Bearing witness ever more
The study of the Holocaust is expanding worldwide—for differing reasons
JPOST
ACROSS the globe, schoolchildren study the industrialised slaughter of Jews by the Nazis. Holocaust museums in America, Israel and Poland each draw more than a million visitors annually. The UN has passed two resolutions in the past decade to institutionalise memory of the Holocaust worldwide. Yad Vashem, an Israeli museum and remembrance authority, trains 10,000 domestic and foreign teachers every year. “Interest is growing immensely,” says Dorit Novak, the director-general. Membership of the Association of Holocaust Organisations (AHO) has increased from 25 in the late 1980s to over 300. Commemorative museums have opened from Germany and France to Brazil and Japan. Of the 16,000 books on the Holocaust listed in America’s Library of Congress, more than two-thirds were published in the past two decades.
In its immediate aftermath, the Holocaust went largely unacknowledged. Perpetrators and bystanders preferred to forget. Commemoration began in Israel, where many survivors had gathered. But even there it was done quietly. For the exuberant young country the slaughter of European Jews was an uncomfortable image of passivity and presumed feebleness. A 1960 study showed that barely a quarter of schools taught children about the Holocaust. Only when Israelis came to feel an existential threat during successive wars with Arab neighbours did that change.
In 1982, the education ministry made teaching about the Holocaust compulsory for all children. Coverage in history textbooks increased from 20 pages in the 1960s to 450 in the 1990s. Today, every Israeli schoolchild spends a semester studying the history of what they call the Shoah, along with further coursework in literature, music and art classes. Some 200,000 students and soldiers tour Yad Vashem annually, the soldiers carrying their guns. The state has managed to draw great strength from keeping alive the memory of the murdered.
Yet over time the depiction of mass slaughter has changed. When Israel was meek, it stressed the heroism of the Warsaw ghetto. Now, with reassuringly powerful armed forces, the focus is more on victimhood. Schools teach that “we need a strong army because the world hates us,” says Dan Porat, a professor of Jewish education in Jerusalem. Domestic critics have called some Israeli history teaching simplistic. The Holocaust is at times presented as evidence of a lack of Jewish national spirit, they say, rather than an excess of Germany’s. Government offices exhibit photos of Israeli air-force jets flying over the death camps of Auschwitz. On Holocaust memorial day, inaugurated five years after the founding of Israel, politicians routinely present the country’s foes as would-be annihilators. “All our [current] dangers are viewed through the prism of Auschwitz,” says Avihu Ronen, a lecturer in Jewish history at Haifa University.
In the West, it fell to the media to stimulate public discussion of the Holocaust. Early works struck themes familiar to Israelis. “Schindler’s List”, a 1993 Hollywood film about a German businessman who bribed Nazi officials to shield his Jewish employees, turns from black-and-white to colour when the survivors arrive in Jerusalem. More recent Western depictions have diverged from the Israeli narrative. Europe’s young, now three generations removed from the killing, flinch from guilt imposed by elders. According to Centropa, an educational centre in Vienna, students respond best to Holocaust teaching when first told about the Jewish past they have lost. “If they relate through Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, the Jews of Prague and Weimar culture, they will learn about the Holocaust through the backdoor,” says Edward Serotta, Centropa’s founder. Dutch schools draw pupils in by holding commemorative walks to buildings that once housed Jews.
Unlike Yad Vashem, which portrays Jews as outsiders in Europe who find redemption in Israel, new Jewish museums in Austria and Poland present Jews as an intrinsic part of European heritage and culture. “It shocked me,” says Mr Porat after a visit. “I never thought of Jews as being Poles.” The exhibition at Yad Vashem ends with a display of Israel’s declaration of independence and the playing of the national anthem, whereas European equivalents emphasise a Jewish rebirth in places where massacres happened (Berlin has the world’s fastest-growing Jewish community—from a very low base).
America may have the world’s second-biggest Jewish population but, with no death camps to commemorate on its soil, it follows a surprisingly universal path in Holocaust teaching. Museums and syllabuses are often used as pathways to examine genocides in general, focusing on the dangers of “racism, bigotry and intolerance”, says Dan Napolitano, director of education at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the largest of America’s 30 museums and 70 centres on the subject. An increasing number offer courses for soldiers, lawyers and policemen that warn against the abuse of power.
