflict the comfortable” (ibid.). Furthermore, crying is not simply a response to the Holocaust sites. As one student said: “When we were in the barracks and everyone fell apart, and it was very difficult, I cried not only for that, but for several other things too. It signified for me a certain ending, a climax, nothing greater can come after that.” When students cry together in public, they also hug and console each other, thus increasing the family feeling of the group. A teacher wrote of the students at the ceremony: “They were really so much like angels, so beautiful and supportive and so much wanting to give of themselves of all they had; they just looked for whoever needed support and whoever needed a hug or a touch and who needed presence at his side … And this was in my head all the time, and aroused in me the great mother. I feel like a huge womb that has no more room it’s so full of love” (d6, 30).

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The breakdown of limits commonly regulating physical contact among unfamiliar members of the opposite sex, or among people of different status within the group, is an expression of communitas of pilgrims: “A ‘moment in and out of time’ … which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of social ties” (Turner 1969: 96). A teacher affirmed that a member of the group who was not well-accepted had acquired much confidence from the emotional access and physical support that the more popular students in the class accepted from him in the course of the voyage ceremonies. Of course, such physical contact, especially between members of the opposite sex, may be so sought after that it becomes sufficient reasons for crying. Thus, the communitas developed may be furthered by the students in ways that do not always serve the interests of the organizers (cf. Galbraith 2000).

The Ceremonies: Conclusions The voyage traces a sequence of ceremonies that will bring the participants back to their point of departure with a changed status: the students who left for Poland as children will return home to Israel as empowered, responsible members of society—witnesses. In the ceremonies, the common affirmation of the State through display of national symbols on sweatshirts and raised flags, through singing together or through taking vows, counts more than the variety of individual beliefs. The mass participation pulls skeptics in. The emotion evoked in the ceremony turns the pledge of allegiance into a moral drama as well as an instructive one (Kertzer 1988: 41), and makes the subjective world picture promoted by the State into a social reality. The orchestration of the ceremonies bonds the person of the participant to particular landscapes, images, symbols music, and texts, whose effect can later be reactivated through their display in other circumstances (see below, chapter 6). The ritual closure with the national anthem and raised flags emphasizes the drawing of final lessons—“Now I understand.” Usually, right after Hatikvah, the students are quickly herded onto the (Israeli interior) bus to go to the next site. There is little or no time for individual reflection, even if students express the need for it. The message, repeated to students in each of the elements of the trip is clear: “Israel is the answer, and you, the mass of proud Israeli students, embody that answer.”

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The sequence of texts and songs within the ceremonies, as well as the sequence of obligatory ceremonies within the voyage, reify the movement of the students from Israel to the death camps to the resistance sites and back home to Israel, as described in Chapter 3. All reflect stages in the transformation of the student from child to victim to victorious survivor and, finally, empowered adult witness and citizen. The overall structure of the voyage is, however, sufficiently flexible to enable the transformation, the coin dropping, to occur to different participants at different times. All students are, however, expected to come back from the death world changed, and are expected to bear witness, to testify to that change. The taken-for-granted life world of the native-born tzabar has now become imbued with value: it is the object of yearning and choice of the oleh. As one teacher said at the close of the final ceremony: “I traveled two thousand kilometers to find the beautiful land of Israel”.

Notes 1. In her survey, Lev found that returning students ranked the ceremonies as the

2. 3.

4.

5.

fifth most important aspect of the voyage (out of fifteen items), with 61.3 percent considering it as very important (Romi and Lev 2003: 234). If time is short, students will be rushed at sites in order to make time for ceremonies. Sites may sometimes be skipped; scheduled ceremonies, rarely. This is a neo-Durkeimian perspective on ritual, and is developed for rites of the nation by Marvin and Ingle 1999. International Jewish organizations, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, assembled eighteen thousand (one thousand times chai [=18=life]) students at Auschwitz-Birkenau to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps on Holocaust Memorial Day 2005. One religious voyage organizer said: “Why should we have a ceremony at the house of the last Kotzker Rebbe? After all, he is in Auschwitz along with the others” (E. H., interview, 27 May 1996). In the March of the Living ceremony at Birkenau in 1994, organizer and Israeli MK Avraham Hirchson addressed the crowd: “This is also the March of the Dead, who never stopped marching and still march today with us and accompany us like the pillar of fire that led the Jewish camp in the Bible... They march with us today; they will march with us tomorrow and next week; and

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

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they will return with us to Eretz Israel” (translated in Stier 1995: 57). In this text, Poland is the wilderness. In a questionnaire filled out by participants about six weeks after their return, the vast majority cited the “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony at Auschwitz I and the ceremonies by the ashes at Auschwitz or Majdanek as the most significant of their trip. Nearly half the respondents considered the ceremony in Warsaw as superfluous or ineffective, for reasons I will discuss below. Other important voyage ceremonies are the official state-sponsored mass commemorations performed by the State of Israel in coordination with Diaspora Jewish organizations (Feldman 2000: 340–345; Feldman 1997: 129–132; Stier 1995) and special occasions, such as the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (in coordination with the Polish government). I will return to this theme in the course of my analysis. Although the Polish government set up a monument with a large open ground in front of it for ceremonies, Israeli groups will never perform ceremonies there. Jochen Spielmann writes of the monument (1990: 20): “The degree of abstraction is … so great, that the reference remains hidden from most observers. The artistic forms produce no connection to the atrocities of the concentration camps” (cf. Spielmann 1994: 169–174). Some delegation leaders or teachers insist that all male students wear head coverings at Auschwitz and at cemeteries, as well as at synagogues. At Auschwitz, the witness Haim donned a kippa, saying explicitly that he regarded the place where so many Jews were murdered as holy ground. I see them, I see them in line for death. They don’t know where they’re being led. Old people, women and children. All pure, all righteous And shining as the heaven’s splendor. There they stand, Oppressed and humiliated And they are crying and hungry Crying and trembling from cold and suffering. They don’t know where they’re being led Where they are going? Not to the showers, not to the showers, for woe unto them. To the ovens, to the ovens they are led.

And in their name this is my cry to you, O God, Why and for how long, are we the Jews, Your chosen children To be a sacrifice and a prey for the Gentiles. How long? How long? (Haim, Birkenau ceremony, 17 September 1995). 12. As Benjamin Meed said about the annual Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) commemorative ceremonies: “No matter if people forget all the speeches—what people remember is the atmosphere that is created” (Rudenberg 1994: 251). 13. One of the most frequently read heroic texts is the alleged last letter of Warsaw Ghetto commander Anielewicz. Based on Antek Zuckerman’s words, Muli

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Brog writes that “Mordechai Anielewicz’s last words, which were considered as a legacy and quoted in almost every book dealing with the Revolt ... were a later addition designed to construct the Warsaw Ghetto as Masada” (Brog 1996: 220. See also Zerubavel 1994b). The casting of the travel to Israel as a symbolic act of aliyah is even more apparent in the Diaspora-oriented March of the Living trips, which are designed to spend Holocaust Memorial Day in Auschwitz and arrive in Israel just in time for Memorial Day for the Fallen Israeli Soldiers and Israel Independence Day. In structuralist language, the sites of the quarantine barracks in Birkenau, the Jewish exhibition in block 27 in Auschwitz I, and the barracks of shoes in Majdanek are bridging categories between the binary oppositions of inside and outside space, Israel and Poland (cf. chapter 3, pp. 77-81). Mary Douglas has demonstrated at length how such boundary-challenging objects are treated in order to uphold the cultural classification of the cosmos. In this case, the ambiguity of the space (Shoah, but inside the group bubble) can be employed in ritual to enrich meaning or call attention to other levels of existence (Douglas 1984 [1966]: 38–40). On the custom of keeping memorial flames burning and folk beliefs connected to it, see Sperber 1994: Vol. 3: 140–141. For memorial candles in Judaism in general, see ibid.: 140–155. Traditionally, memorial candles are lit and stones are placed only by tombs. In Israeli civil custom, however, the practice is extended to symbolic tombs (such as the Dakar Memorial on Mount Herzl) or places of death (such as the place of Rabin’s assassination in Tel Aviv). The textual basis for lighting memorial candles and not blowing them out, according to Sperber, is the scriptural verse, “The light of the Lord is the soul of man” (Proverbs 20:27). Sperber (see note 16, above) provides many instances where the extinguishing of candles was seen as the portent of an early death. For an account of the forest as Israeli national icon, see Y. Zerubavel 1996. Kugelmass (1993) reports that on one trip, a Canadian Jewish congregation gathered ashes from Auschwitz to be reinterred in Israel. The Yad Vashem Bulletin described the ashes of the victims buried there as having been “illegally” brought into Palestine by a Polish partisan. The Handelmans note that “use of the term ‘illegal’ was intended to invoke the ‘illegal immigration’ (Aliya Bet) of Holocaust survivors through the British sea blockade.... Thus ashes of the martyred dead also suffered the depredations that living survivors underwent in order to make their place in the Israeli landscape” (Handelman and ShamgarHandelman 1997: 122). Judith Baumel provides several other examples (1995: 159): “A Holocaust memorial wall was created in Kibbutz Maagan only after a 1954 airplane disaster in which close to twenty participants were killed at a commemorative ceremony held at the kibbutz. In 1950, a Holocaust memorial was erected at Kfar Ha-roeh following a car accident in which several of the moshav’s members were burnt to death.” Righteous Gentiles are non-Jews recognized and honored by Yad Vashem, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust and were not motivated by profit. Handelman writes (2004a: 194), “On occasions of Holocaust memorialism, Righteous Gentiles are often made honorary Jews; or more ambiguously,

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made betwixt and between, leaving the monothetic gentile category, but not entering the monothetic Jewish one.” The division between survivor and Righteous Gentile is always maintained. The term used, “hassid umot ha’olam,” is a Talmudic one, and appears in the context of those non-Jews who, through observing basic moral laws, have earned a place in the World to Come (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Melakhim 8:11). Exceptionally, this took place on one recent voyage, as a student of mine notified me. After showing the site where she hid the Jews during the Shoah, the Righteous Gentile hugged each one of the participants saying, “You are all my grandchildren.” The military terminology used to refer to the heroic survivors will be discussed in chapter 6. By contrast, among National Religious groups, every ceremony will conclude with two songs: “Ani Ma’amin” or “Shomer Yisrael” along with Hatikvah. The “bottom line” proclaims faith in Messianic redemption or God’s Providence, as well as celebrating the nation. For a concise history of the Kaddish, see Elbogen 1993 [1913, 1972]: 80–84. I have found that when El Mole Rachamim was sung outside the framework of a group ceremony, for example, by a small group within the building of the crematorium at Majdanek, some participants voiced their displeasure. It is in that sense that I refer to praying in a synagogue as an act of commemoration (see chapter 4 and appendix). “Reproductive” religious ceremonies are not necessarily devoid of political significance. Thus, one religious participant, describing the group’s dancing and singing around the tomb of Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhansk, said: “They [the Poles] probably heard this bunch of crazy Jews singing throughout the town.” Prayer, too, can become a political act of manifestation of power, as often manifested by Gush Emunim (Feige 2006). It did not occur to the teacher to question the singing of the Hatikvah on the grounds that many of the Jews buried there were not Zionists, nor to question the holding of an Orthodox Shabbat service in a liberal synagogue. On one occasion, in 1993, when a mass ceremony in Warsaw cosponsored by the Polish government ended with a bugle retreat of the Polish honor guard (national anthems were sung at the beginning of the ceremony, which the students missed), the students spontaneously burst out in a chorus of Hatikvah.

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And my heart expires, and my hands are too weak to save, And sometimes it is I that suffocated in the gas chambers, And a minute later, I am the partisan in the forests And again, I am a member of the Sonderkommando burning bodies in the forest And I am the Mussulman, And I am the IDF paratrooper taking revenge against his enemies.... And I know that this is my people. And I know That the strength of this memory Is what makes me what I am, What gives me the strength And the power and the courage, and the right, The right and the obligation, To remember, to do and to march onwards... (Omri, Nozhik Synagogue ceremony, 20 September 1995).

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6

CHAPTER

Homecoming—the Transmission of Holocaust Memory and Jewish-Israeli identity

The voyage does not end in Poland. Students are expected to testify to what they have seen and experienced there, and the voyage is promoted as transforming the lives of participants. In the course of my analysis, I made claims about the aims of the voyage, as they affect attitudes towards the State, Judaism, the Jewish past, and the world. By tracking the initial processing of the voyage in the month following the students’ return, employing open-ended questionnaires and citing the results of recent studies on Poland voyages by social psychologists and educators, I will show how students develop strategies to preserve and transmit their experience, and realize their mission of becoming “witnesses of the witnesses”. By considering the mediumterm effects of the voyage, I will examine the implications of the voyage for Jewish identity, Israeli nationalism, and military service. I conclude with several thoughts on the future of the voyages. The data in the following sections derives from a meeting held by the voyage group approximately ten days after their return, a meeting of guides and staff held about a month later, informal conversations with students and teachers, and open-ended questionnaires distributed to the voyage participants.1 My conclusions are also informed by observations of follow-up meetings of ten other groups.

Notes for this section begin on page 250.

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Becoming a Witness—the Aftermath of the Voyage Recommendations in the DGC notwithstanding, the Ministry of Education has made little effort to prescribe or coordinate follow-up activities. I suspect that the organizers assume, correctly, that in Israeli society, future civil and military ceremonies will provide sufficient stimuli to trigger the emotional experiences and sensory stimuli planted during the voyage.2 In the group I observed, one follow-up meeting was held, and the plans for the delegation-wide meeting were curtailed by Rabin’s assassination six weeks later. Later meetings were also scrapped as a result of Hezbollah rocket attacks on the town. Returning participants often find it difficult to readjust to ongoing daily and school life after their intense experience in a different space, with very different rhythms of time. One girl said: “After a week, I’m still flying, I haven’t landed completely… I didn’t digest that I was in Poland and I didn’t digest that I returned. So I really was afloat.” One teacher reported: “When I returned, every half hour I cried to myself. I didn’t want to land. It was difficult for me to take leave of such an intense experience” (T., 1 October 1995). Some may refuse to develop their pictures or unpack their suitcases following their return. As one student put it, ten days after his return, “The things I trip over in the night in my room in the dark are my suitcases” (Z. S., 1 October 1995). Some students come back physically ill or exhausted. Some exhibit depressive symptoms for several days to several weeks after their return. It might even be described as a transmitted form of survival guilt. One boy recounted: “Maybe it was an aftershock of Majdanek, but I was really depressed. I was sad. I came back to school, and everything seemed so foolish. And every time I saw an empty chair, I thought that there should be a kid of the Holocaust who would have sat there had there been no Shoah, and all kinds of illogical stuff like that” (H. A., 1 October 1995). Another girl wrote: “I had a very rough month since I returned from the voyage. I didn’t feel like doing anything, and everything appeared very stupid to me and unnecessary compared to what happened to the Jews in Poland. I couldn’t do many things—to brush my hair in the mirror, to eat much ... to smell the barbecued meat on Shabbat, and stuff like that... Only after a while did I get used to everything.” The readjustment can be particularly difficult if the student was not accompanied by a significant number of participants from his own school. In such cases, the school is frequently unaware or insen-

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sitive to the student’s often agitated emotional state, and makes no provisions for gradual reintegration. In the group I accompanied, there were two individual students from other schools. One complained: “There was a complete break. The minute I got back to Z., that’s it. No more Poland, no more friends from B., no bad and good hotels. I couldn’t share my feelings with anyone, because no one around me was there” (Discussion, 1 October 1995). In the school I observed, as in most schools, a sizable group traveled together. This creates a core of people within the school, drawn together through the common voyage experience. For some, the emotional impact of the trip first makes itself felt only after their return. Those students will feel a particular need to share these emotions and impressions with fellow travelers. This results in a kind of greenhouse effect, where voyage participants continue to meet, share experiences, and sometimes cry together and hug each other during the weeks (according to several educators, up to two months) following their return. Those students socially marginalized in daily life who experienced a sense of communitas and acceptance by the group in Poland may attempt to extend it into their daily lives, and teachers note the greater class crystallization (gibush) effected, at least in the short term.3 Often, students feel frustrated in their attempts to communicate their experience to others. As Susanne Langer noted: “Language is a very poor medium for expressing our emotional nature. It merely names certain vaguely and crudely conceived states, but fails miserably in an attempt to convey, the ever-moving patterns, the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience, the interplay of feelings with thoughts and impressions, memories and echoes of memories, transient fantasies, or its mere runic traces, all turned into nameless emotional stuff” (S. Langer 1948: 81–82). One student expressed these difficulties in communicating her experience: “I’m trying to explain it, and I see all the faces looking at me that want very much to understand what I felt, but don’t succeed. In reality, only those who were there can really understand. In the end, I gave up and said, ‘Just go, just go, because you can’t express this in words. Just go there.’” The understanding that the student speaks of is inseparable from the experience of being there, from the performance of the pilgrimage. True understanding, as promoted by the voyage and its organizers, is attained not through book learning, but through identification, embodiment, and experience. Adi Ofir suggests (1995: 12) that as part of the transmission of hegemonic messages, voyage organizers impart to students “the

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ability to formulate sentences which express the inability to formulate [emphasis in original] the experience revealed ‘there.’” Although such language may be frequently employed by certain survivor-writers (Ka-Tzetnik, Wiesel), during the course of the voyage, I found few instances of such mystification on the part of organizers and guides. I believe that, insofar as such mystification exists, it is done by students to keep casual inquirers at arm’s length: Z.S.: “We come back home to Israel, and everyone asks how was it, how was it, but… I don’t have the strength for it. So you formulate a line, everyone who asks, you feed him the line, ‘It was great, it was wonderful. Yes, there were tough moments, but all in all it was great.’ [laughter] And then if they press me, I say, ‘I don’t think I want to talk about it.’ And then it’s mysterious, and everyone says, ‘Wow, what an experience he had !’” [laughter] Teacher (f): “They’ll say, ‘He came back traumatized’” (Z. S., 1 October 1995).

