The Evolution of Israeli Historiography

Between Memory and
History:
The Evolution of Israeli
Historiography of the
Holocaust, 1945–1961
Orna Kenan
PETER LANG
Between Memory and History
Studies in Modern European History
Frank J. Coppa
General Editor
Vol. 49
PETER LANG
New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern
Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford
Orna Kenan
Between Memory and History
The Evolution of Israeli Historiography

of the Holocaust, 1945–1961
PETER LANG
New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern
Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kenan, Orna.
Between memory and history: the evolution of Israeli historiography
of the Holocaust, 1945–1961 / Orna Kenan.
p. cm. — (Studies in modern European history; vol. 49)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Historiography. 2. Holocaust, Jewish
(1939-1945)—Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—Israel. 4. Memory.
5. Yad òva-shem, rashut ha-zikaron la-Sho’ah òvela-gevurah. I. Title.
D804.348.K46 2003 940.53'18'07205694—dc21 2003006208
ISBN 0-8204-5805-8
ISSN 0893-6897
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
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of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
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To my sons,
Gil and Amir
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Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii
Part One: Different Perceptions of the Holocaust:

The Yishuv, the Survivors and the Jewish Fighters—
during and following the War Years
Chapter One: In the Yishuv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Chapter Two: The Survivors and the Jewish Fighters
in the DP Camps, 1945–1948 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
Part Two: Politics of Memory and Historiography

Chapter Three: The Israeli Representation of
the Holocaust in the 1950s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43
Chapter Four: Israel’s “Pantheon” and the “Silence”
of the Survivors during the 1950s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63
Chapter Five: The Turning Point, 1961 to the Present . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137

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Acknowledgments
I owe a great intellectual debt to my mentor and dear friend, Saul

Friedländer. Without his attentive guidance and support, this work would
not have been accomplished. I would also like thank my former teachers,
David N. Myers and Arnold J. Band of UCLA, for their valuable insights and
years of intellectual inspiration.
I am grateful for the fellowship support and research grants I received
from the Monkarsh Foundation, the history department at UCLA and, most
of all, the 1939 Club. A special salute to the members of the 1939 Club,
for their dedicated work in keeping the memory and lessons of the
Holocaust alive.
This work benefitted immensely from the generous assistance and
good advice I received in Israel’s many historical archives. My thanks go
especially to the librarians and archivists at the Jewish National and
University Library Archives, the Central Archives for the History of the
Jewish people, the Yad Vashem Archives and the archive at Beit Lohamei
Hagetaot. I have also greatly profited from the energizing atmosphere in
the reading rooms of the National and University library in Jerusalem and
of the Wiener Library at Tel Aviv University. In Israel, I am also greatly
indebted to Ms. Ella Klein for doing a wonderful job in transliterating and
translating documents and texts from Yiddish to English.
A special thanks to my parents, Moshe and Ahuva Meron. Their love
and support is vital to everything that I do. My deepest gratitude is direct-
ed to my sons, Gil and Amir, my towers of strength. Both have accompa-
nied me throughout the difficult moments of writing. It is to them that I
dedicate this work.

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Preface
By Saul Friedländer
Orna Kenan’s study investigates a new domain in the historiography of the

Holocaust. It starts with the early development of memorialization and his-
toriography among its direct victims, in the camps of post-war Europe,
then in the new state of Israel during the years prior to the Eichmann Trial;
the study closes with an interpretation of later developments that carry
the analysis to the present.
This work achieves a coherent synthesis between the earliest shap-
ing of a collective memory of the Shoah and the roots of its historiogra-
phy. It is among the surviving remnants in the Displaced persons (DP)
camps that we can trace both the initial efforts at memorialization and the
basis for a historiography of sorts, three years before the creation of the
state of Israel. Within this context, the author underscores a dichotomy
which has never been stressed so forcefully and in such detail: the oppo-
sition between the self perception of the “ordinary” survivors and that of
a self-appointed elite of survivors from the ghetto revolts and the armed
partisan groups.
Before addressing her initial major theme, the author evokes its silent
background, a paradoxical situation which developed in the Yishuv dur-
ing the Shoah and immediately afterwards: the almost complete silence
regarding the events in Europe of the leading figures of Jewish historical
science, all belonging to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Thus, we are
confronted both with the tragic inability of leading intellectuals in Jewish
Palestine to address the Shoah, on the one hand, and the determination,
on the other, among broken remnants gathered in the camps of liberated
Europe to record every possible detail of the immediate past.
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The main emphasis of Orna Kenan’s study is upon the evolution of