Discussing the Holocaust in the context of other human horrors is popular in Latin America, Africa and Asia as well. Richard Freedman, who runs the oldest of South Africa’s three Holocaust centres, has used Nazi race laws to examine white rule. “There are very close parallels between Germany’s establishment of a racial state in 1933-39 and South Africa’s apartheid state,” he says. “The separation of communities, the ban on mixed marriages—it’s a powerful link.” In Senegal, a UN official in charge of promoting memories of the Holocaust in Africa has spoken of using it as a way “to develop remembrance about slavery”. Argentine pupils examine the Holocaust in the light of who was responsible for their own dictatorship a little more than a generation ago.
Moral equivalence
Later this year AHO, the world’s biggest Holocaust association, is to stage China’s first international conference on the topic in Harbin. The north-eastern city once had a thriving Jewish community, but a more important stimulant for local interest in the conference will be parallels to be drawn, rightly or wrongly, between the Holocaust and Japanese wartime atrocities. The Imperial Japanese Army used the city for experiments on humans, including vivisection and dropping anthrax from low-flying planes, killing an estimated 400,000 people.
Methods developed by early Holocaust centres have become guides for memorials to Asian tragedies. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia and a Chinese museum commemorating the “Rape of Nanking” by Japanese soldiers in 1937 have drawn on Yad Vashem. “Israeli people did a great job of teaching the past,” says Xiaowei Fu, director of the Judaic studies department at Sichuan University in Chengdu. She has tried to drum up interest in the Holocaust with an essay competition offering a cash prize.
In some places, the Holocaust now overshadows the conflict that fuelled it. Indian history textbooks devote much of their second-world-war coursework to the slaughter. “Imagine yourself to be a Jew or a Pole in Nazi Germany. It is September 1941, and you have been asked to wear the Star of David,” instructs a tenth-grade textbook called “India and the Contemporary World”. Here and in some other places, the Holocaust is seen as the core event of the 20th century in Europe, and it thus draws millions of tourists to its memorials. Last year, 46,500 South Koreans visited Auschwitz, only a few less than Israel’s 68,000.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust
The main geographic exception to the growing global interest in the Holocaust is the Muslim world, where it is commonly viewed as a dramatisation meant to win sympathy for Jews bent on grabbing Arab land. None of the three main UN information centres in the Middle East marks Holocaust Day. “I cannot really speak about the Holocaust in Iran,” says a UN official in Tehran. Iran’s recently retired president called the Holocaust a myth. In parts of Paris with a lot of Muslims, some schools have reportedly removed mention of the Holocaust from the syllabus for fear of appearing pro-Israel. “I know of cases in which the teacher mentioned Auschwitz and Treblinka [another death camp], and students clapped,” wrote Georges Bensoussan, a French historian, in a 2004 study of immigrant schools.
Nonetheless, Western Holocaust centres are making inroads in the Muslim world. The internet allows circumvention of local censors. The Aladdin Project, a Paris-based initiative, has staged Holocaust lectures from Beirut to Baghdad, praising Arabs who offered refuge to Jews fleeing persecution in the 15th century. Next month, Washington’s Holocaust museum will hold its first training programme for Arab educators. The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, which runs schools for the children of Arabs who fled Israel at its founding 65 years ago, repeatedly tried to teach Holocaust classes but was thwarted by Hamas, the Islamist group.
It is not only Westerners who want to talk about the Holocaust in Middle Eastern schools. Morocco may become the first Arab country to put Holocaust teaching on its syllabus. King Mohammed VI has long sought American congressional support by wooing Jewish groups. Members of the Berber ethnic minority also champion it to win support for their struggle to reverse 1,400 years of Arabisation; they have taken Holocaust courses at Yad Vashem and translated teaching material into their vernacular, Tamazight. “We’re trying to relate the Jewish physical genocide to our cultural one,” says Massin Aaouid, a Marrakech travel agent who helped to organise a Holocaust road show in southern Morocco two years ago.