This language is not promoted by the system in order to obfuscate an ideological-economic structure underlying it (contra Ofir 1995: 12). It is the gap between the students’ heightened emotional state and mundane existence that students encounter upon their return that leads them to describe the voyage in such terms. As the trip was a considerable investment of time and money (usually of the parents), students may feel pressure of parents and teachers to justify their decision to go. Shahar and Katzen (2001) described the guilt feelings of those students who, upon their return, only spoke of their good times, rather than transformatory emotional experiences and educational lessons. As one girl wrote: “I don’t think that the reason [for going to Poland] matters at all. Everyone came back from there different to some degree, even if they went for some nondescript reason—like enjoying themselves and being abroad, it doesn’t matter, because they came back with such a different approach, so much that they can’t even remember the original reason” (B. K., November 1995). A student of another voyage returning from Poland wrote in a letter to the daily newspaper: “The voyage to Poland ... has results in a person’s every action, in every breath he takes. Those returning from Poland live the shuddering in all their bones. Whoever has not stood on the railroad tracks in Birkenau or under the mountain of ashes at Majdanek will never understand.... Everything takes on a different meaning—family, friends, the State” (Yahav 1999).

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This language of change is encouraged, often explicitly, by the teachers and school administrators. Students have been told during the preparation and throughout the voyage that they will be/have been changed through the voyage from children into witnesses of the witnesses. Students are reminded, both on the voyage and afterwards, that as representatives of Israel in Poland, they bear a special duty and status once they come home. By reenacting the path of their “grandparent” survivors, the youths acquire an imagined common past, an identity as survivor-witness. This makes them part of a collective that is given moral and ontological value, and corresponds to adolescent needs to belong to something bigger than themselves. In the discussion following the voyage, one student mentioned: “At Majdanek, Z. (a teacher) said that we’re all witness people. Last Friday, I developed the pictures and I wanted to show them to another person and another. We’re not witness people but messengers” (1 October 1995). In order for students to understand the voyage as part of their life process rather than as a one-time event, the school and their peers need to acknowledge their newly acquired status. Erik Erikson wrote, “Societies confirm an individual in all kinds of ideological frameworks and assign roles and tasks to him in which he can recognize himself and be recognized by others. Societies thus verify the new individual and are themselves historically verified” (Erikson in Guardo 1975:2 19). One way of providing recognition is through encouraging students to wear their Poland delegation sweatshirts as a kind of school uniform, or through assigning the students official “witnessing” functions, both during classes and as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. Is students’ behavior changed permanently by the voyage? Longterm changes in behavior cannot be inferred from the students’ reactions in the short-term, and the influence of a single pilgrimage is difficult to isolate from a person’s life history.4 But the reactions of students collected over the month following the voyage, supported by other, mostly quantitative studies done by educators and social psychologists (Fisherman and Kaniel 2004; Litvak n.d.; Lazar et al. 2004a; 2004b; Romi and Lev 2003; Shechter 2002; Gross 2000; Lev 1998; Asa and Degani 1991), have given us some indication as to attitudinal or emotional changes spurred by the voyage, at least over the short and medium term.

Transmitting the Voyage Experience I have chosen to divide the participants’ acts of transmission of the Poland experience into “conversations,”—informal acts of transmis-

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sion—and “presentations”—more formalized and institutionalized acts of transmission.

Talking about the Voyage: Conversations with Classmates, Family, and Survivors While some students speak about the voyage compulsively during the first days or weeks after their return, others may not discuss it at all. Often, students will develop two different ways of speaking about the voyage: one containing stock phrases or general statements for casual inquirers (and often for their parents), and another, more expressive mode to be shared with insiders—fellow participants or their very closest friends. With casual inquirers, students will often overemphasize the easy parts or the fun aspects (kef) and mischief making. Sometimes they wish to hide the pain or the emotion from themselves, as well, as one perceptive student remarked: “I felt that if I deal with this any more, I can’t do it. I’ve repressed it. It’s in my memory, but when I remember, I think mostly not about the details, but about the fun parts with the hevre. When I start to think about it, it’s so big, that you get swallowed up in it. I think, that I am one person, and opposite this huge number” (H. A., 1 October 1995). In the case of grandchildren of survivors, I tried to ascertain, through a questionnaire, if the voyage opened new avenues of dialogue and understanding with their elders. Some student descendents of survivors reported that their showing of their photos of the “old country” or of the camps enabled their grandparents to open up and speak to them of their Shoah past—sometimes for the first time—creating a special, more intimate relationship between grandparent and grandchild. In other cases, however, students reported not being able to talk about the events with their parents and survivor grandparents. This unwillingness to speak may result from the continued traumatization of the grandparents or their unwillingness to expose their suffering and humiliation before their loved ones (cf. Bar-On 1994: 21–36). The voyage experience may help some students come to terms with parts of their past, or at least set the process in motion. One girl recounted: “My grandfather’s family were all killed in the Shoah, and he married a second time with my grandmother, and so my mother was born. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been born. On Holocaust Memorial days, I would think about that, and would repress it. Now, in the gas chambers... Only after Poland could I accept myself, that

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I would be prepared not to be here if they could have been saved” (B. K., 1 October 1995). It is through his or her performance and testimony in the intergenerational Israeli voyage, rather than through his or her family lineage or personal relationship with the survivor, that the student is born as a survivor-witness, a carrier of memory. If Auschwitz is a site frozen in time, the witness is the key to the lock that opens that time. It is the witness that enables the students to sense that they are “in Auschwitz,” and not just in its petrified ruins. Throughout the voyage, and at Auschwitz in particular, the witnesses remind them that they, the students, are their family and their future. As one witness said: “I’ve fallen in love with every one of you. I felt like with family. Although I have six grandchildren at home, I feel like you’re all mine” (O., 19 September 1995). The survivor-witness embodies the entire Jewish people before the Shoah, the victim (“right here”) in the camps during the Shoah, and the victorious adult Israeli afterwards. It is the State-sponsored voyage that grants the survivors honor as witnesses.5 In some cases, students may adopt the voyage’s survivor-witness and develop personal relationships with them afterwards. This recognition may help console the survivors, granting them long-sought recognition by Israeli society and strengthening their spirits. As one survivor said at the end of the voyage: “Their reactions encouraged me. How they got emotional and cried. How they took it hard, their amazement and questions. For so long they didn’t want to hear, we had to keep silent, and now they ask and listen” (S., 20 September 1995). Two months after the voyage, another survivor-witness reported: “Here I am tired. And there I had tremendous force—because of the kids. People ask, ‘How was it?’ And I tell them, ‘The kids! the kids!’ And they call me, and they send me pictures. I got strength from them. Later, in the house, I fell, but it was worth it. I’m sure that they’ll pass the message on to others” (Staff discussion, 21 November 1995). The expansion of the voyages to Poland, according to many educators, has created a more hospitable environment towards the survivors and their stories in Israeli society (cf. Yaktar 1998). In many cases, survivors have told students stories that they kept secret from their own families. Through the shared practices of reading victims’ names and reciting the mourner’s Kaddish, the members of the group comes to recognize themselves as bearers of an intergenerational Jewish legacy. Through the survivor-witness’ bringing personal memory and collective history into the same discursive space, history becomes

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imbued with emotion and understandings of self and community are nationalized (see also White 2000: 508 on guides to the Pearl Harbor Monument and Feldman forthcoming).

Presentations: Albums, Videos, Ceremonies, and the Future of “Witnessing” As the number of witness-survivors diminishes and the number of Poland voyage travelers grows, the ruins of Auschwitz—and their photographic representations—increasingly become substituted for Auschwitz itself.6 Students’ photo albums and videos create new images of the Shoah which can further displace the documentary photos. The picture of a crowd of blue-and-white sweatshirts standing under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, festooned with Israeli flags (see chapter 4, Figure 11), imposes itself on the picture of that same gate, with bedraggled prisoners struggling towards slave-labor details. While the replacement of the site by its image is increasingly common in postmodernity (Eco 1986; MacCannell 1992),7 the widespread diffusion of these photographic images may propagate a simplistic understanding of the Shoah (Zelizer 1998) that promotes closure: the strong State, as embodied in the students, as the answer to all questions about the significance of the Shoah.8 This process is further encouraged by suggestions on the part of some educators, that in the future, when survivor-witnesses are no longer around, the participants who were at the camps with the survivors will transmit their testimony at the site (Shahar and Ketzin 2001). I maintain, however, that in spite of the returning students’ claim to be a firsthand source, “without a witness it’s not the same” (Yossi Levi, interview, 31 July 1994). The witness of the witness may accurately transmit the survivor’s story, but he cannot duplicate the survivors’ bodily presence. The secondhand witness, like the guide today, will be seen as a role player, not as a metonym of the dead. He cannot become the symbolic type, who not only authenticates the silent ruins but incarnates them. The main media for transmission of students’ impressions in both casual and more formalized contexts is the students’ photo albums and video films. They provide visual support for their stories, as well as a distancing mechanism that enables students to express emotion without eye-to-eye contact. Some students spend many hours arranging their albums and writing commentary. When the group met together for the first time after the trip, students showed

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each other photos for over an hour; only with difficulty were they persuaded to close their albums and begin discussion. The returning students are a symbolic resource for the school (Lomsky-Feder 2003: 380), as they become a major source of knowledge about the Shoah for classmates who stayed behind (cf. Romi and Lev 2003: 234–235). In some schools, the principal or teachers may ask returning students to go from class to class and speak of their experiences and show their photo albums and video films. As the Sulam principal said: “I’m certain you can transmit these things to the other classes, so that in the next years we again have large groups going to Poland” (S. R., 1 October 1995; cf. Fridman 1997). At their first meeting after the voyage, one of their teachers said: “Today I have the feeling that there is a kind of testament that you have to go there, as many as possible. In my opinion, it should be an obligation for everyone to be there, to experience and see, and I’m already planning the next trip for the next class. In my opinion, whoever wasn’t there, can’t understand what was” (Z. H., 1 October 1995). The returning students generally take charge of organizing the next upcoming Yom Hashoah ceremony.9 Usually, the performers will wear their delegation sweatshirts, marking them as the corps of official transmitters. The ceremony frequently includes journal passages or poems describing their experiences in Auschwitz or Majdanek.10 Survivors, parents, and neighborhood residents often attend. Thus, the socioeconomic capital that enables students (funded by their parents) to travel to Poland increases the symbolic capital of the school as successful facilitator of future Poland voyages and Holocaust commemorative ceremonies and is returned to parents as social capital as well. This dynamic reinforces socioeconomic inequalities both within the school and in the larger society. As most voyage participants of the voyage in Sulam High School were from wealthier town A., mainly members of A. became wearers of the Poland delegation sweatshirt and could share a valued experience that most residents of B. could not afford. In general, the wealthier and more Ashkenazic the school, the more likely that they will organize a voyage to Poland.11 In 2004, one poorer Mizrahi town organized a subsidized voyage to Poland for one day(!) so that the town’s youth could also visit (and be photographed) at Auschwitz. Thus, the Ministry of Education’s desire to create Jewish unity through voyages to Poland actually helps reinforce social inequalities.

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Subsequent Effects of the Voyage on Participants I will briefly survey students’ expressed changes in attitudes towards Judaism, the Diaspora, and the Poles, as well as towards the Arabs, the flag, and military service, in the weeks following the voyage. These expressions, supplemented with the results of other recent studies of the voyages, will serve as summaries of many voyage phenomena and the basis for analyzing the implications of the voyage for Jewish-Israeli identity.

Changes in Attitudes towards Jewish Tradition and the Diaspora Although one of the Ministry’s declared aims is “showing the wealth of Jewish life” and teaching about eight hundred years of Jewish life in Poland, the primacy of the national collective, united through common destruction, is valued over the multiplicity of differing Jewish life experiences in Europe (Meron 1994: 206; cf. Raz-Krakotzkin 1993; 1994). In spite of intense identification with the Shoah victims, students see little link between the past Jewish life and current Jewish identity, and find difficulty identifying with the Diaspora Jew (Lev 1998: 94, 96).12 Jewish life before the war is overshadowed by Jewish death during the Shoah. Poland becomes a Jewish graveyard in the eyes of many. The picture of the Jewish past presented to participants is that of “a nation that dwells alone.” The voyage conveys Jewish history rather than the history of Jews (Diner 1995: 150), certainly not the history of Jewish Poles (or Jewish Germans). Death sites like Auschwitz and Majdanek, with their abundance of artifacts, leave a far greater sensory and emotional impression than Jewish life sites, like the synagogues. No effort is made to meet Diaspora Jews while in Poland, and there is no understanding of the present situation of Jews living there. The experience of voyage time and space encourages passivity and a deterministic feeling and colors the historical events with a strong teleological perspective. The Holocaust was the inevitable outcome of all exile, and the final vindication of the Zionist thesis (cf. Diner 1995)—that Jewish life, secure from the predations of anti-Semitism, is possible only in the State of Israel (Romi and Lev 2003: 234). Not surprisingly, in response to the questions, “Did the voyage influence your attitude towards Judaism? If so, how?” most mentioned the flag, common Jewish destiny in the Shoah, and the link to the Land of Israel, rather than religious belief or practice. One boy

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recounted: “I felt the trip tied me more closely to Zionism and nationalism than to Judaism. I feel very distanced from Judaism. During our visit to the synagogue (for prayer,) I was bored. During our song evening, I had a great time” (Y., 1 October 1995). Many questionnaire responses that did deal with Judaism spoke of allegiance to the Jewish people rather than religious content. Often they expressed their appreciation for Judaism as a stage in the struggle for Jewish survival that culminated in the establishment of the State. Not one of the twenty-five responses made mention of strengthening relations with the Jewish world or the assumption of responsibility for worldwide Jewry as a lesson of the voyage (cf. Romi and Lev 2003: 234).13 As part of her research, Lev asked groups of voyage students, both before and after the trip, to identify themselves as primarily Jewish or Israeli. She concluded that “the Israeli component of the Jewish Israeli identity is strengthened among the voyage participants. It may be that the connection to Eretz Israel is seen by them as more Israeli than Jewish, and is expressed in a feeling of strength, independence and the ability to defend oneself” (Lev 1998: 94). I maintain that the very formulation of the question reifies the binary oppositions built into the voyage, by troping “Israeli” as secular and political and “Jewish” as religious. Throughout the trip, Polish Jewry is primarily represented through religious images, and Orthodox Judaism is portrayed as the glue that held the community together through times of adversity. On the other hand, that Judaism, especially for secular groups,14 is a folkloric past Judaism, an antiquated religion whose positive aspects have been inherited by Zionism. The students, when asked if their attitudes towards Judaism had changed as a result of the voyage, gave mixed responses. Some reported that they began to light Shabbat candles, fast, or go to synagogue to pray on Yom Kippur, or that the practices they continued to observe took on new meaning. In my own experience, confirmed by Poland guides, many students who come from traditional backgrounds, especially if their grandparents were survivors, often see their increased observance of tradition as a memorial act, an act of homage to their ancestors. Others said that the trip distanced them further from Jewish tradition—either because it reminded them of the absence of God in the Holocaust, or because of the depiction of exilic Jewry as weak or antiquated. In general, the perception of continuity and identification with past European Jewry and their Judaism is greater among traditional and the Orthodox.15 Thus, In Yair Auron’s survey of teacher trainees (1993: 73–77), only the