these various strands of early memorialization and historiography under
the new conditions created by the existence of the state of Israel and the
endeavor, within this new context, to create an “official” representation of
events which in the minds of many did not tally with the dominant Zionist
ideology of the 1950s. The political struggle for the “correct memory” and
the “correct historiography” within the official institutions destined to
foster them and also between these institutions and competing centers in
Israel and in the Diaspora is a particularly fascinating part of Orna Kenan’s
study. The complexity of the issue was reinforced by the fact that these pol-
itics of memory and historical writing became enmeshed with powerful tra-
ditions in Jewish historiography, opposing a Western analytic school and
an East-European tradition of chronicling that mainly arose during World
War One and immediately afterwards.
All through, the author shows how the evolution of the memorializa-
tion and the historiography of the Shoah in Israel were intimately related
to the ideological climate of the new state and, specifically, to the central
tenet of Zionism: the negation of Exile. Most of this dominant trend start-
ed to change with the Eichmann Trial. Nonetheless, some of the most basic
inhibitions regarding the writing of the history of the Jewish catastrophe
among professional historians remained, as an echo of the attitude adopt-
ed by the scholars of the “Jerusalem School” in the late 1930s and the
1940s.
The last and equally important part of Orna Kenan’s study addresses
the transformation undergone by the Israeli approach to the Shoah from
the 1970s onwards. A generational change among the leading historians
of these years may have been of the essence, but the author shows that
deeper forces were involved, such as the decline of the traditional Zionist
ideology and with it the negation of Exile. It is in this new context that
Israeli historiography of the Shoah came into its own.
It has been mentioned at times that, for opposed reasons, followed
partly similar stages in the land of the perpetrators and in that of the vic-
tims. It is not the least aspect of this paradox that the present study is being
published at the verysame time when the first candid and thoroughly
documented history of the early phase of the central research institute
established in Munich after the war to study the Nazi period, is coming to
light.
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Introduction
Between History and Memory: The “Twilight Zone”