Perhaps the biggest threat to remembrance of the 6m Jews killed by the Nazis is trivialisation. “The Holocaust has lost its specificity,” says Eckhardt Fuchs, a German academic preparing a study of textbook coverage worldwide. Politicians in America and elsewhere routinely employ the Holocaust as a rhetorical device to denote evil. The term has cropped up in comic books and heavy-metal music. Even in Israel, mentions are increasingly casual; farmers upset at diminishing returns from tomato concentrate have called ketchup their Auschwitz. Israeli politicians flock to Holocaust survivor beauty contests. A joke popular among Israeli schoolchildren asks, why did Hitler kill himself? (Answer: he read his gas bill.) In Britain, some teachers use the Holocaust as a lesson against bullying, reducing Nazis to schoolyard thugs. Treating it as a neat moral issue, warns Paul Salmons, a British academic, could devalue study of the Holocaust regardless of its proliferation.
honeybee Said:
R.I.P.
@ Shy Guy:
Smarty Pants Dance
honeybee Said:
You betcha!
Shy Guy Said:
WARNING FEMALE ATIRE: http://youtu.be/7hl9-A0zlt4
honeybee Said:
Just a bit but not tutu angry.
Shy Guy Said:
Your not angry at me now to,too,two.
@ honeybee:
A warning would have been appreciated.
Shy Guy Said:
A nice Yashivah boy like you,I would have though spent days aiding the blind: http://youtu.be/QcSI7DKaO9w
honeybee Said:
On YouTube, in my free time on the days when I play hookey from school.
@ Shy Guy:
Dancing your pants off!!!!!!!!!!! http://youtu.be/wtDNYqGNK3A
@ Shy Guy:
Where do find this stuff?
honeybee Said:
Can’t wait till he gets married
Laura Said:
Many have stopped protesting because it changes nothing. Still if the shepherds’ corruption spreads through the body politic, Israel’s future is in doubt. Its not the Arabs who are a threat – its Jews who believe Jewish sovereignty creates too many difficulties with the world, who are the wolves within the Jewish fold. Sarah Honig just wrote that Jews of all the nations on earth, believe they must pay the price to legitimate their independence. And as long Jews fear world opinion more than they fear G-d, Israel in for very hard times ahead.
@ Shy Guy:
No pats dance: http://youtu.be/bWWZXtcGZAQ
honeybee Said:
You betcha!!!
I think what is most dramatically missing from the popular education of the Holocaust is two things:
First, the actual Holocaust, the systematic, socially engineered industry of mass murder was a state secret. It was never intended that anyone should ever know what happened to the Jews. They were to have just disappeared. “Gone east”.
Second, the Holocaust was genocide, which is to say, murder. It’s victims were completely and utterly innocent of the accusations made against them that justified the public part of the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich. And furthermore, the history of the persecution of the Jews is characterized this way. The Jews have never been guilty of the accusations made against them anywhere and any time in the history of the persecution of the Jews. This ongoing legacy of lies about the Jews is also what drives the fake moral crusade against Israel. The Jews have always been innocent and Israel has always been and is now innocent.
If people really want to consider themselves educated on the subject of the Holocaust, they should always remember these two things.
Why is everyone jumping down Norman’s throat? I think you folks are misunderstanding him. He has been commenting here for quite a while and I know he loves Israel. I think we all can agree that Israel’s political leaders are morally bankrupt- from the “peace” process to the releasing of terrorists and the expulsion of Jewish communities etc. Norman was not referring to Israel’s population as a whole.
yamit82 Said:
Ja sure!!!!!!!!!!!!! You betcha!!!!!!!!!!
Shy Guy Said:
SMARTY PANTS DANCE
NormanF Said:
I thought you were yet another ant-semetic using the site at Yom Kippur in order to demerate Jews. Now I understand,but you cannot hold the whole of Israel or the Jewish People accountable for other failings.
I was horrified by the release of terrorist and murderers,but these actions are beyond my controll. And from what I many Israelis also reputiated these releases.
@ Shy Guy:
That’s safe at a time when you’re not swirling a glass of Merlot
That’s a good idea for the feast after the fast! Thanks Shy Guy!
Jeruselem next year!!