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Orthodox groups took pride in the conduct of the Jews in the shtetl. In the case of National Religious groups, there is, nonetheless, the same sense of superiority towards that past (Lev 1998: 91; cf. appendix), rooted in the Zionist view of the negation of exile (RazKrakotzkin 1993; 1994). This view of exile can only be confirmed if the significant sites are devoid of living Jews. Indeed, if the ruins and former synagogues were to come to life, no Israeli flag could fly over them uncontested. The permanence and teleological inevitability of the hurban of the Exile is affirmed by the planting of the redeeming Israeli flag over the ruins of the death camps. In this sense, the voyages also differ radically from pilgrimage rites to the destroyed Temple (preface, p. xvii cf. Reiner 1989; 2000). Mourning rites for the Temple were accompanied by the hope and, often, the intense expectation of imminent redemption, which was depicted as the restoration of a more glorious past (cf. Raz-Krokotzkin 1994). The voyage, by contrast, proclaims the permanence and teleological inevitability of the hurban of the Exile; for the flag to fly victoriously, the Polish-Jewish past must be destroyed. In performing the voyage, students reenact the passage from hurban to geulah in its Zionist understanding. Exile is no longer an existential situation in time, between hurban and geula, between beginnings and endings. It has become a coordinate in space: notIsrael as opposed to Israel. The voyage’s construction of time, space, and ceremonial ritual associates Poland with the dead Jewish past and Israel with the live Jewish future. When students move through the voyage from Poland to Israel, from Auschwitz to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the traditional trajectory from exile and redemption and the sentiments associated with them are projected onto the planes of Poland and Israel. It is in this sense that the voyage is a Zionist rite of territorialization of Jewish history. The traditional temporal tensions between exile and redemption are learned through the body as spatial tensions between Israel and outside Israel. The voyages both resemble and differ from roots tours, including those bringing Israeli Jews of Moroccan origin to their Diasporic places of birth (Levy 1997).16 Those tours aim at providing Israelis with a nostalgic view of their past Diaspora homeland, but the contact with Morocco often reaffirms the voyagers’ distance from their Diasporic past and their attachment to their current Israeli identity. The voyages to Poland, on the other hand, are not a nostalgic look back at the shtetl. They bring participants to a Jewish past (not the place of embodied memories or of most participants’

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ethnic origins) only to reiterate that that elsewhere/elsewhen is dead. This is supported by the survivor who proclaims that the Diaspora should be mourned—and granted a future—through testimony and life in the State. In many ways, the voyage is similar to “homecoming” tourism of diaspora dwellers, which seeks to “spatialize [the] mythico-historic homeland within [the state’s] sovereign territory” (Markowitz 2004: 26). Through their display and embodiment of Israel to themselves and to the Poles, and through the significance assigned to their movement form Israel to Poland and back, the charged web of significations associated with Israel by both Jewish tradition and the voyage text itself can become coeval with the temporal and spatial boundaries of the State. Another characteristic shared with tourism practices of diasporic communities, especially African American voyages to Africa (Ebron 2002; Bruner 1996), is voyagers’ recognition of their present privileged status and their transcendence of the sufferings of the diasporic past. In Poland, however, in reverse of the homecoming voyages of Diasporic groups, it is the State, rather than a minority ethnic group, which sponsors these trips from the homeland to the Diaspora, depicted as exile. At a time when the natural unity of am hasefer (people of the Book) and am ha’aretz (people of the Land) is questioned and rendered problematic (Gurevitch 1997: 215), and the centers of Israeli civil religion (Masada, Tel Hai) have lost much of their appeal, the non-State, Diasporic spaces and times of suffering are promoted in order to re-enchant the State with mythical and life-giving significance. To quote a teacher at the closing ceremony in Warsaw: “Now I know that I had to travel two thousand kilometers to find the beautiful Land of Israel.”

The Voyage and Polish others In the voyage, Polish culture, the Polish language, and the Polish people remain essentially foreign and hostile. Polish inscriptions on memorial sites that ignore Jewish victims, as well as real or perceived anti-Semitic insults and graffiti, confirm the students’ preconception of Poland as a hostile anti-Semitic country. The cultural particularities of Polish Jewry, as well as their involvement in Polish culture, are marginalized, eliminating any possibility for understanding “the complexity of Jewish-Polish relations throughout the ages” (revised DGC 1994). The tight schedule and security regulations isolate the students from contact with modern-day Poland, while the Israeli flag processions lead students to see themselves as victorious representatives of

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Israel in enemy territory. The meetings with Polish youths (when they do take place) and the presence of Polish guides are structured so that they have little impact. The stories of Polish victims of the Holocaust, as well as the dilemmas encountered by Polish bystanders, are also rarely heard. Even righteous gentiles are encountered as stage figures elevated from oblivion by the State of Israel’s recognition and honor, and not as an “other” to be heard. The only significant embodiment of the Shoah encountered in Poland is that of the witness, who is “one of us.” There is no significant face-to-face encounter with an Other, (such as a non-Jewish victim or righteous gentile) who could serve as a subject of empathy (cf. Golani 2002: 49–56). According to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a genuine ethical relationship results, not from the acceptance of an abstract system of principles, but from local encounters with the naked, vulnerable face of the other, that provoke us to engage in dialogue with the other, and evoke in us our sense of responsibility for him (1982: 79–98). Hence, the opportunity to develop recognition of the Polish other, which might lead to increased ethical awareness and greater acceptance of the other in the students’ own lives, is lost. Furthermore, the victim, often a deportee who never lived in Poland, can rarely provide the perspective needed to comprehend the universalist moral implications of the Shoah—whether understood as a Zivilizationsbruch—as evidence of the fragility of civilization (Steiner 1977: 31) or democracy, or else as an exemplar of the dehumanizing totalizing civilizatory processes of modernity (Bauman 1989). For this, we must examine the Shoah against a background of presumed continuity of human endeavor (including its European, German, and Polish political and social contexts) before the Holocaust and after (Meron 1994: 201–202; Golani 2002). Only thus can students be reminded of the very human processes that led down the slippery slope to Auschwitz.

The Voyage and Dedication to the Nation Given that the voyage seeks to transform teenagers into carriers of memory, how do these messages affect the students’ political opinions or their commitment to national goals? This question is particularly important, in light of the proximity of the voyage to students’ future military service. Dedication to the Flag and Students’ Political Opinions

Although students expressed a variety of responses to questions on the contemporary political lessons of the Shoah, the strengthening of

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ties to national symbols was unequivocal. One girl wrote: “To walk with the flag in the camps, is to walk with a very mighty power. It may sound pathetic, but that’s what we felt. When the flag caressed the stones, there was a feeling of linking up. We felt the flag kept us warm” (T. W., November 1995). The flag and anthem serve as condensation symbols for the intensified life experience of the students when they land. The majority (!) of students who responded, when asked (a month later) about the most important messages of the trip or about changes in their attitude towards Judaism, mentioned the new significance and emotion attached to the flag and the national anthem. To one of the questions on the questionnaire (on changes in attitudes towards Judaism!), one girl responded: “I am sure of three things: (1) that I’ll enlist in the army, (2) that the flag of Israel will be much more meaningful now, and (3) that I will never bow my head again when I sing Hatikvah” (P. T., November 1995). Another girl wrote: “And I don’t know if I came back a better Jew, a better human being. But I know that the flag of Israel has suddenly become something huge for me, during the voyage itself it gave me tremendous force, whether I held it or just looked upon it…. The hymn, Hatikvah, suddenly became a great pride for me, to stand and to sing it with all my might, that all should hear and know” (S. B., November 1995). This heightened emotion may often be triggered by similar visual or sensory stimuli later on. Students report being reminded of and motivated by their Poland trip experiences in flag ceremonies during their military service (AYH interview) or in other contexts where national death is present. One boy wrote: We were with the school on a week’s army experience at GADNA. On one of the sessions, they brought us into a dark room with candles, and in the middle of it was a wooden memorial. And we talked about the death of soldiers in the army, and the room reminded me very much of the Jewish room at Auschwitz, and tears were in my eyes. And one girl who was on a mission to Poland the previous year said that it reminded her of the same thing, and everyone who was in Poland and was there burst out in tears” (N. R., November 1995).

After Rabin’s assassination, the groups of youths that gathered spontaneously on the pavement in front of the Knesset and at the place of his murder in Kikar Malkhei Israel in Tel Aviv lit candles, wrote notes, cried together, sang sad songs, and duplicated, almost exactly, the “Lekhol Ish Yesh Shem” ceremony held in the Jewish block in Auschwitz I. In spontaneous mourning ceremonies for

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Rabin in Jerusalem, not a few wore their blue-and-white Poland delegation sweatshirts. A teacher of the voyage group said: “When I saw all the kids at Malkhei Israel (the site of Rabin’s assassination), I said, ‘I know those kids!’” The repetitive display of raised and planted flags and the wearing of parsed flag sweatshirts (Marvin and Ingle 1999) at the death sites in Poland charges the flag with passion and fosters identification with the nation and willingness to sacrifice oneself for it. The periodic repetition of those symbols in future discursive contexts perceived as similar recharges the symbol with the emotion acquired on the voyage (cf. Silverstein and Urban 1996: 13). The influence of the voyage on students’ political views is not monolithic. Lazar and colleagues report (2004a: 195) that the Poland voyagers exhibited a stronger sense of national identity than those remaining in Israel,17 while Shechter (2002: IX) reports that students traveling to Poland emphasized national lessons over universal ones. In questionnaires and informal conversations, however, students report no significant change in support for any particular political platform or party. Schechter (2002: 74–75) claims that students’ previous positions towards Arabs—whether empathic or dysempathic—tended to be strengthened by the voyages. Some students emphasized Israel’s need for security and a harder line against compromise with the Arabs. Another student replied: “I continue to think that, although the State is very important, and maybe because it is, we have to make peace with our neighbors from the entire area” (U. D., November 1995). Yet there are political implications in the fact that, in response to my question about changes in their political views, so many students wrote of their increased motivation to serve in the army. It expresses a view of the world that places security at center. Of the twenty-five responses of returning students to the question asking for the main reason for going to Poland, only five or six phrased their responses in terms of its lessons for humanity or relations towards others, rather than towards Israel or the Jewish people.18 The voyage structure and ceremonies reaffirm participants’ belonging to a primordial group, rather than shared citizenship and consensus as the basis for Israeliness. In this conception, “the world is divided into ‘we’ and ‘they’—Jews versus everyone else” (Kimmerling 1985: 275). Although the analogy between Poles and Arabs is rarely made explicit in the voyage (but see the witness Ora’s testimony, p. 154 and the appendix), Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin reminds us (1993: 48–49) that “the learning of the practice of denial of the

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other has ramifications in the Zionist discourse on the Palestinians— even if it does not automatically lead to a right-wing political line.” At a time of weakening commitment to national goals and civil religious symbols, the depiction of a hostile world and a doomed Diaspora are marshaled to recharge the life world with contingency, emotion, and ultimately, commitment. As Mary Douglas notes: “If a community is not sure of what it stands for, or of its collective identity, then the rediscovery of those who would oppose its central values is a means for reaffirming those very collective moral purposes” (Douglas in Bergesen 1984: 89).19 Survival by Proxy and Service in the Israeli Army

An important aspect of the voyage is the students’ contact with death. In a sense, they have been through Auschwitz; such a view is supported by the survivor-witness’s public discourse. As a result of its contrast with the intense death world of Poland, the takenfor-granted life world is imbued with contingency (Hankoff 1975: 377)—thus with new vitality, it is cathected with emotion. One girl reported: “When I returned, it was strange, because the bus let me off on my street. I remember as I walked along the street and heard the selihot from the synagogue. And I walked with all the suitcases and felt so confident, and so secure, that things are nice here and there’s no anti-Semitism and no Pole will yell at me” (I. N., 1 October 1995). The students’ understandings of death and sacrifice are closely linked to their identification with the survivor.20 Through him or her, students identify not only with death, but with victory over death.21 As Robert Lifton explains: “The ordeal of the hero is a powerful confrontation with threat and death, and, really, the threat of annihilation.… And what the hero achieves is some degree of mastery in the struggle which he—it’s usually a male hero—can bring back to his people. It’s a knowledge of death and therefore a knowledge of life.... So in that sense the survivor has lived out the mythology of the hero, but not quite” (Lifton in Caruth 1995: 135–136). Even if different survivors attribute their survival to different factors, including pure chance, the voyage frame pulls the witnesses’ testimony towards a nationalist redemptive close. In the voyage, survival becomes spiritual resistance, a narrative of weakness and power. This adulation of the survivor as hero has important consequences. As Zygmunt Bauman writes (1998: 33–34): “As the direct experience of the victims recedes and fades, the memory of the Holocaust tapers and congeals into a precept of survival: life is about

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surviving, to succeed in life is to outlive the others.... Whoever survives-wins.... The awesome two-pronged legacy of the Holocaust is the tendency, on the one hand, to treat survival as the sole, or at any rate the topmost value and purpose of life, and, on the other hand, to posit … survival itself as a site of conflict between incompatible interests in which the success of some depends on the non-survival of others.” While the competitive nature of survival is not highlighted in witness discourse, it is implicit in the military overtones of students’ understandings of survival. In the poem recited as part of the ceremony in their honor (chapter 5, p. 213), the witnesses are called “a special force,” “soldiers without weapons,” and “a regiment without uniforms.” The students can share in the glory and the responsibility of this elite group if they successfully carry out their mission to ensure Jewish survival. Thus, they “swear an oath” to join the ranks of the witnesses and “tell everyone what happened when the world was silent.” Through their participation in the voyage, and through subsequent invocations of the voyage experience, students are encouraged to become what Zygmunt Bauman calls “adopted victims,” or “victims by proxy” who “need to re-forge their own imagined continuity of victimhood into the world’s real continuity of victimization” (1998: 37). That can be done, writes Bauman, “only by acting as if ... the world they live in reveals its hostility, conspires against them and, indeed, contains the possibility of another holocaust” (1998: 37). Consequently, “The flawed children of the martyrs do not live in homes; they live in fortresses. And to make their homes into fortresses, they need them besieged and under fire” (ibid.; cf. Carmon 1988: 81). This process does not take place in a social vacuum. Studies show that many students think of the Shoah most when they hear of “security incidents”—terrorist attacks. In Israel, The Shoah is a code by which hostilities and animosity towards other enemies have been interpreted (Zuckerman 1993; 2001; Gur-Ze’ev 2000; 2001). Chava Shechter notes (2002: IX) that, “upon their return to Israel, the students intensely feel the sense of victimhood, and as a result of terrorist attacks … [participants] expressed their feelings of helplessness and anger and emphasized the need for a strong, sovereign state.” The voyage makes the student into a survivor at the very time when changes in the nature of Israel’s battles—from frontline combat to intifada urban terror—blur distinctions between soldiers and civilian victims. Recent memorial sites and ceremonies link Shoah victims with Israeli soldiers and victims of terror (Feldman 2005b:

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25–28), implying that all are the victims of the same murderous forces.22 The nonconsensual nature of some of these engagements has resulted in the gradual replacement of the sacrificial discourse of the heroic fallen soldier by an individualizing discourse of survival, suffering, and mourning (Feige 2006; Lomsky-Feder 2003), while the prototype of Holocaust survival has shifted from the armed revolt to spiritual resistance. If, in the 1950s, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were invoked to legitimize Shoah memory for a nation in arms and Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers served as the template for Holocaust memorial ceremonies (Ben-Amos and Bat-El 1999; 2003), in the current context, the total innocence of the survivor of Auschwitz is invoked to increase the sanctity of the war dead and the legitimacy of the State.23 Thus, in his 1998 Memorial Day speech for fallen Israeli soldiers at the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu invoked the practice of the voyages to introduce the Holocaust dead into his Memorial Day address for fallen soldiers: “Last week, my wife and I marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau, holding the flag of Israel, and I thought about the relation of the Shoah and the State of Israel, between hurban and revival... The IDF is a historical revolution. They gave their lives to transform a downtrodden nation into a promised nation... Fifty years ago, it was not certain ... that this fallen tree had the capacity to generate new life. Supreme spiritual energies were called for. Those energies were returned to us by our children and brothers buried under these tombstones” (29 April 1998). Although they were not asked, many students explicitly stated that their motivation to serve in the IDF (or combat units of the IDF) increased as a result of the voyage. This may result from the internalization of the lesson that Shoah death is the inevitable result of Jewish weakness in exile, and that another Shoah can only be avoided through manifestation of Jewish strength (cf. Romi and Lev 2003: 235–236).The contact with death fascinates the students, but this death remains romantic and heroic. In this romanticization of death, the fear of death is mitigated through the use of symbols and language that overcome it. This may be seen as a kind of homeopathic inoculation with small doses of death in order to neutralize the big one—the army. The voyage mystifies and glorifies sacrificial death, as it glorifies Israel as the source of life. The greater the intensity of contact with death in Poland, the more military service becomes mystified as its antithesis. Insofar as students come to see themselves as survivors by proxy, military service thus becomes not only an antidote to Diaspora Jew-

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ish weakness, but also a sacred duty towards the dead. What better way to continue the legacy of the “regiment without uniforms” (cf. Righteous Gentile ceremony, chapter 5 pp. 211-13) than through defending the Jewish State in uniform? Not infrequently many parents and educators speak of the voyage as coming at just the right time—so that the students should know what they’re fighting for. Educators cite the role of the voyage in increasing motivation to serve, and Israeli officers-in-training have been sent to Auschwitz for that same reason.24 An organizer of Bnei Akiva tours explained: “Just as you take a boy before army service and bring him to Masada and the Vale of Tears (a Golan Heights battle site) to teach him heroism, so you teach him Shoah in Poland” (E. Hartman, interview, 27 May 1996). Thus, the voyages may be the penultimate instantiation of a series of civil ceremonies, going from kindergarten through mobilization. Ultimately, according to Handelman, such rites reconstitute the child in the image and substance of the citizen, one whose ultimate loyalties will be not to his family, but to the abstract idea of the nation-state (Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman 1991; Handelman 1990: 168). Although strength, pride, and dedication to common goals may be values the society seeks to promote, the closed, triumphant, and triumphalist nature of the voyage and the emphasis on the drawing of final lessons involves a risk—that the incommensurability and openness of the Shoah event be lost, and the moral, theological, and existential questions that reverberate in the void left by Auschwitz be silenced completely. As Saul Friedlander warned, there is a danger that “the dialogue with the mute God may ... be drowned out altogether by the growing noise of the merely spectacular” (1992: 21; cf. Gitlitz and Davidson 2006: 186–188). The ways in which the survivor is “not quite” the war hero are rarely brought to the fore. As Robert Lifton says, “That ‘not quite’ is the tragic dimension of it that you see, well, in the story of Primo Levi, who seemed to have mastered it to a degree that moved us, even thrilled us. And then killed himself, as an elderly man, for reasons that we don’t fully understand. But still in a way that tells us that he was still haunted by that experience” (Lifton in Caruth 1995: 135–136). That tragic dimension, the “hauntedness” of the experience, the ways in which the survivor is “not quite” the war hero, and which provoke open questions more than they provide answers, is marginalized by the voyage frame.