In the past two decades or so, the relations between historical understand-
ing and collective memory have received considerable attention. Some his-
torians, such as Pierre Nora and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who based their
conceptual frameworks upon Maurice Halbwachs’s path-breaking La
Mémoire Collective (1941),1 contend that there exists an unbridgeable gap
between historiography and memory.2 Collective memory, according to
them, belonged to pre-modern societies where tradition was strong and
memory was a social practice, whereas the discipline of history, emerg-
ing in the nineteenth century, belonged to modern society in which tra-
dition declined and relations to the past were cut off by the “acceleration
of history.”3
According to Yerushalmi, it was collective memory which sustained the
Jews’ understanding of the past in the pre-modern period. Although the
Bible abounds with historical narratives, once the canon was established,
Jewish historical consciousness remained “locked” between the remem-
bered biblical past and the anticipated messianic redemption: “For the rab-
bis the Bible was not only a repository of past history, but a revealed
pattern of the whole of history, and they had learned their scriptures
well...Above all, they had learned from the Bible that the true pulse of his-
tory often beat beneath its manifest surfaces, an invisible history that was
more real than what the world, deceived by the more strident outward
rhythms of power, could recognize.”4
Apart from a few exceptions, such as “Yosiphon” in the tenth centu-
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ry and the spate of historical chroniclers in the sixteenth century, from the
second to the mid-nineteenth century the biblical narrative had yielded a
mythical memory that could serve all future events. Every enemy was a
manifestation of Amalek; every persecution an echo of the destruction of
the Temple.
According to Yerushalmi, the ruptures in Jewish collective memory,
brought about by the erosion in faith in the modern era, cannot be sub-
stituted by critical historical scholarship. This is because “Memory and
modern historiography, by virtue of their nature, stand in radically differ-
ent relations to the past.”5 While collective memory is selective, emotion-
al and pedagogical, continuously changing in response to society’s shifting
needs, historiography, the product of a scholarly research, is essentially
detached from the constraints of the immediate present.6
Other historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm and Amos Funkenstein, do
not subscribe to this sharp division between history and memory, main-
ly as far as modern history is concerned.7 Hobsbawm, for example, rec-
ognizes a “twilight zone” between history and memory—“between the past
as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspec-
tion, and the past as part of, or background to one’s own life.”8 Although
critical historical scholarship is bound by rules of evidence and verifica-
tion, the historian, contends Funkenstein in agreement with Hobsbawm,
does not write in a vacuum; rather, his story often reflects the collective
historical consciousness shared by the society within which he lives.9 The
nineteenth century, for example, saw the professionalization of history; yet
even the most professional studies clearly reflected the identity problems
of the nation state and its societal aspirations. Hence, for instance, “de
Tocqueville’s attempt to prove the continuum between the ancien regime and
the [French] Revolution (and thus to restore the Revolution to French his-
tory)—or...even, the meta-theoretical debate over the limits and unique
means of cognition of the humanities—empathetic ‘understanding’ as
opposed to causal-rational ‘explanation’—also reflected the assumption
that only a national can write the history of his nation faithfully.”10
The interaction between memory and historical writing in shaping
Israel’s historiography of the Holocaust period is another case in point. The
destruction of a major part of European Jewry, followed shortly thereafter
by the establishment of the state of Israel, started an ongoing process of
engagement between a past that continues to influence the life and iden-
tity of the nation and a present in which the nation’s changing sense of
self leads to successive transformations in the perception of that past. In
this process, historical narration and collective memory often seem inter-
woven. Indeed, as we shall see, for each changing phase in the memory
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INTRODUCTION ) XV
of the Holocaust, a related move in its historiography also took place.

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In Eretz Yisrael as well as throughout the West, during the two decades fol-
lowing the war, professional historians—whether they were Jewish histo-
rians or not—did not address the history of the Jewish catastrophe in
Europe. If we take the most illustrious Jewish historians of the 1940s, such
as Felix Gilbert, Hans Rosenberg, Lewis Namier, Eugen Taeubler (in the
Anglo-Saxon world), and, in Jerusalem, Joseph Klausner, Yitzhak Baer,
Gershom Scholem and even Ben-Zion Dinur, who served in the 1950s as
Chairman of Yad Vashem, the newly created Israeli institution devoted to
Holocaust research and commemoration, none of them turned to the his-
tory of the Shoah.11
It is true that most of these historians were not specialists of the his-
tory of the twentieth century, but several among them turned to twenti-
eth century history and even to the history of Nazi policies in the wake of
the Second World War (Felix Gilbert and Lewis Namier, for example).12 No
one, however, as already mentioned, thought of dealing with the extermi-
nation of the Jews of Europe.13
This “global” reticence is a question that has never been explored and
that demands an inquiry in itself. In the next few paragraphs I shall exam-
ine possible explanations for the silence of the scholars in Israel, primar-
ily of the founding generation of professional Jewish historical research in
Palestine, members of the so-called “Jerusalem School”—Joseph Klausner,
Yitzhak Baer, Gershom Scholem and Ben-Zion Dinur—all of whom emi-
grated to Palestine from Eastern and Central Europe in the second and third
decades of this century out of a deep Zionist commitment14 and all of whom
held positions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and dealt with Jewish
history or related fields of study.
The Silence of Post-War Historiography