@ NormanF:
There are different ways of killing people. It is not your place to judge the Jews. Right now we need support. No apology here.
yamit82 Said:
You’re right about the am haaretz – they’re good and decent people! My point was that the elite that sets the direction – a wrong one – makes the country feel weak and ashamed of itself. This is what I take issue with. When Jews respect themselves, they will earn others’ respect. That would be both the penultimate fulfillment of Zionism as well as bringing Jewish ethics to the world. Behaving like the Arabs do won’t bring peace closer. Jews are meant to be a special nation and they don’t have to apologize for it!
Shy Guy Said:
Not so. His criticism and example was specific. Israel as a country and a specific vile act of essentially one man with the consent of a very few.
The vast majority of Jews in the country were very much opposed to his and their actions.
The expectation that any political entity and government will act on a high moral and ethical plane is not only naive but utopian.
Most Israeli Jews live morally and ethical lives especially when compared to other nations and countries.
Only in Israel
The joys of living with the family
dove Said:
That’s safe at a time when you’re not swirling a glass of Merlot!
NormanF Said:
Norman, knowing where you’re coming from, I agree – and I say that as an Israel, living here in Jerusalem. I think you were misunderstood. You were certainly taken out of the context of your intentions.
yamit82 Said:
Well said. You’ve always said it.
I would just add: We are defined by Sinai. They’ve all forgotten that.
yamit82 Said:
We cannot improve on the silence of the dead when we don’t listen to them! Cool it, indeed – the world is indifferent to the slaughter of Arabs in Israel’s neighborhood. If Jews don’t begin taking care of themselves, no one is going to do for them.
dove Said:
You put me on the same level as those who murdered Jewish children and whom the Arabs regard as heroes? Why do you see me as a greater threat than them? I have not subverted justice, spit on the dead or hobnobbed with Arab terrorists who murdered Jewish children! Chaim Nahman Bialik’s lesson on the pogroms that happened a century ago is wasted on the likes of you and sad to say – Jewish passivity in the face of evil is still not a thing of the past. You’re more than half-wrong and owe me an apology.
honeybee Said:
You don’t think subverting justice, desecrating the dead and releasing the killers of Jewish children from prison isn’t evidence of a country that’s lost its way? In dealing with Arab terrorists, it seems the only topic of discussion in Israel is how much more of a blood price to pay them! And you have the chutzpah to characterize my comments as “disgusting!” Go figure.
@ NormanF:
Norman said – Israel has a lot to repent this Yom Kippur
Your half right. We should repent for not blowing people like you away a long time ago.
That’s what I tell people when they ask if I have any regrets.
I’ll be wearing white for Yom Kippur.
NormanF Said:
I don’t know who or where you are,but your comments are disgusting on this post and at this time!!!!!!!!!
IAF Israeli Air Force fly over Auschwitz
Hatikvah Sung at Bergen-Belsen by Clive Kandel
Rav Israel Lau – Israel ..
@ NormanF:
“If you can’t improve on the silence of the desert then shut up.” Bedouin saying.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Cool it!
Ted: My Comment blocked by spam filter.
Unlike many if not most American Jews I reuse to allow the holocaust to define me as a Jew.
Elie Wiesel and his ilk are mostly responsible for the banalization of the Jewish holocaust by internationalizing it. Making it’s message a universal humanitarian issue and not a specifically a Jewish tragedy.
A whole cottage holocaust industry has sprung up Museums in many countries, university chair endowments, holocaust research institutions, Tens of thousands of books articles,movies, documentaries.. The amt of spin offs is enormous.
Hundreds of thousands have enriched their bank accts and stock portfolios capitalizing from this subject.
The current peace process is a historically standard Christian policy against the Jews. Locked into a fourteen-mile-wide state, besieged by US-armed Arabs from without, watched by the fifth column of a 34 percent Arab population from within, the Jewish state is meant by the Quartet to become the Final Solution.
Israel cannot even honor the Jewish dead slain by Arab terrorists!
Its a little late to show hypocritical piety over the only Jews that gets the world to go tut tut tut.
As a morally bankrupt country, Israel has a lot to repent this Yom Kippur.