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The Future of the Israeli Voyages to Poland Over the past ten years, the response to the Poland trips has steadily increased, from four hundred in 1988 to over fourteen thousand in 1998 (Oded Cohen 1999: 408), twenty-one thousand in 2002 (Auron 2003: 153), and over twenty-eight thousand in 2005 (Auron 2005: 65). In some schools, they have become almost obligatory, the thing to do at age sixteen. Will the participation in the Poland voyages continue to grow? Unquestionably, many agents have economic and local-political interests in the continued growth of the voyages. Although we may hardly speak of the voyages as an integrated economic-religious enterprise (Ofir 1995: 12; cf. Blattman 1995: 16), the voyages are sponsored by government bureaucracies and private tour agents that seek to perpetuate themselves. The Society and Youth Authority of the Education Ministry has grown in power and prestige as a result of the sponsorship of the trips and is reluctant to introduce changes or raise fundamental questions, especially if they involve reducing the magnitude of the voyages.25 Teachers and school administrators can provide students with a moving experience and enjoy the social capital of having sent out the groups representing the school and the State with only a modest amount of planning and investment (cf. Keren 1998: 99–100). Yad Vashem or another Holocaust institution can provide some of the preparation program and the parents pay the costs. The students returning from Poland provide the publicity and help mobilize younger students. Travel agents in Israel and Poland have found a profitable new tourism market (cf. Keren 1998: 97–98). At peak season, around Holocaust Memorial Day, sometimes all the decent hotels in Warsaw are fully booked, largely with Jewish participants. And what other tourists would fly to Poland in the winter months? These economic interests, however, cannot explain the popularity of the voyages, which far surpassed the expectations of the Ministry of Education. Participants experience intense emotions, test their endurance, meet new friends, cry and mourn together over their murdered fellow Jews, as well as over many other things unrelated to the Shoah, and enjoy superior status upon their return. Some may develop new relationships with their survivor grandparents or go on to study the Shoah further as a result. Even critics of the voyages admit that the voyage is one of the most intense experiences in a students’ educational career (Auron 1993: 14–15). True, after nearly twenty years and over 250,000 participants, for most,

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the trip is no longer an adventure into the unknown. But, as the survivors die out, more of the weight for concretizing the past will be shifted onto the fragile material remains, decaying relics, and the images provided by past participants.26 Barring a severe financial crisis in Israel, a change in attitude on the part of the Polish hosts, or a terrorist attack against a youth group there, the numbers should continue to increase in the foreseeable future and shape the understandings of the Shoah of the next generation of Israelis. Yet the form of the voyages will unquestionably change as the survivors die out. One teacher on the Poland voyage said: “This trip to Poland, I feel like we’re getting the Oral Law. We see things as they were and we get the living testimony from the people who were here and saw the things when they happened. I hope I have the strength to transmit the stories to the next generation, when the witnesses are no longer with us. In this sense, I compare it to the Oral Law” (K., 15 October 1995). The challenge is—how will the Oral Law change when it is no longer voiced by the body of the witness?

Notes 1. The questionnaire was open-ended, and the questions were not screened to ensure the lack of bias. Nevertheless, important information can be derived from it, especially when the information volunteered was only tenuously linked to the question posed. The questionnaire reached the students about a month after the voyage, and some utilized them as a trigger for testimony or confession. The questions whose answers provided some of the data for the following sections were: What was the most impressive ceremony in which you participated in Poland? Why? In your opinion, what is the most important reason for going to Poland? Since your return, have you spoken with your parents/grandparents (mention if they are Holocaust survivors)/siblings about the voyage? What about? Did the voyage change your attitude to Judaism? How? Did the voyage change your political opinions? How? Did you cry during/after the voyage? If so, where and when? 2. By contrast, the organizers of the Canadian Jewish March of the Living to Poland invest significant institutional effort in follow-up activities designed to fan the flames of emotionality kindled during the voyage and turn it into longstanding Jewish commitment (Blumer forthcoming).

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3. The effects of the voyage on social dynamics of the class, on facilitating acceptance of marginal students within the group, and on changing student-teacher relationships has, to the best of my knowledge, not yet been investigated. 4. In an interview I conducted with five students of a school group five years after their voyage, they said that the emotional effect of the flag wore off after a year, but that they were reminded of the trip on Yom Hashoah and when they found themselves together with other trip veterans in the army. The students interviewed remembered the sensory environment of the witnesses in the camps more than the content of their testimony and, in spite of a certain critical distance towards the ceremonies and flag raising, most would recommend the voyage to friends or family in high school. They also claimed that it had had no effect on their political opinions or motivation while in the army (AYH interview, 27 April 1996). 5. Some survivors return as often as ten times a year to accompany the voyages. See Feldman forthcoming. 6. Eleonora Lev, in a book on her trip to Poland with her teenage daughter (1989), warns: “The place we are visiting is only the bottle of formaldehyde where the corpse of memory is kept.... [Auschwitz] exists not here but is dispersed throughout the word, in fragments, in the survivors’ memories, day and night, continuing to struggle and gnaw and consume without refuge” (Lev 1989, translation in Hartman 1994: 5). 7. William Miles suggests (2002: 1177) that “as sensory cognition evolves in relation to progressive computerization … longstanding psychological distinctions between real and virtual, here and there, subject and object may themselves loosen. If so, then the dark cybertourist may not in fact sense a substantial difference between walking and browsing through Auschwitz.” I doubt it. Authority structures and social worlds may continue to insist on the distinctions between the in situ object and the cyberspace representation. If Miles is correct, it will mark the end of tourism, pilgrimages, and many other life experiences, not just so-called dark tourism. I am uncomfortable with the category “dark tourism,” as I believe that including Auschwitz and chambers of horrors in the same category celebrates voyeurism of violence. 8. In her recent book, Barbie Zelizer discusses other ways in which various photographic images of the Shoah have shaped the perceptions and imaginations of viewers (and reflected interests of groups displaying the photos). She warns against another effect of overexposure to Shoah photographs (1998: 3): “It may be that we have learned to use our Holocaust memories so as to neglect our response to the atrocities of the here and now.” 9. In the case of Sulam High School, the town was bombarded with rockets launched by Hezbollah around Holocaust Memorial Day. Schools were closed and the ceremony was canceled. 10. This concurs with the increased centrality of the mourner (rather than the fallen soldier) at school Memorial Day ceremonies for the fallen (LomskyFeder 2003: 366–367). 11. An informal survey among freshman anthropology students in the Negev over several years showed that the wealthier and mainly Ashkenazic students at Ben Gurion University were far more likely to have visited Poland than the poorer and mainly Mizrahi students at two neighboring community colleges.

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12. This supports Auron’s contestation that “the negation of exile has developed not only as a negation of the situation of the people dwelling in it, but as a negation of the people living in exile” (1993: 123; cf. Zerubavel 1995: 19). The observations of Nili Keren, a leading educator involved with the voyages, confirm my findings (Keren 1998: 93–100). 13. Lazar et al. found that participants on the Poland voyage more strongly affirmed the message that “Israel is the only place for Jews” than their classmates remaining in Israel (2004a: 198). 14. For religious groups, see appendix. 15. In Lev’s survey, she notes that among the school classes she surveyed, most students choosing to participate classified themselves as religious or traditional, whereas the overwhelming majority of those electing not to go classified themselves as secular. The self-selection of students according to religious affiliation warrants further study (Romi and Lev 2003: 234). 16. The voyages to the Diaspora are part of a wide range of “roots” practices in Israel. These include the Diaspora museum (Golden 1996; Shenhav-Keller 2005), settlement and illegal immigration museums (Katriel 1995; 1997a; 1997b), pilgrimage to saints’ tombs and ancestral homes in Morocco (Levy 1997; 2004), the establishment of new holy sites dedicated to Diaspora saints in development towns (Bilu 2005; Bilu and Ben-Ari 1987; Shokeid 1998), the construction of architectural edifices copying those of rabbis’ residences in the Diaspora (Weingrod 1993), as well as many heritage museums dedicated to various Jewish communities. All exhibit nostalgia for places of origin, while most depict migration to Israel as a homecoming. Tamar Katriel writes (1997a: 169–170): “Each promotes a different, sometimes mutually-exclusive mythology of origins. They create disparate [and, I might add, sometimes conflicting] ‘geographies of meaning’ within the context of contemporary Israeli culture.” 17. Their study also concluded that “adolescents [both those traveling to Poland and their fellows who remained behind] whose family members included survivors connected a more ‘power-oriented’ interpretation of the Holocaust to a strong sense of national identity, and were less likely to assign universalistic messages to the Shoah” (Lazar et al. 2004a: 198–199). The relation of family affiliation to voyage and postvoyage reactions requires further study. 18. In their questionnaires, Romi and Lev do not even include humanistic lessons as a possible outcome of the voyage (2003: 231, 236). 19. For a more detailed application of Mary Douglas’s theories on enclaves, group, and grid to the Poland voyages, see Feldman 2002. 20. Based on their surveys of several schools, Romi and Lev found that the presence of survivors (96.7%) and the death camp visits (94.6%) were ranked by students returning from Poland as the most highly significant aspects of their voyage (2003: 234). 21. That may also be why students’ descriptions of the voyage frequently emphasize the element of danger and overcoming danger, which are infrequent in official descriptions. 22. See, for example, Lt. Col. Eleazar Stern’s summary of the IDF officer training school’s visit to Auschwitz: “We came here, and have added the extermination sites to the heritage sites, the ghettos and their surroundings have been added

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to the battle heritage that serves and will serve us in the preparation of officers and fighters in the Israel Defense Forces” (Stern 1994: 5). 23. Thus, in her 2001 Holocaust Memorial Day Speech, Education Minister Limor Livnat addressed the public: “Primo Levi once wrote that an unbridgeable abyss yawns between one who was there and one who wasn’t. Astoundingly, it seems today that this gap is narrowing. Many of us feel as though we might have been there; to a certain extent, it’s as if we were there. Our young people, second and third generation offspring of native-born Israelis, gravitate towards Auschwitz. They want their own feet to tread that cursed earth, as though to assure themselves that the sun which rises there is the same one which rises in our world. I’ve watched them there clinging to one another, clutching the flag of Israel, weeping…. We shouldn’t suppose that we differ from our grandfathers and grandparents who went to the gas chambers. What separates us form them is not that we are some sort of new Jew. The main difference is external: we have a state, and a flag and an army: caught in their tragedy, they lacked all three” (Livnat 2001). Livnat invokes the Poland visits as a lived experience that will render plausible the view 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. 24. Oded Cohen of the Ministry of Education cites Lt. Col. Eleazar Stern (currently, Gen. Stern in charge of army personnel) as saying that Poland voyage veterans (and graduates of youth movements) are more motivated soldiers (Sheleg 1999). In a report on a visit of officer trainees to Auschwitz on Yom Hashoah, Lt. Col. Stern writes [the original contains grammatical and syntactical errors, which I have tried to render in the translation]: “The voyage should serve two purposes: “1. In my opinion, this experience will contribute greatly to the officer’s attitude towards his post, and towards his desire to remain an officer in the standing army. “2. ‘Those who remain until the end are, without a doubt those who have the greatest resistance and they deserve special treatment because they are natural selection and if they are liberated, they will serve as the core for the building of a new Jew [see the experience of history] Protocol of the Wannsee Conference 20 January 1942.’ “The symbolic significance of who really ‘won’ in light of the mobilization of such a delegation in the camps, 50 years later, and the message in it for millions of spectators in Israel and the world” (Stern 1994: 2). 25. In response to (a minor) criticism in the press, one Ministry official replied: “The dogs bark and the convoy rolls on through.” 26. In Lowenthal’s formulation: “As time distances events beyond personal recall, memory within any society gives way to history, and relics gain renewed significance. Once great events pass beyond the realm of memory and oral verification, they take on a different look” (1985: 245). Increasingly, memory will become vested in the trace (cf. Nora 1986).

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CHAPTER

Holocaust Memory, National Identity, and Transformative Ritual

The implications of the voyages to Poland extend beyond Israeli society. Holocaust memory and commemoration have come to play an important role in shaping collective memory and national identities in many European nation-states (cf. Carrier 2005), and the Holocaust is indexed by various social movements throughout the world (Sturken 1997). By understanding the construction and role of transformative Holocaust ritual in Israel, we may come to understand better how both Holocaust memory and state ritual function in other societies in the global era. In this final chapter, I begin by summarizing my conclusions on the Poland voyages as a pilgrimage of national identity. I then marshal the results of my research on Holocaust memory and national identity to critique Levy and Sznaider’s (2006; 2002) theses on “cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust.” I argue that global forces and the proliferation of representations, as embodied in state-sponsored ritual, may effectively create totalizing worlds promoting commitment to sacrifice for the nation. I then return to Handelman’s theoretization of state ritual, which underlies my analysis throughout this book, and explore the correlation of transformative rituals (models) with primitive societies and spectacles (mirrors) with bureaucratic states. Employing Márvin and Ingle’s (1999) understandings of totem rituals of the American flag, I suggest that in times of fundamental uncertainty, bureaucratic states may foster Notes for this section begin on page 266.

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transformative bodily practices to strengthen citizens’ commitment to the social order. Finally, I suggest that such mobilization of transformative rites is not without risk for the nation-state.

Conclusions: Poland Voyages as National Pilgrimages The voyage to Poland is neither a study trip, nor primarily the “peak of a (three-part) historico-educational process” (DGC). It is a rite of transformation, designed to transmit understanding through identification, embodiment, and experience. At a pivotal stage in their development, when they are most susceptible to romantic ideals, and shortly preceding their mobilization into the army, Israeli teenagers perform an intensive, week-long pilgrimage that performs the history of the Jewish people and the paradigm of hurban (destruction) to geula (redemption) as schematized in the Zionist master narrative. This pilgrimage is constructed as a ritual reenactment of survival. The students leave the life world, the Land of Israel for Poland, the land of the Shoah, where they “witness” the destruction of the Jews of the exile. But there, they survive to return with the witness on his triumphant ascent to Israel. Upon their return, participants frequently speak of their voyage as segirat ma’agal. The life world frames the voyage at its beginning, and the portal of heroism (Warsaw Ghetto) provides the reentry to a renewed commitment to the life world upon the students’ return. As in traditional religious pilgrimages (Turner and Turner 1978), the voyager experiences communitas at the significant center, returns home by a path spiritually different than the one he took upon his departure, and enjoys a new status upon his return: the students who left for Poland as children will return home to Israel as empowered, responsible members of society—witnesses—and become future soldiers of the State of Israel. Unlike the pilgrimages theorized by Turner, however, which involve an ascent to the Center, “the source of hallowed (socio-moral) order of the cosmos” (Cohen 1992: 50; cf. Smith 1997), the death camps partake of the nature of the absolute Other, the “primordial, unformed, and unknown, lurking in the recesses of chaos surrounding the ordered ‘civilized’ cosmos […] the embodiment of evil as cognitive and moral confusion” (Cohen 1992: 51). The student enters the demonic death world only to conquer it through the symbols of the State.1 In doing so, he discovers that Auschwitz is not only a state of mind, but a place—the intersection of time and space (Casey 1987: 194–215)—of evil, which can be overcome, but only at great cost. In

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embodying Israel at the death camps, reenacting a drama of suffering, death, and rebirth there, Auschwitz becomes the birthplace of the State. The students’ increased awareness of existential danger and sense of overcoming that danger through the presence of the State generates a commitment to basic national and cultural values. In a poem written several days after the trip, a girl wrote: It is impossible to understand the concept a mountain of human ashes. And it is impossible to understand many other things. But you stand there, trying to feel the evil, the helplessness The screams, the tears, the wide-open eyes!... To sing the Hatikvah - in the midst of the inferno, a place that swallowed up so much! To sing, and to be proud of your country, your flag and yourself. And on the holiest moments - to know and feel that they are still here with you, all the time (B.W., October 1995).

At the conclusion of their voyage, Israel is appreciated, not as the taken-for-granted birthplace of the native-born tzabar, but as the sole giver of life and value. As one teacher said at the close of the final ceremony: “I traveled two thousand kilometers to find Eretz Israel hayafa (the beautiful Land of Israel).” The true, beautiful face of Israel cannot be seen as long as the student is merely a native. It must be found by traveling to the death world; there, Israel becomes an object of longing and desire. The student can accomplish his or her mission, recognize the “beautiful Land,” only through his or her symbolic aliyah (ascension/immigration) to the Land of Israel. Table 7.1 Movement in the Pilgrimage to Poland

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Their successful accomplishment of this pilgrimage empowers the participants to be responsible carriers of Jewish memory upon their return. The multigenerational configuration of the staff and the mise-en-scene of the testimony in Auschwitz-Birkenau cast them in the role of grandchildren of the survivors, while their youthful vitality becomes an answer to Shoah death. Through their transmission of the experience to family and friends upon their return, they become witnesses of the witnesses, bearers of the legacy entrusted them. Through their future service to the country as soldiers in the IDF, they embody the Jewish people that survived the catastrophe and were reborn in the strong, independent State of Israel. The voyage repeats the same essential cosmology through a variety of means of construction. The space of Poland is divided into inside Israeli life spaces, and outside Polish death spaces. The mass presence together, security regulations, and Israeli flags and symbols, all isolate them from the Polish surroundings. While contact with the Poles or Diaspora Jews is kept to a minimum, the Israeli witness-survivors are given the authority of place and a position of honor that reinforces their status as the heroes of the voyage and paradigms of behavior. The message conveyed is clear: We = Israel = survivor = security = Jewish strength = life They = Poland = Shoah bystanders/perpetrators = dangerous antiSemitism = Jewish weakness = death

Various sequences within the voyage are orchestrated, or spontaneously performed, in accordance with the same progression of themes. The sequence of obligatory ceremonies describes stages in a process of transformation, from spectators to victims, and from victorious survivors to heroic fighters and citizens of Israel. The sequence of texts within the ceremonies moves from destruction in Exile to redemption in Israel. The positioning of ceremony performers and the raising of the flags at their conclusion all describe the movement from passivity to activity, from death to life, from exile and Shoah to Israel. Each element is a performance that creates a seamless link between the Shoah and the State. Many structures operate simultaneously to convey similar messages. The transformations are arrayed to create a kind of fractal effect: the sequence of texts of each ceremony, the raising of the flag, the progression from silence to triumphant singing, the sequence of ceremonies—each of these describe a cycle of transformation from child to victim to victorious survivor to witness and future soldier.

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Each cycle confronts the students with the forces of chaos of the Shoah, which they overcome and domesticate through the affirmation of the State. Each is embedded within the larger voyage cycle, which describes the same progression. The individual cycles and the larger cycle reverberate and energize each other to effect the transformation. While not all students emerge from the voyage affirming the same political opinions or ideologies, they do learn to identify themselves with the same symbols, particularly the flag and the Hatikvah. Once charged with the meaning they acquire in Poland, the symbols can then continue to work on and in the students in the life world, providing new “charges” each time they are displayed. These symbols do not necessarily convey a specific consciously promoted ideological message, but rather, define the groups to which they will pledge allegiance. The students become victorious survivors and heirs to the dead Diaspora Jewish past through their performance. Their bodies form the link between the Diaspora past (“above the death pits”) and the Israeli future (“beneath the flag of Israel waving on high”). The Israeli survivor-witness in Poland links the young Israeli citizens and future Israeli soldiers with that past through his or her bodily presence. The survivor’s actions, including the presentation of ritualized in situ testimony, stand for Jewish history as formulated in the Zionist narrative. By seeing the places the witness saw, feeling the cold, discomfort and lack of sleep, performing the ceremony and singing the Hatikvah along with the witness, telling and showing pictures of “what they saw there” to friends and family back home, the students symbolically reenact the death of exile and passivity, to be reborn as Israeli survivor-witnesses—adults, empowered with a moral obligation to bear witness for the dead and for the aging survivor-witnesses, and to continue their struggle. As one girl summarized: “I had a feeling of pride and victory. The victory of the Jewish people over the Nazi oppressor who wanted to destroy us. In spite of the great pain over the murder of the six million Jews, which will never be forgotten or forgiven, the main aim of the Nazis was not accomplished. We, the youths who were in those places, are the decisive proof of this. We the Jews who arrived from Israel testify that THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL STILL LIVE! [emphasis in original]” (I., Rogozin School trip book 1993: 76).

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Cosmopolitan and Nationalist Memories of the Shoah in an Age of Representations Israel has no monopoly on Holocaust memory. On the contrary, it seems as if hardly a week goes by without a reference to the Holocaust by politicians, the opening of a new Holocaust museum, publication of a new book, release of a new movie, or dedication of a new monument to the subject. In an article (2002) and in their recent book (2006), Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that the new global discourse has made the Holocaust a universal “moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and [in] the absence of master ideological narratives” and “a moral certainty that now stretches across national borders” (2002: 102, 94). They also claim that the demise of the last of the eyewitnesses and the growth of media representations provide an opportunity for the development of a more pluralistic and universalist memory of the Holocaust, rather than one considered the “property” of the survivor and his national or ethnic group. In an age marked by the secularization of religion and the progressive disenchantment of the nation, they argue that collective memory is floating free of the “cracked container of the NationState” (ibid.: 88). They celebrate the rise of what they term “cosmopolitan” memory of the Holocaust, which, they claim, fosters the development of solidarities and mutual responsibilities that transcend territorial boundaries. For Levy and Sznaider, this form of memory is facilitated by the proliferation of representations and simulations and the spread of hypermobility in the global age. Through simulations of the Holocaust, as Haim Hazan argues (2001: 5), “Dismantled collective memories can be disenfranchised from the realm of elitist hegemony ... and inserted into the cultural flow of everyday consumption. The simulation provides an easily manipulated cultural form, divorced from personal commitment or collective ideologies.”2 Hypermobility, the increasingly rapid movement of people, goods, and information across borders and spaces,3 “divides and disperses people and activities that once occupied a contiguous space and abbreviates the time it takes to get from here to there” (KirshenblattGimblett 1994: 342). This constant movement, which is manifested, among other ways, through practices of travel and tourism,4 facilitates the development of a wide variety of ethnic and Diasporic identities. Consequently, the insularity of national groups and the strength of their claim to peoples’ loyalties and affections are weakened. Unquestionably, global forces have brought new goods, information, and youth cultural models into Israel and undermined Zionist

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visions and practices, as well as the encompassing authority of communities promoting those visions (Bilu and Ben-Ari 1997). Yet, while alternative Holocaust voyages do exist,5 the space, time, and ritual of the vast majority of Israeli-sponsored youth voyages have remained extremely uniform over the period of fifteen years and among two hundred fifty thousand participants. My study of the youth voyages to Poland demonstrates that in their celebration of the global, Levy and Sznaider underestimate the power of rituals and embodied practices to create coherent, totalistic local worlds of meaning (Feldman 2005b). They also undervalue the continued ability of modern nations to ground their ontology in traditional religion-based paradigms and embodied practices (Kapferer 1988) and deploy cultural history in service of the State (White 1997: 4). In other words, reports of nationalism’s death—and the victory of secularization—have been premature. Furthermore, some of the very conditions cited by Levy and Sznaider facilitate the performance of the Israeli nation on Polish soil. The permeability of national boundaries, the ease and relative affordability of travel, and the ability to diffuse knowledge of the voyages through mass media all enable the State to promote voyages to the dead Diaspora as a source of stable roots in the state—a goal which can no longer be fully satisfied through existing practices on Israeli soil.6 The proliferation of simulations in postmodernity enables returning students who have simulated survival through the voyage to generate another generation of voyagers through presenting their video films, photo albums, and stories of their experiences in Poland. Finally, under the new conditions, Israeli participants may hoist the flag and perform, on Polish soil, flag rituals closely resembling those of the cult of fallen soldiers (Mosse 1979; 1990),7 without being seen (and vociferously opposed) by Poles as staking an exclusive territorial claim to the site. Indeed, the very recognition of the cosmopolitan (or inter-European) significance of the Holocaust makes Poles loath to openly confront Israel over the extremely nationalist (and often anti-Polish) tenor of the voyages.8

The Poland Voyages and Modern State Ritual: An Event That Models Promoted by a Bureaucracy At the beginning of this book, I presented Handelman’s distinction between mirrors and models. Whereas mirrors are “vivid and vibrant expositions, (which) … do not change the lived-in world of their

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participants” (Handelman 1990: 42), models “index or pre-view a hypothetical future condition that will be brought into being, and … provide procedures that will actualize this act of imagination” (ibid.: 28). Throughout this book, I have argued that the Poland voyages are models, designed to transform the teenagers into witnesses of the witnesses and dedicated Jewish citizens of the State. In his taxonomy of public events, Don Handelman invites us to think about “why particular kinds of public events are more prevalent in certain kinds of social orders” (Handelman 1998: xvi). He argues that events that model are most common in tribal societies, where social order is remade through the forces of macrocosmic uncertainty that are engendered in events of modeling (Handelman 1990: 80). In modern societies, on the other hand, their function has been replaced by bureaucratic practice. There, “change... becomes a function of the bureaucratic, scientific and technological ordering of, and impact on living” (ibid.: 78-79).9 In such societies, change becomes independent of the natural cosmos, and thus independent of the practice of ritual as the ongoing recreation of the cosmos (Herzfeld 2001: 266). Yet, here we find an event that models propagated with great force by a bureaucratic State structure—the Ministry of Education. How are we to explain this? In attempting to provide an answer, I note a question frequently voiced by many of the administrators and teacher-guides: “What do they search for and not find in Israel that makes them go to Poland?” (M. M., interview, June 1996). This question reflects their sense that the bureaucratic structures of the educational system, as well as other societal mechanisms, are insufficient for creating the necessary commitment to Zionist values and worldviews or to the JewishIsraeli community. The reasons for this crisis are many. Some see it as a necessary consequence of the achievement of Zionism’s chief aim—statehood. Once realized, “the dream which had motivated generations of Jews to sacrifice … would not offer sufficient meaning to their children” (Eisen 1986: 131). Others cite the rise of an individualist ethic of consumption, the proliferation of global forces through increased youth travel abroad (Noy and Cohen 2005), the spread of Western media and popular culture, or the undermining of the authority of the Zionist historical narrative by post-Zionist scholars (Michman 1997a). Whatever the reasons, the results are the same: the loss of faith and commitment to a common vision, declining nationwide solidarity, and the weakening of the hold of the Israeli nation-state

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on people’s identities (Bilu and Ben-Ari 1997; cf. Beck 2002). Clearly, the loss of the vision of a single people marching inexorably through history towards a common goal has been a major concern of leaders and educators (cf. Keren 1998: 97–100). The Shoah voyage brings students in contact with fundamental uncertainty—the chaos underlying human existence that in the death camp visits, assumes a demonic face and a multisensory character, but is finally overcome through the victory of the Israeli nation-state. This contact with uncertainty recharges the life world with contingency and a mythic force that the taken-for-granted Israel, reproduced and replicated through its bureaucracy, does not possess. The bureaucracy is strongly creative, but it creates without feeling. In the prevailing environment of uncertainty, bureaucratic means cannot suffice to motivate people towards common goals. What bureaucracy cannot do, the contact with death and uncertainty at Auschwitz and the framing of the State as its antithetical life world will—create emotion and longing. Viewed from Auschwitz, Israel is flooded with the vivid colors of life and redemption. A unity of destiny, common death in the Exile, is invoked in order to create commitment to the Jewish-Israeli collective: “In Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz, our differences disappeared as though they never existed ... there they made us into one people, the people that was murdered!” (Keren in Ministry of Education 1993: 103).10

Models and Mirrors, Bodies and Texts A complementary comparative perspective for understanding the appearance of transformational rituals in modern societies is provided by Marvin and Ingle (1999) in their study of American flag rituals. They formulate a distinction that overlaps with and further informs Handelman’s distinction between small-scale primitive societies ordered by rituals and modern state-societies governed by bureaucracies: “The crucial comparison may be the relative prevalence of practices in which the body is immediately present and its relation to social action directly observed, and those of disembodied, or textual practices in which the body is not only removed, but denied by an active effacement. Relative to the textualized, bodydenying social organization of industrial nation-states, small-scale face-to-face societies are less textual and more bodily in their social organization” (Marvin and Ingle 1994: 4). They add, however, that textually organized societies continue to express the role of the body in the social order through their demand for bodily sacrifice. “At the behest of the group, the lifeblood of community members must be

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shed. Group solidarity, or sentiment, flows from the value of this sacrifice” (ibid.: 4). Drawing on a variety of ‘totem rituals of the American flag, they argue for the religious nature of all nationalisms and the centrality of violent sacrifice for the nation. They claim (con. Anderson 1983), that shared textual experiences cannot explain how nationalism inspires profound loyalty and sacrifice: “Violence is a central dynamic of nation-state groups insofar as all societies are notions of order imposed on bodies, expressed ultimately through the explicit or implied exercise of force on those bodies … Despite our conviction that violence is morally repugnant and should be eliminated, it creates groups to which we feel the strongest attachments” (ibid., 313). “Nationalism,” they write, “is a community of blood and not text.[…] Ceremonies of nationalism are about death and not literature” (ibid.: 26–27). Based on the Poland voyages, I suggest that texts are not merely literature. They have historically often been performed (Yerushalmi 1984; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2005). Various texts are produced under different historical circumstances and have careers (King 2001: 224). Texts and bodies may compete against and complement each other in maintaining the coherence and continuity of communities throughout the course of their histories.11 When, however, the power of the text wanes or is fragmented into a multiplicity of disparate and sometimes conflicting narratives, bodies become a stronger argument: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The bodies cry out for other bodies, greater self-sacrifice to fill their absence, justify their sacrifice. Atop the crematoria, under the flags, facing the flag-clad students, the elderly survivor and former boxer declares: “Bring more children to the nation so that we live forever.” In Poland, the event that models anchors the State in students’ conception of the cosmic order and in the sensations of their own bodies. As one girl expressed it: “The voyage to Poland was the most meaningful experience of my life... The voyage to Poland made me laugh, made me tremble with cold, made me afraid, made me me!” (T. B.). This also explains the centrality of public shedding of tears— it is a clearly verifiable bodily expression of transformation. By crying together, especially when wearing and waving the flag, the community can be seen—and felt—as one. As Marvin and Ingle state (1993: 43), “A national or tribal flag stands in this way for the bodies that constitute a community. A flag ... expresses the body and is magically invested with its powers and vulnerabilities.[...]

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The flag is not an ornament to be waved ... it is a living creature ... a moving body.” As I have described, other multisensory practices also serve to inscribe the threatened and redemptive nation on the body: the movement from death sites to sites of revolt, seeing the death camps, scratching the gas chamber wall, smelling the shoes, collecting ashes, crying and hugging together, singing the anthem… Based on the Poland trips, we may propose the following hypothesis: Where the power of the common narrative weakens, modern nationstates may marshal bodily practices—rites of transformation, “models”—to do what bureaucracies cannot—recharge its institutions and social boundaries with passion and commitment. Where the narratives are consensual, bureaucracies and spectacles (“mirrors”) will suffice in assuring continuity and assigning citizens their place.

Thus, a proliferation of transformatory, bodily tribal rites should alert us to the depth of uncertainty and fragmentation in the heart of the society performing them and of leaders’ concern over the leaking boundaries of the group (cf. Feldman 2002). There remains, however, one major difference between the American flag rituals in Marvin and Ingle’s study and those of the Holocaust voyages. In the American flag rituals, when the allocation of the State’s killing authority is not settled by clear borders, states may mass flags at the enemy’s border to reimpose their authority as the supreme object of sacrifice. In Poland, the flags are directed, not against a current foe, but against a past enemy—the Nazis, the Poles, or Amalek. Where the physical border (with the Palestinians) and the righteousness of the struggle are no longer the object of consensus, consolidation and righteousness can be evoked in more consensual ways by displaying the flag at the death camps to the Poles (or symbolically “in the sweaty face of Hitler” [see above, p. 113). There, students may display their flags and pledge their bodies to the nation as totally innocent victims struggling against a totally malevolent enemy. The current struggle of the Israeli nation can thus be depicted as eternal, as rooted in the cosmos—in the separation between good and evil.

The Risks of Transformatory Events in Bureaucracies While the contact with uncertainty and death may serve to reenchant the State, this contact with antistructure typical of the liminal phase in rites of ceremony must be carefully controlled (Handelman 1990: 60; cf. Turner 1969) to neutralize subversive

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messages which may arise. In the discussion that evening, one student said: “Many said they felt as if they’d won. And I didn’t feel victory. I said, you know, they can take me, they can take the State of Israel, they can take the flag, they can take it all, if they could only bring back the force of life of the six million, those people, and give them their normal, everyday, boring lives, that they watch TV every day and die at age seventy-two, without doing a thing I’m willing, I’m willing, because I know that that’s what I would want” (Discussion, 19 September 1995). In order that the voyage accomplish its aims, the State must assure that the change the student undergoes is channeled into paths that reaffirm the State. Uncertainty is limited by ritually hedging possibilities, by defining absolute, impermeable boundaries between “us” and “them,” “here” and “there,” in the voyage. Furthermore, many of the practices rely on widely diffused cultural texts and symbols that reappear in other mirrors, spectacles of ordering, such as school commemorations and military ceremonies. This makes it likely that the one-time experience will be interpreted in accordance with a similar logic expressed on other occasions. Nonetheless, the conscious cultivation of attachment to the homeland through simulations and ritual may be problematic. In her work on Israeli settlement museums, Tamar Katriel writes 1997b: 9): Zionism as an ideology and Zionism as a lived sense of belonging to place (as opposed to) commemoration are two very different things. So is the unselfconscious experience of rootedness as composed to the active, deliberate cultivation of cultural roots. This paradox of having to consciously cultivate a sense of affiliation where it should have been a cultural given became even more pronounced in the lives of later generations of native-born Israelis. For them, a sense of place was an essential cultural experience, and the rhetoric of roots only threatened to undermine its existential force. The more markedly ideological these assertions became ... the more potentially destabilizing they seemed to be, and the more riddled with self-doubts.

If for the survivors, Israel was lived as the restoration of life, dignity, and security after the depths of Auschwitz, for the students, the survivors by proxy, it is an experience, however moving. “Any making of order,” writes Handelman (1990: 64), “also changes, in the process, that selfsame order.” It may well be that, as they mature, students may reflect back on the voyage with an awareness (sometimes accompanied with anger) of how the ruins of Auschwitz were substituted for Auschwitz itself. In such cases, the overstatement of the link between Auschwitz and Israel may occa-

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sion greater questioning of and dissent towards the narrative promoted by the voyage.12 The same students who travel to Poland at age sixteen will don backpacks at age twenty-one (cf. Feldman 2005a) and experience other alternatives, which are neither Israel nor Auschwitz. As they reflect on the voyage in future years, some may come to question the vision of the world presented by the trips to Poland13 and feel uncomfortable at “seeing (their) sense of self as constituted by (their) constitution of other people’s otherness” (Dominguez 1989: 191). An alternative risk entailed by the promotion of this event that models as a unique experience is that it may become so successful that it undermines other, more routinized bureaucratic means of its transmission. Will Israelis continue to remember the Shoah through textbooks, exhibits, and school ceremonies if they are seen as a mere shadow of the real thing in Poland?14 James Young warns: “Once we assign monumental form to memory ... we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember” (1992: 273; cf. 1994)

Notes 1. The role of violence, strife, and death among participants in various “centers out there” was minimized by Turner, but is frequently mentioned in critiques of communitas and of Turner’s paradigms for pilgrimage (Eade and Sallnow 2000; Galbraith 2000) and rites of passage (Lincoln 1981: 102–105; Morris 1987: 259–263), and is central in the analysis of “dark tourism” (Foley and Lennon 2000). Other analyses (based on the work of René Girard) see violence towards others as integral in the constitution of tribes and nations (Marvin and Ingle 1999). I believe that it is Turner’s humanistic spiritual orientation that led him to see such manifestations as external and antithetical to the essence of the spiritual quest. 2. Hazan makes this claim with respect to the Israeli voyages to Poland, based on the variety of school preparation programs for Poland trips (Hazan 2001: 53). I have argued previously that Hazan’s study places undue emphasis on preparations and that the voyage itself promotes a far more uniform Israeli memory. 3. A growing body of scholarly literature demonstrates how such understandings may be constituted or transmitted through practices of travel and tourism

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4.

5.

6.

7.

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(Markowitz and Stephansson 2004; Coles and Timothy 2004; Basu 2004; Kelner 2002; Ebron 2002: 183–211; Levy 1997; Bruner 1996). The case of the Poland voyages complicates matters, insofar as, unlike the visits of African Americans to Africa (Bruner; Ebron; Schramm) or Australians of Scottish origin to the Scottish Highlands (Basu 2004), in the voyages to Poland, the state of current residence presents itself as the original homeland and the teleological end of Diaspora existence. The cases of American Jewish voyages to Israel (Kelner 2002; Goldberg, Heilman, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002) or to other Diasporic Jewish communities (Kosansky 2002) present other issues. While Coles and Timothy (2004) assemble a substantial number of cases and have made an initial attempt at ordering diaspora homeland travels, a theoretically informed comparative study could yield significant insights for the study of nationalism and diasporas in the global era. The case of the Poland voyages reminds us that practices of roots tours of ethnic or diasporic groups reflect the identity politics of various minorities, the nature of historical experience in the previous homelands, as well as intergenerationally transmitted cultural paradigms shaping touring or memorial practices. Voyages to ancestral homelands can play a wide variety of functions. They may reinforce ethnic identity and empower minorities within the larger hegemonic national community. They may reinforce identification with the nation in the new place of residence. In some cases (Levy 1997), they may do both. For a sensitive and comprehensive, yet succinct summary of the wide variety of forms and practices in Holocaust travel, see the chapter “The Shrines of the Holocaust” in the recently published book Pilgrimage and the Jews (Gitlitz and Davidson 2006: 157–188). Among the alternative voyages to Poland are the Orthodox voyages (see appendix) and the American (Stier 2005: 150–190; 1995; Feldman 1995: 35–36; Kugelmass 1994; 1993) and Canadian Jewish March of the Living, which foster a Diasporic Jewish identity combining commitments to support Israel with a struggle against the threat of assimilation and intermarriage (Blumer forthcoming). In 2003, a joint Israeli Jewish-Arab voyage traveled to the death camps. For the varieties of preparatory programs of Israel voyages, see Hazan 1999; 2001: 31–55. Such outmoded or declining practices include not only the establishment of agricultural settlements, but many of the bodily practices which Zionism employed to inscribe the text on the land—hikes to Biblical places (Katriel 1995), archaeology (Elon 1996), climbing Masada (Ben-Yehuda 1995), and military parades and commemorations on Mount Herzl and Tel Hai; even military service, the most intense bodily expression of the willingness to sacrifice, no longer enjoys full consensus among Jewish Israelis. It would be of interest to compare the Poland voyages with commemorative military rites held outside of national territory, such as the popular pilgrimages of Australians to Gallipoli, where Turks and Australians unite in common affirmation of brotherhood on the site of the bloody World War I battlefield (West 2002). Although over the past five years, following Poland’s entry into the European Economic Community, Polish diplomats have publicly protested the antiPolish nature of the voyage in meetings with their Israeli counterparts. This probably reflects the increased confidence of Poland in the world arena.

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9. For a critical discussion of Handelman’s distinctions between models and mirrors, primitive and bureaucratic societies, see Herzfeld 2001: 254–277. 10. This is what Education Professor Yair Auron condemns as Sartreian Jewish identity: “The Jew is the man that others see as a Jew ... The anti-Semite makes the Jew” (Auron 1993: 13). 11. The question of the centrality of texts, as opposed to bodies, in Jewish history has been the subject of a heated debate between Leon Wieseltier (texts) and Jonathan Boyarin (bodies) in Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 3 (2005). See also Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (in the same issue) who argues against the identification of texts with disembodied ideas (2005: 457–458): “Such abstract notions arose through processes of disembodiment and dematerialization as technologies of writing and printing separated the text from its oral and gestural performance, while reading and interpretative practices made the physical characteristics of the text irrelevant. As a result, the text was gradually purified at every point of reference related to the senses.” 12. For a similar reaction towards the Masada Myth of the 1960s, see the opening chapter of Ben-Yehuda 1995. 13. One student who was strongly emotionally affected by the voyage in eleventh grade insisted on traveling there a second time a year later. On his return, he was highly critical: “I thought something real happened, but after the second time, I realized that it’s all manipulations. It’s all bullshit.” 14. According to one scholar, the annual march of youth groups from Yad Vashem to Mount Herzl (cf. Feldman 2005b: 25–28) was instituted to provide the students from schools with large delegations visiting Poland, who opted not to travel there (or could not afford to do so), a substitute for the Poland voyage (Mooli Brog, oral communication).

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Afterword

The night before I was to present a lecture on my research, I had a dream. In it, I was wandering around my grandfather’s house in Ungvár (Uzhhorod), a house that (in the dream) also contained his tombstone and those of the extinct Jewish community. A group of young Hungarians were performing some activity at the new swimming pool built on the site. I slinked around, trying to find my grandfather’s tomb, with no success. In a second dream scene, I sat at a long wooden picnic table somewhere in the house, along with the participants of the training course for Israeli tour guides in Poland, listening to a young Hungarian female guide explain something. She then turned to me and said, “And now, I thought you would tell us the story of your father.” I stammered, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t taking notes.” In the last scene of the dream, I left Ungvár with my wife in a New York subway car. Suddenly, I realized that I did not succeed in finding the tomb of my grandfather and my voyage was incomplete; I will have to return. Israeli teenagers, when they reach a point in their development when they begin to ask themselves who they are and where they came from, would like to be able to rummage for an answer in the houses and dusty attics of their grandparents. But the houses are often also their tombs. Many don’t exist any more. The way back, for many young Israelis, leads through Auschwitz. It is this search for roots, for a tie to Jewish history that leads many—myself included— to Poland. Yet, when students or guides publicly represent our pasts before the representatives of the nation, in the context of the organized mass trips, some part of our search is lost along the way. The multiplicity of personal meanings arising from the Shoah cannot all be contained within the narrative of mishoah litekumah (from Holocaust to redemption). So, either we close our eyes, join in the chorus of Kaddish and Hatikvah, and try to focus on our dead, our living, or we stammer, “Sorry, I wasn’t taking notes.” If, in my research, I represent the voyage as merely the latest stage in the Zionist appropriation of Jewish memory, my story is incomplete as well.

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In a 1986 interview, Claude Lanzmann, director of the film, Shoah, explained: “When does the Holocaust really end? Did it end the last day of the war? Did it end with the creation of the State of Israel? No. It still goes on. These events are of such magnitude, of such scope that they have never stopped developing their consequences.... When I really had to conclude I decided that I did not have the right to do it.... And I decided that the last image of the film would be a rolling train, an endlessly rolling ... train” (Lanzmann, quoted in Felman 1992: 242). The New York subway train taking me out of Ungvár is not the cattle car that brought my grandfather to Auschwitz. They travel in opposite directions. And yet, the two trains are, in some way, coupled to each other. Often, quite often, the way back is the only way forward.

7.1. The shlissl yid, holder of the key to the Jewish cemetery of Ungvar leads the author to the grave of his grandmother

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Appendix: The Orthodox Delegations to Poland

Most of the fieldwork that served as the basis for this book was carried out among State secular schools. This appendix provides a short account of the variant Orthodox voyages to Poland.1 In Israel, Orthodox and haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) students study in separate school frameworks, and their voyages to Poland may reflect different values and dynamics. Among the religious groups in Israel, haredim do not go on Holocaust trips. For most of their families, the school trips are prohibitively expensive. If they travel to Eastern Europe at all, it is in order to accumulate merit by praying and prostrating themselves on the tombs of their respective Hassidic leaders or celebrate Rosh Hashanah at the tomb of Rabbi Nachman in Uman in the Ukraine.2 Usually, they will travel with their families or other Hassidim of the same sect. Their voyages may include a visit to Auschwitz, but death sites will not be the epicenter of the voyage, and the pilgrimage will focus on prayer, renewal, and healing. Furthermore, charisma is not mediated in these journeys by the symbolic type of the witness-survivor-hero. Rather, the dead zaddik or the living rebbe serve as alternative symbolic types. Some claim that the reality of the Holocaust and the sense of belonging to a people set apart by God, for chosenness and persecution, is so much a part of haredi perception, that it does not need to be created through repeated visits to hosts of camps or through securityinduced isolation. Who needs a bus to create a sense of separation when a kapote (long coat), tzitzis (ritual fringes), and peyes (sidelocks) will do? Furthermore, these groups cannot accept the redemptive role assigned to the State of Israel as answer to the Holocaust (cf. Schindler 1990; Friedman 1990). The religious youths who do travel on the Poland school trips are almost all of the Zionist National Religious public.3 Among the differences between National Religious Ministry of Education delegations and so-called secular groups are: (1) The itinerary of National Notes for this section begin on page 276.

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Religious groups is even more insular and includes more Jewish religious sites and avoids churches.4 (2) Shopping time (if available) is allotted on Friday, instead of Shabbat, and the Shabbat experience is more significant. (3) Special kosher food in sealed packages is provided to be eaten on paper plates.5 (4) The group finds it easier to identify with pre-War Jewish life than the secular youth groups. Most religious groups travel with Orthodox youth movements or private agents, to assure kashrut and Shabbat observance and avoid the temptations of contact with the nonreligious. Although the Ministry of Education sought to attract religious youth in order to promote the trips as occasions of achdut Israel (the unity of Israel), it has conceded to desires of the religious, and organized separate allreligious delegations. The only times most religious groups meet up with students of nonreligious schools are on the plane and at the hotel, at the Kabalat Shabbat service (on religious ground), at the Israeli song evening (see below), and on Holocaust Memorial Day, in the March of the Living from Auschwitz I to Birkenau. Religious groups can be distinguished in Poland through girls’ modest dress (skirts and long sleeves), boys’ head coverings, thricedaily prayer services (sometimes in public),6 and greater synagogue attendance. In the delegation I observed, differences between the ulpanot or yeshivot (intense religious study frameworks, often with dormitories) and the State Religious schools were greater than those between State Religious (mamlakhti dati [MAMAD]) schools and their secular counterparts. Most religious groups feel connected to religious Jewish life sites. In his research, Haim Hazan found that past Jewish life in Poland was the key to their preparatory programs (Hazan 2001: 50). Some of the names of Polish Jewish religious leaders are familiar to them, and the synagogue building is a home for them (see chapter 4, p. 116 above). They identify more with the Jewish past, insofar as it is portrayed as Orthodox, and have easier access to religious forms of commemoration through their daily practice. For them, commemoration does not require planning, but springs, ready-made, from their pocket prayer books.8 Among MAMAD students, I generally witnessed greater respect for the teachers and fewer disciplinary problems. This may result from the greater respect for law and order among religious youth in general (Liebman 1993: 274–275). Delegation leaders and teachers occasionally reminded the group that they were to serve as the “banner before the camp.” (“One of the aims is to raise us above the grayness of the common Israeli.”). In the groups I observed, issues of

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religious faith rarely came up. Where they did, they were stifled by the teacher: “Faith begins where rational answers end.” Students’ dissatisfied with the explanation that the Holocaust was punishment for assimilation (mipne hata’enu) or a “rod of chastisement” could not voice their questions publicly. Orthodox religious education, in general, is geared to protecting morals, inculcating habits, and strengthening group identity, rather than questioning essential beliefs. Most religious teachers and organizers proclaim that the trip is designed to strengthen the students’ faith. Overall, however, the itineraries and organization and social dynamic in the MAMAD groups is similar to that of secular groups. Both are interested in meeting the opposite sex (though religious students’ behavior is both more restrained and more closely scrutinized by their teachers). Both listen to the same music and share similar expectations of the voyage. They are fascinated by the horrors of the camp and bored by many of the synagogues and cemeteries. One student summed up: “We should just visit camps, that’s what we came here for; maybe stick in a zaddik’s tomb here or there” (12 September 1997). Often their knowledge of and interest in the Jewish past in Poland is no greater than that of secular groups. The ulpana girls, on the other hand, had great expectations of their visits to tombs of zaddikim. They brought packets of prayer requests from family and friends to Rabbi Elimelech’s tomb and sat there for over an hour singing mournful songs. The difference between the ulpanot/yeshivot and the MAMAD groups becomes evident in the discussion among the teachers in reaction to the Israeli song evening. An ulpana teacher said: “When I arrived at the song evening, I was in shock. I stood there with a torn soul and with tears in my eyes. There is a minimum beneath which we cannot descend on the eve of the visit to Auschwitz. But there has to be a minimum of tact and respect; to do this instead of preparing for Auschwitz!” Another ulpana teacher said: “The purpose of the trip is to bolster their faith. To teach them sexual modesty. The hearing of the voice of a female singer in person is prohibited by the Torah (d’oraita). There are girls that shook their bodies (int’zu) with the rest. In the beginning there were Eretz Israel songs, but later, too many wide beds… Even the most lenient rabbi could not permit listening to performance of a woman singer—it is a prohibition mid’oraita… I don’t have to bring religious girls to a performance where they’ll shake their bodies to the music.” A witness, who was also a MAMAD teacher, replied: “Woe unto us if we educate our kids to ghettoization!

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They need to see something else, regardless of whatever hothouse we raise them in. They’ll be in the army and they’ll see. We live in a wide world, and we religious cannot enclose ourselves in our four amot (yards).” On shopping, an ulpana teacher said: “I regret that our girls participated in the bulimia of shopping. There are many girls who regretted having succumbed to the temptation; it was embarrassing. We have to set a higher moral standard, and not give free time for shopping.8” A MAMAD teacher replied: “I think it’s perfectly legitimate for kids who came here to spend a quarter of an hour buying some souvenir for friends.” This discussion reflects strong differences within the religious world. Whereas some schools place great value on integration into the larger society and assign positive value to openness and general culture, others are more concerned with halakhic stringency, greater separation, and guarding the morals and standards of the youth, and accord little or no value to non-Jewish culture. When groups travel with private Orthodox agencies, the atmosphere on their tours is even more insular than that of the Ministry of Education. The head of the religious sector of the Ministry of Education writes: “The preparations, the testimony of the witnesses on the sites … and the religious expressions through prayers … leave a deep experiential impression … that deepens the education towards religious values, while rejecting the style of permissive Western society, which often seems to preach towards the slogan ‘eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.’… May this book be a further layer in the efforts of the religious Zionist society to see in the State of Israel the only possibility for our generation, by negating the exile and continuing the struggle over the Jewish nature of our State” (Dagan in Alfasi 1994: 6). These groups see their religious lifestyle as the organic continuation of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Poland, while “the struggle for the Jewish nature of the State” (through settlement of the greater Land of Israel?), reflects their self-understanding and self-promotion as exemplary Zionists: “Although the yeshivot did not come on aliyah, their Torah is being taught in the yeshivot and ulpanot of Bnei Akiva that were established in Israel … ‘the houses of study are destined to come on aliyah to Israel’” (Alfasi 1994: 21). The Orthodox project their current Israeli Judaism onto the screen of Poland and, like the secular, claim that they are the telos of Jewish history and the heirs to Diaspora Judaism. The insular nature of the voyage and the encounters (real or imagined) with Polish anti-Semitism are extended to the Arab-Israeli

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dispute. Liebman writes (1993: 277): “The de-emphasis on universal standards of morality on the part of many rabbinic leaders extends beyond the Israel-Arab dispute.… Behind the [attitudes and values described above] lies a worldview that is formed, in part, by basic halakhic notions that divide the world into right and wrong, good and evil, pure and impure. These attitudes and values … are rarely articulated. They are conveyed by indirection and in a matter-of-fact manner, as basic assumptions, not only of Judaism, but of human nature and the cosmos.” A recent study, conducted by Auron, Keren, and Levy indicates that the greater the religious commitment among Israeli youths, the more likely they are to see all gentiles as intrinsically anti-Semitic.9 This insular ideology is also expressed through articulations of eternal hatred of the Poles and animosity towards the goyim. The late Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriah wrote: “It is a sacred obligation to remember the deeds of the Polish people, who are imbued with a venomous hatred towards every Jew—a hatred which trickles down to this very day. These were the people who assisted in the execution of mass murder, and whose children also slaughtered many.… We must remember all this so as not to live with the illusions of “another Germany” or “another Poland,” to see with open eyes the world in which we live—this seeing and knowledge also has implications for our lives and our security [emphasis mine].… Remember our murdered and remember our murderers—we shall not forget!” (Neriah in Alfasi 1994: 26–27).10

In the religious group voyages, many of the nationalistic and xenophobic messages that I intuit behind the schedule and logistics of the Ministry of Education voyages are explicitly proclaimed by leaders and staff. The visibly Jewish National Religious groups inevitably attract anti-Semitic reactions that “prove” the veracity of this worldview. Based on a study of voyage preparation programs, Haim Hazan writes that the religious school groups’ view of the Holocaust constructs a bridge to Jewish history and emphasizes the continuity of Jewish life. State-secular school groups, he claims, stress the dissociation of the Holocaust from Jewish history and the contrast of the Holocaust with the self-identification with a sovereign and strong Israeli state (Hazan 2001: 52). I find that although religious Zionist groups do identify more strongly with the religious past in Poland, it is a past constructed in their own image. They, too, require synagogues empty of Jews in order to see themselves as the fulfillment of the prophecy that “the houses of study are destined to come on aliyah to Israel.”

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Notes 1. The data for this chapter was gathered on a Prague-Poland voyage of an Orthodox delegation that I guided on 8–18 September 1997. I supplemented my information with interviews of religious educators and voyage planners and attendance at Poland voyage preparation meetings. 2. For reports of these voyages, see Shemer 1995; Epstein 1995; Fenton 1990. 3. Some National Religious rabbinic authorities opposed the voyages, mainly on grounds of the prohibition of leaving the Land of Israel for purposes other than the study of Torah, out of objection to walking the “impure soil of Amalek,” or as a refusal to contribute to the welfare of modern-day Poland (or Germany). Rabbi Neriah Gutl argues that the commandment to remember Amalek is not through seeing the remains, but “by word and in the heart—this is the way of the Torah” (Gutl 1994: 135). Nevertheless, he claims that there is no halakhic prohibition against the visits. 4. Haim Hazan quotes a delegate from a religious school in Tel Aviv: “A journey to Poland is a journey to the Holocaust. We don’t visit other sites, except for Jewish sites. We are not tourists, but pilgrims” (Hazan 2001: 50). 5. Nevertheless, some religious teachers are dissatisfied with the level of kashrut supervision. Among Bnei Akiva groups (not organized by the Ministry), a rabbi accompanies all groups traveling to Poland. His function is “to provide atmosphere, teach Torah, and reinforce faith” (E. Hartman, interview, 27 May 1996). 6. The prayer services were obligatory for boys, though not for girls. Some National Religious boys on the delegation I accompanied tried to avoid prayer services if they could get away with it. 7. Trip organizer Yossi Levi said in an interview: “I’m jealous of the religious. They open the Book of Psalms and they have their entire ceremony prepared” (31 July 1994). 8. Bnei Akiva participants are instructed: “We are traveling to Poland only in order to stand and pray at the tombs of the zaddikim and to visit the death camps and the places that served as synagogues ... therefore the program does not allow free time ‘to waste money or for shopping expeditions’” (Alfasi 1994: 31). Another religious group leader referred to shopping in Poland as a temptation to be overcome, and exhorted students “not to give the Poles a penny more than necessary” (H. L., September 1993). His appeals fell on deaf ears. 9. Yair Auron, lecture on Israeli youths’ perceptions of anti-Semitism and racism, at Van Leer Institute, 6 December 1996. 10. The reference to Arabs as Amalek, the eternal enemy, is made explicit in other writings and on several occasions in the course of the journey.

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_____. 1998. From Catastrophe to Power. Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel. Berkeley: University of California. _____. 2002. Ha’uma Vehamavet: Historia, Zikaron Upolitika. Or Yehuda: Dvir. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1985. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. New York: Free Press. _____. 1993. “In the Beginning: Notes on the Social Construction of Historical Discontinuity.” Sociological Inquiry 63, no. 4 (November): 457–459. Zerubavel, Yael. 1994a. “The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. E. Gelis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. _____. 1994b. “The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors.” Representations 45 (Winter): 72–100. _____. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. _____. 1996. “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics and the Archaeology of Memory.” Israel Studies 1, no. 1: 60–99. Zimmermann, Moshe. 1994. “Israels Umgang mit dem Holocaust.” In Der umgang mit dem Holocaust in Europa/ USA/ Israel, ed. Rolf Steininger. Institüt für Zeitgeshcichte der Universität Insbruck/ Jüdische Museum Höhenems, Band 1, Böhlau: Wien, Köln, Weimar. _____. 1996. “Zwischen Historiographie und Ideologie; Zum israelischen Diskurs über den Holocaust.” In Auschwitz: Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung, Fritz Bauer Institut (Hg.). Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Zuckermann, Moshe. 1993. Hashoah Baheder Ha’atum. Tel Aviv: Hotza’at Hamehaber. _____. 1995. “Al Israelim, Polanim Vesabonim.” Hed Hahinukh: 14–17. _____. 1998. Zweierlei Holocaust: Der Holocaust in den politischen Kulturen Israels und Deutschlands. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. _____. 2001. Haroshet Ha’israeliyut: Mitosim Ve’idiologia Behevra Mesukhsekhet. Tel Aviv: Resling.

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A Alexander, Jeffrey, 17-18, 28n10 aliyah, 154, 194, 204, 210, 226n14, 256, 274, 275 Almog, Oz, 32, 33, 62-63, 134 Aloni, Shulamit, 60 Amichai, Yehuda, 29, 171 Anderson, Benedict, 13, 263 anti-Semitism, xiv, 3, 45, 55n29, 81, 85, 88, 102, 103, 115, 121-122, 150, 170, 183n5, 185n30, 196, 212, 238, 241, 245, 257, 274-275, 276n9 Appelfeld, Aharon, 33 Arab Israelis, 54n20 Arabs, attitudes towards, 122, 152, 154, 244, 274, 276n10 Ashkenazim, 42-43, 45, 73-74, 98, 116, 237, 252n11 Auron, Yair, 2, 3, 41, 42, 46, 58, 239, 249, 252n12, 268n10, 275, 276n9 Auschwitz, xv, 1, 3, 54n12, 57, 6869, 79, 81- 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93n4, 93n8, 94n16, 95n25, 95n29, 95n31, 105, 132-134, 135- 248, 151-154, 159, 161, 167-169, 172, 184n24, 185n30, 185nn32-33, 194203, 213, 235, 236, 265-266, 270 Authenticity, 88-89, 91, 95n28, 106, 117, 140, 142, 146-149, 163-172, 175, 184n21, 186n37, 193, 209, 220, 221-222, 263 B Bar-On, Dan, 17-18, 33-34, 40-42, 234 Barak, Ehud, 151, 222 Bat-El, Ilana, 2, 16, 49-51, 247

Ballinger, Pamela, 17, 19, 42, 43 Bauman, Zygmunt, 19, 42-43, 54n17, 242, 245-246, 268n9 Begin, Menachem, 34, 38, 50, 55n25 Ben-Amos, Avner, 2, 16, 49-51, 247 Ben-Ari, Eyal, 39, 41, 54n16, 74, 210, 252n16, 260, 262 Bilu, Yoram, 39, 41, 210, 252n16, 260, 262 borders, “Auschwitz”, 37 boundaries, xvi, 6, 10, 69, 99-100, 123, 215, 217, 219, 241, 259, 260, 264, 265 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 43 Brink, Cornelia, 106, 142, 163-165, 185n28 Bruner, Edward, 88, 241, 267n4 Bruner, Jose, 38 bureaucracy, 25, 260, 262, 264-266 C Carmon, Arieh, 44, 185n45, 246 carriers of memory, xv, 19, 159, 235, 230-237, 242, 255-258 Caruth, Cathy, 28n10, 245, 248 Casey, Edward, 89, 117, 255 center out there, xviii, 6, 266n1 centers of death 79, 84- 85, 92, 130, 135, 163-164, 168. Center, sacred, 4-5, 85, 93n8, 205, 241, 255 ceremonies, see also commemoration, Holocaust, 13, 19, 24-25, 46-47, 55n31, 71, 75-76, 80, 83-85, 86, 90, 135-136, 170, 172-173, 182, 246, 257 ceremonies, civil, 46, 49-52, 230, 248, 263

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ceremonies, Holocaust memorial, 93n12, 112-115, 119, 141142, 150-153, 181-182, 188227, 236-237, 247 ceremonies, military, 151, 222, 230, 243, 265 ceremonies, religious, 7, 227n28, 125 ceremonies, school, 43, 50-52, 61, 251n10, 266 Chernobyl, 57-58 Christian pilgrimage, xvi, 5 civil religion, 1, 12-14, 47, 53n8, 55n28, 189-190, 241 Cohen, Avraham Oded, 6, 57, 63, 76, 202, 249, 253n24 Cohen, Erik, xii, 5, 6, 12-14, 21, 36, 41, 65-66, 110, 214, 255, 261 collective memory, xviii, 1, 5-6, 9-12, 17, 24, 31, 46, 49-50, 136 148, 254, 259 commemoration, 7-8, 9, 17-18, 26, 49, 55n28, 211, 214-215, 265, 267n6, 272 commemoration, Holocaust, 9-11, 16, 17, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46-53, 90, 93n3, 112115, 134, 141, 150, 151-153, 171, 181-182, 189, 190, 191193, 196, 204, 206, 210, 211, 225n7, 227n28, 254 , communitas, 4, 62, 223, 231, 255, 266n1 Connerton, Paul, 7, 10, 24, 35, 46, 52, 198n1, 201 cosmopolitanism, 254, 259-260 Cracow, xvii, 65, 71, 81-83, 86-87, 95n25, 114, 125, 129-132, 153, 173, 184n14, 184n21, 219 crying, 22, 26, 74, 100, 114, 121, 124, 134-135, 141-142, 152, 161, 163, 169, 173, 197-198, 206-207, 211, 219-223, 225n11, 243, 263-264 D Danieli, Yael, 17, 199 death-world, 6, 7, 10, 35, 52, 83-84, 87, 114 121, 135, 147, 164, 189, 200, 224, 245, 255-256

301

discussion groups, 120-122, 152-153, 174 Dominguez, Virginia, 41-42, 128, 266 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 12, 37-38, 214 Douglas, Mary, 99, 101, 226n15, 245, 252n19 Dwork, Deborah, 28n13, 91n4, 95n31, 136, 140, 180, 184n25 E Eade, John, 6-7, 25, 56, 266n1 education, Holocaust, 6, 7, 25, 43-46 Eichmann trial, 34-35, 37, 53n8 Eisen, Arnold, 126, 261 Eliade, Mircea, 134, 147 Elkana, Yehuda, 28n11, 39 emotion, 44-45, 50,59n7, 65, 94n14, 120-122, 135, 153, 157, 169, 172, 173-176, 189, 190, 198, 204-205, 206-207, 219, 220, 223, 231-232, 235, 236, 243, 262 environmental bubble, 70, 80, 77-81, 110, 124, 221 ethnicity, 3, 14, 35, 41-42, 45, 73-74, 98, 116, 241 237, 251n11, 259, 262, 267n4 ethnographic method, 11, 19-21, 24, 25-26, 41-43, 97, 183n1 experience, 2-7, 9, 11, 15, 24, 44, 47, 56, 65, 67- 69, 85, 89, 91n5, 98-99, 121, 133-134, 140, 142, 153, 162, 166-167, 184n15, 209, 229-231, 233-237, 249, 257, 263, 265-266 Ezrachi, Sidra, xii, 85, 87 F Feldman, Jackie, xvi- xvii, 20, 28n14, 40, 49, 93n13, 99, 183n4, 183n12, 186n37, 193, 206, 212, 225n7, 246, 251n5, 252n19, 260, 264, 266, 267n5 268n14 Felman, Shoshana, 68, 89, 183n8, 198, 270 fertile center 200, 202 Firer, Ruth, 2, 44 flags, 22, 26, 50-51, 60, 71-72, 94n14, 103, 108, 110, 112-114, 115, 124, 138-140, 144, 146,

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302

150-151, 159, 162-163, 173, 175, 179, 182, 183n9, 191-192, 194, 196-197, 199-203, 207, 211, 215219, 223, 236, 238, 240-244, 247, 251n4, 253n23, 254, 256- 258, 260, 262- 265 food, 61, 67, 71-72, 80, 87, 93n13, 99, 112, 121, 127-128, 130, 133,145, 175, 183n2 185nn34,41, 230, 272 Friedlander, Saul, 28n12, 248 G Geertz, Clifford, 7-8 gender and the voyage, 35, 71, 74, 94n19, 125-126, 128, 169, 183n1, 215, 272-274, 276n6 geulah, 11, 31, 23, 240, 255, 260. See also redemption gibush (crystallization of the group), 76, 100-101, 120, 132, 152, 231 Golani, Motti, 3, 242 Grimes, Roland, 204 Gur-Zeev, Ilan, 2, 3 Gutmann, Israel, 36, 38, 45 habitus, 2, 36, 38, 43, 116 Halbwachs, Maurice, xii, 2, 7-9, 1516, 19, 27n3, 40, 43, 48-50, 56n26, 61-63, 68, 93n7, 93n9, 93n12, 115, 149, 151, 172, 190, 192, 198, 226n20, 227n22, 248, 254, 260262, 265, 268n9 Handelman, Don, xii, 2, 7-9, 15, 16, 19, 27n3, 40, 43, 48, 49, 50, 55n26, 60, 61-62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 81, 83, 88, 93n7, 93n9, 93n12, 115, 149, 151, 169, 171, 190, 192, 198, 210, 212, 226n20, 227n22, 248, 254, 260, 261-266, 268n9 Hatikvah (Israeli national anthem), 51, 103, 112, 114-115, 119, 150, 173, 182, 196, 201-202, 207, 211, 214-215, 218-219, 223, 227n25, 227nn29-30, 243, 256, 258, 269 Hausner, Gideon, 35, 48, 55n28 Hazan, Haim, 21, 28n14, 59, 75, 95n21, 122, 259, 266n2, 267n5, 272, 275, 276n4

Index

history, Jewish, 1, 13-14, 21, 28n14, 31, 45-46, 49, 59, 81, 238, 240, 255, 258, 268-269, 274-275 history, Israeli, 31, 35, 40, 58 Hobsbawm, Eric, 7, 13, 52 Holocaust, xiii, xv, xvii-xix, 1-3, 10, 12, 14, 15-16, 17-22, 24, 25, 26, 27n1, 28n9, 28n13, 30-52, 53, 54n10, 54n17, 54n20, 54n22, 55n24, 55n27, 55n31, 56-57, 5960, 64-65, 67-68, 71, 73-75, 77, 80-83, 85-90, 92, 97, 99-101, 103, 106, 108, 110, 113-114, 117, 119120, 122, 127, 132-138, 145, 147149, 151-155, 157, 167-170, 178-182, 185n28, 185n30, 186n37, 190-191, 194, 196, 200, 202, 204206, 209-211, 213, 216, 220, 222, 226n15, 226nn20-21, 227nn22-23, 230, 234-239, 242, 245-249, 250, 251n4, 251n8, 252n17, 253nn2324, 254-255, 257-260, 262, 264, 266 267n5, 269-271, 273-275, 276n4 Holocaust Memorial Day, xv, 2, 16, 25, 31-32, 42, 43, 44, 49-53, 55n25, 93n12, 138, 161, 184n24, 191, 204, 214, 224n3, 226n14, 233-234, 249, 251n9, 253n23, 272 Holocaust memory, 2, 11, 14, 17, 19, 28nn12-13, 30-31, 32, 34, 39-40, 46, 48, 49-53, 55n28, 229, 251n8, 254, 259 Holy Land, xvi, xviii, 186n36 humanism, 59-60 hurban, xvii, 1, 11-12, 48, 240, 247, 255 , See also Temple, destruction I Israel Independence Day, 49, 86, 226n14 Ingle, David, 16, 27n6, 200-201, 215, 217, 224n2, 244, 254, 262-264, 266n1 intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust, 16, 27n6, 118, 119, 199-201, 234-236, 250. See also carriers of memory intifada, 39, 41, 54n16, 246

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invented tradition, 30, 41, 52 itinerary, 20, 24-25, 28n14, 56-58, 63, 65, 70-71, 76-77, 81-84, 86-87, 92n2, 94n18, 109, 215, 271 J journals, students’, xiii, 23, 25, 28n15, 97, 141, 152, 183n1, 226n14 K Kaddish, 48, 112, 115, 119, 187n48, 192, 197, 205-206, 211, 214-215, 227n26, 235, 269 Kapferer, Bruce, 6-7, 9, 12, 37, 128, 203, 260 Kasztner trial, 34-35 Katriel, Tamar, 14, 23, 62, 68, 73, 75, 90, 93n10, 97, 100, 101, 152, 252n16, 265, 267n6 Katz, Elihu, 8, 49, 66, 86, 90 Keren, Nili, 2, 44, 54n9, 72, 75, 249, 252n12, 262, 275 Kertzer, David, 7, 9, 11-12, 46, 189, 190-192, 217, 223 Kidron, Carol, 18-19, 159, 186n37 Kimmerling, Baruch, 12-13, 36, 43, 214, 244 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 163, 259, 263, 267nn3,4, 268n11 kitsch and death, 19, Kolbe, Maximillian, 136, 143, 185n33 Koontz, Claudia, 28n13, 186n36 Kovner, Abba, 32-33 Kugelmass, Jack, 54n17, 57, 138, 178, 284n20, 226n20, 267n5 L Langer, Lawrence, 147, 149, 183n12 Langer, Suzanne, 198n1, 205, 206, 231 Lanzmann, Claude, 89, 148-149, 183n8, 270 Lazar, Alon, 21, 94n19, 233, 244, 252n13, 252n17 legitimation, 12-13, 34, 38, 120, 220 Lev, Michal, 21, 77, 83, 94n17, 94n19, 184n23, 187n47, 224n1,

303

233, 237-240, 247, 252n15, 252n18, 252n20 Levy, Andre, 41, 84, 95n24, 240, 52n16, 267nn3-4 Levy, Daniel, 16, 39, 54n10, 184n21, 254, 259-260 Liebman, Charles, 12-13, 30, 214, 272, 275 lieux de memoire, 40 Lomsky-Feder, Edna, 2, 16, 40, 52, 211, 237, 247, 251n10 Lowenthal, David, 163-164, 253n26 M MacCannell, Dean, 88, 95n30, 140, 178, 236 Majdanek, 79, 81-83, 86, 89, 91-92, 124, 127, 135, 142, 155-156, 158161, 163-164, 167-168-176, 185n27, 186n41, 186n43, 187n46, 187n49, 193-194, 202, 208-210, 212, 216-217, 220-221, 225n6, 226n15, 227n27, 230, 232-233, 237-238, 262 March of the Living, 93n4, 138, 184n24, 186n41, 187n51, 191, 210, 225n5, 226n14, 250n2, 267n5, 272 Marvin, Carolyn, 16, 27n6, 200-201, 215, 217, 224n2, 244, 254, 262264, 266n1 masa, voyage as, 22, 61-63, 86, 133134, 180 master commemorative narrative, 1, 15, 16, 32, memory paradigms, 10, 11-13, 31, 55n28, 255 memory, Polish, 89-90, 118-119, 136, 137-138, 143-144, 159-160, 185n30, 185n33 Ministry of Education, Israel, xiv, 2-4, 6, 9 11-14, 20-25, 28n14, 30, 31, 10, 12, 15, 20, 40, 44-45, 51-52, 56-58, 62-65, 70, 72-76, 81-82, 92, 98, 125, 128, 133-135, 181, 184n14, 185n34, 187n47, 189, 193, 202, 204, 224n3, 230, 237, 249, 253n24, 261-262, 271, 272, 274-275

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304

Ministry of Education: Director General’s Circular (DGC), 58-61, 75, 134, 230, 241, 255 Mizrahim, 2, 16, 41-42, 45, 52, 74, 94n15, 98, 237, 251n11 models and mirrors, 7, 9, 42-46 passim, 52, 54n19, 190, 254, 260266. 262, 268n9 Mosse, George, 12, 48, 260 Mount Herzl, 49, 55n26, 226n17, 247, 267n6, 268n14 mourning rituals, xvii, xiv,17, 24, 47, 48-49, 55n26, 62, 129, 144, 150, 196, 205-208, 211, 214, 240, 243 museums, Holocaust, see also Yad Vashem, xii, 1, 16-17, 25, 27n1, 28n13, 31, 47-49, 51, 53n6, 54n19, 55nn25-26, 64, 78, 93n12, 95n29, 99, 104, 106, 114, 131, 136-137, 142, 144, 151-152, 164, 166, 180, 185n30, 204, 210, 222, 226n20, 227n22, 249, 259, 268n14 N National Religious schools, 51, 129, 192, 215, 227n25, 271-275, 276n3 nationalism, 6, 13, 26, 28n8, 37, 51, 127, 128, 185n30, 196, 229, 239, 242-248, 260, 262-264, 267n4 nationalism, religion of, 51, 37-38, 128 Ne’eman-Arad, Guli, 28n13, 54n17 Nora, Pierre, 40, 253n26 nostalgia, xvii, 127, 177, 218, 240, 252n16 O Ofer, Dalia, 33-35, 39, 45, 53nn1-3, 54n9, 55n26 Ofir, Adi, 10, 15, 20, 28n11, 39, 133, 187n45, 231-232, 249 Orthodox groups, 16, 23, 26, 61, 75, 95n22, 105, 116-17, 133, 183n10, 183n13, 186n39, 240 271-275 Orthodox Judaism, xv, 4, 27n2, 41, 125-129, 131, 154-155 192, 215, 227n29, 239, 267n5

Index

P performance, xviii, 68, 3, 6-8, 10, 13, 17, 31, 50, 68, 73, 85, 88, 93n7, 97, 106, 136, 141, 147, 171, 178, 185n30, 192, 206, 208-211, 214215, 217, 231, 235, 257-260, 268n11 performance and structure, 5-6, 2426, 56-57, 92 periodization in Zionist history, 11-13 photography, 76, 91, 104, 138-140, 157-158, 236-237, 251n8 pilgrimage, xvii- xviii, 3-7, 20-21, 23, 26, 27n2, 41-43, 46, 54n12, 56-57, 76-77, 84, 86, 92, 95n24, 102-103, 116, 119, 137, 143, 154, 179, 186n36, 206, 231-233, 240, 251n7, 252n16, 255-258, 276n4 Plaszow, 81-83, 153-155, 188 Plessner, Helmut, 121, 219-220 Poland voyages, origins, 56-57, 92n2 Poles, particpants’ views of, 60-61, 66-67, 71-73, 83-84, 87-90, 102103, 106, 109, 112, 117-118, 121122-124, 131-132, 138, 159, 163, 165, 178, 183n11, 192, 227n28, 241-242, 257, 276n8 postmodernity, xvii, xviii, 3-7, 20-21, 24, 46, 89, 236, 260 post-Zionism, 14-15, 20, 27n5, 30, 39-40, 53n3, 261 preparation, 3-4, 21-22, 25, 56-59, 64-66, 69, 71, 75-76, 83, 88, 94n18, 95n21, 98-101, 134-135, 162, 233, 249, 253n22, 266n2, 274-275 PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), 14, 17, 199, 274 R Rabin, Yitzchak, 54n15, 226n17, 230, 243-244 Ram, Uri, 15, 27n5, 55n25 Rapaport, Roy, 6 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 12-13, 27n7, 45, 238, 240, 244-245 redemption, 11- 13, 19, 27n7, 36, 40, 68, 175, 178, 203, 227n25, 240, 255, 257, 262, 269, 271

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religious practice, 72, 125-129, 144, 155, 160-161, 179-180, 205, 206207, 208-209, 214-215, 239, 272274, 276n6 representations, 7, 9-10, 16-18, 24, 26, 28n13, 40, 46, 87-88, 106, 127, 182, 184n21, 236, 251n7, 254, 259-260 Resnik, Julia, 2, 43, 45, 54n21 Righteous Gentiles, 82, 84, 99, 131, 151-153, 190, 193, 211-213, 227nn22-23, 242 ritual, xiv, 2, 3-4, 6-11, 15-16, 24-26, 27n2, 35, 39-40, 49-52, 53n8, 6162, 67, 90, 93n12, 107, 114-115, 140-141 147, 159, 167-168, 185n30, 138n38 180-193, 190, 242 ritual and social order, 3-11, 16 ritual appropriation, 138, 170-171, 208, 210-211 ritual re-enactment of survival, 7-9, 255 Romi, Shlomo, 21, 77, 83, 94n17, 94n19, 187n47, 224n1, 233, 237239, 247, 252n15, 252n18, 252n20 root metaphors, 10-11 roots, search for, xviii, 7, 19, 41-43, 63, 118, 128, 240-241, 252n16, 265, 267n4, 269 Rosenthal, Gabriele, 17 Rubenstein, Amnon, 60-61 S sacrifice, 16, 27n6, 33-34, 48-49, 52, 74, 180, 202-203, 207, 211, 215217, 225, 244-245, 247, 254, 261263, 267n6 Sallnow, Michael, 6-7, 25, 56, 266n1 Schatzker, Haim, 35, 44-45 Schechter, Hava, 21, 233, 244, 246 Scheveningen, Netherlands, xv- xvi Schindler’s List, 87, 153, 184n21 Schwartz, Barry, 9, 11 security, 3, 9, 11, 19, 22, 24-25, 61, 69-72, 76, 93n11, 103, 108, 123 caption 4.8, 133, 183n5, 241, 246, 257, 275

305

Segev, Tom, 10, 12, 15, 19-20, 36, 53n1, 53n3, 53n9, 55nn25-26 Seremetakis, E. Nadia, xvii Shabbat, 57, 72, 86, 103, 124-133, 183n13, 184n18, 227n29, 230, 239, 272 Shamgar-Handelman, Lea, 2, 8, 48, 50, 55n26, 62, 115, 192, 226n20, 248 Shapira, Anita, 2, 30, 34, 53n1, 53n3 61-62 Sivan, Imanuel, 32, 101 shlisl yid xvi, 270 Shoah, see Holocaust Shoah and Holocaust, definitions, 1, 27n1 shopping, 81-82, 95n22, 129-131, 156-157, 184n19, 272, 274, 276n8 Six Day War, 12, 30, 34, 36-38, 44, 53n9, 54n10, 57 smell, 92, 99, 106, 163-169, 184n15, 187n47, 230, 264 soldiering, 126, 151, 154, 204, 243, 245-248, 247-8, 252n22, 253n24, 255, 267n7 Sontag, Susan, 138, 185n28, 186n35 space, interior and exterior, 77-82, 102, 147, 168, 205, 226n15 spiritual resistance, 30, 34, 36-38, 44, 71, 180, 203, 245, 247 Stier, Oren Baruch, 20, 138, 187n41, 210, 225n5, 225n7, 267n5 structure of voyage, 24-25, 56, 63-73, 221, 224 substitute families, 61-63, 199 survival by proxy, 245-248, 265 survivors, 22, 24-25, 31-35, 40-42, 61-64, 64-65, 67-69, 115-119, 133,144-150, 198-199, 212-213, 233, 234-236, 245, 250, 251n5, 252n20, 257 symbolic type, 67-68, 93n7, 160, 236, 271 synchronicity, 32, 62, 191 Sznaider, Natan, 16, 39, 54n10, 54n13, 184n21, 254, 259-260

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306

Index

T

W

Temple, xvi, xvii, 1, 4 Temple, destruction, xvi-xvii, 1,11-12, 50, 55n25, 240 tour guides tour guide course, xvi, 64-65, 269 tour guide narratives, 24-25, 87, 90-92, 220 tour guide: Israeli, xvi, 1, 50, 6466, 69, 153 tour guide: Polish, 65-67, 102 transformation, xvi, 4, 8-9, 11-14, 26, 56, 167-169, 190, 198, 201, 202, 207-208, 220, 223-224, 229, 232233, 254, 257-258, 263-264, 257 trauma, 2, 6-7, 10, 12, 17-19, 28n10, 31, 32, 42, 44, 67, 84, 100, 102103, 120, 147, 149-150, 186n37, 199, 234 trauma, cultural, 12, 14-15, 1719, 28n10, 31, 34, 42 trauma, social construction of, 17-19¸44 Treblinka, 76, 82, 86, 88- 89, 109115, 119, 121, 135, 142, 152, 158, 183n8, 193, 202, 216, 263 Turner, Victor, xviii, 4-6, 8, 23, 56, 84, 115, 223, 255, 265, 266n1 tzabar, 33, 41-42, 57, 219, 224, 256.

Wang, Ning, 95n28 Warsaw Ghetto, 81, 82-84, 86, 90, 96, 105-108, 107, 176-182, 192193, 203, 206-208, 247, 255 Washington Heights, New York City, xv Webber, Jonathan, 137, 184n14, 185n31 Weitz, Yehiam, 27n5, 32, 34-35 Werblowsky, Zwi, xii witnesses, xiv, 19, 35, 62, 64, 66-69, 82, 87, 93n8, 118, 123-127, 134, 136, 144-150, 151, 157, 160, 169, 173, 179, 183n12, 185n34, 186n38, 194, 196-198, 211-213, 235-236, 245-246, 259, 274 witnesses of witnesses, xiv, 3, 200-201, 229, 230-233, 235, 236, 255, 257-258, 261. Wyschogrod, Edith, 6, 164

U Ultra-Orthodox, 75, 271 Ungvár, Carpatorus, xv-xvii, 269-270. V van der Hart, Onno V, 147, 149 van der Kolk, Bessel A, 147, 149 van Pelt, Robert Jan, 28n13, 91, 95n31, 136, 140, 180, 184n25 victim by proxy, 19 voyage finances, 58, 73, 94n17 voyage preparation, 58-61, 73-76, 98101

Y Yablonka, Hana, 15, 33, 53n1, 53n3, 53n7 Yad Vashem, xii, 1, 16, 25, 27n1, 4749, 51, 95n29, 55n26, 64, 95n29, 106, 151, 180, 227n22, 268n14 Yad Vashem Law, 47-49, 53n6, 55n25 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 11, 49, 61, 263 Yom Kippur War, 34, 36-39, 41, 54n9 Young, James, 28n13, 48-50, 55nn2526, 95n31, 112, 156, 159, 170, 178, 180, 184n25, 185nn30-31, 185n33, 266 Z Zertal, Idit, 2, 15, 30, 33, 53n1 Zerubavel, Yael, 10-12, 27n5, 32, 55n27, 129, 226n19, 252n12 Zimmermann, Moshe, 15 Zionism, 11-14, 27n2, 31-35, 54n10, 59, 126, 184n16, 239, 261, 265, 267n6

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Index

Zionism and exile, 11-14, 25, 63, 28n8, 80-81, 83, 126-129, 183n14, 176-178, 214-215, 218-219, 238-241, 262, 274-275 Zionist leadership and the Shoah, 31-36, 47, 55n29 Zionist master narrative, 15, 16, 35, 37, 63, 71, 127, 151, 255, 258 Zuckermann, Moshe, 10, 12, 15, 20, 32-36, 88, 246

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11-Feldman Index

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