The fact that before the late 1960s the complex history of the Holocaust
received but a meager representation in Israel’s intellectual discourse was
likely the result of the close proximity in time to the event itself. The emo-
tional involvement was too strong, the correct perspective was missing and
it was too early to research the period academically, even by an act of will.15
As the Jewish historian Salo W. Baron remarked in 1960: “A generation that
has gone through that extraordinary traumatic experience cannot com-
pletely divorce itself from its own painful recollections and look upon the
Holocaust from an Archimedean standpoint outside its own turbulent
arena.”16 In his article, “Judaic Studies” (1961), Gershom Scholem, the
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XVI ( B E T W E E N M E M O RY A N D H I S TO RY
Jerusalem scholar of Jewish mysticism, concurred:

We are still incapable—due to the short distance in time between us and those
events—to understand the significance of all that we have lived through and suf-
fered, to grasp it in the intellectual and scientific sense. It is simply impossible
yet to draw conclusions. When in 1492 came the great holocaust of the expul-
sion of the Jews from Spain, and suddenly one of the greatest, most thriving, most
spiritually important branches of the Jewish tree of life was cut off, the people
needed a long time until they were able to reach a true assessment, to confront
what had happened to them. In the 16th century it took two generations until they
reached this stage, and certainly it will not be much different this time. I don’t
believe that we, the generation who lived through this experience,...that we are
already capable today of drawing conclusions. But the impact of all that has hap-
pened, the image of the Holocaust will, of necessity, dominate the agenda of
Jewish studies...17
In addition to the proximity of the trauma, it may be possible to claim

that, for the Jerusalem scholars, the lack of critical historical study of the
Holocaust period may have other explanations that have to do with their
specific ideological/intellectual evolution. After a period of ambiguity in
which the aspirations for a Zionist-oriented historiography were “weighed”
against European-Jewish tradition (which imposed a pattern of continu-
ity), the aim of Israeli historiography became the revival of a national iden-
tity within the context of Zionist ideology.
Naturally, each of the historians under consideration expressed the
influence of Zionism on his research in a different way according to his
individual concerns, interests and sensibilities as well as the social, cul-
tural and intellectual milieu from which he came. However, the basic tenet
of Zionist ideology, namely, that there always has been a Jewish nation and
that only through its return to its ancient homeland could this nation
overcome the debilitating physical and spiritual constraints that marked
Jewish existence in exile, became the basic assumption in the scholars’
writings of Jewish history.18
As for antisemitism, despite it being the major argument in favor of the
Zionist solution to the “Jewish Question,” its study was not, in and of itself,
the focus of these scholars’ historical investigations. This may have been
a consequence of their rather simplistic/nationalistic view of the phenom-
enon as a mere reflection of a certain historical situation: the Jewish exil-
ic condition, that would disappear with the establishment of a sovereign
Jewish state.19 It is not surprising, therefore, that the Jewish catastrophe
found little resonance in their writings. For the most part, the Holocaust
was interjected, in their mainly programmatic essays and popular articles,
into their Zionist outline of Jewish history and presented as undisputed
proof of its validity.20
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INTRODUCTION ) XVII
For example, like his colleagues at the Hebrew University, Joseph

Klausner’s writings during the war years expressed his steadfast belief in
the Zionist way as the only solution to the “Jewish Question,” yet avoid-
ed any direct analysis or discussion of the unfolding tragedy as such.
Klausner felt most deeply that the young people of his own day needed the
inspiration of the noble past and, therefore, wrote more about heroism than
about suffering. His view was based on the premise that “we are permit-
ted, even obligated [emphasis in the original], to probe into history for
what is similar and almost equal in all times, lands, and circumstances...For
there is no doubt: he who writes the history of the past writes, at the same
time, the history of his present.”21 And Klausner’s present “dictated” the
celebration of the era of ancient Israel’s struggle to achieve sovereignty over
Palestine, an era which had the most to say to his own generation.22 And
“what was the hope of the [Hasmoneans] rebels?...There are moments in
history in which the nation does not vacillate but rules that it is better to
die as a human being than to live as a dog.”23 The relation of Klausner’s
words, published in the Revisionists’ paper, Herut, in December 1945, to
the recent catastrophe and to the ongoing struggle to achieve sovereign-
ty in Eretz Yisrael, was clear.
Given the role attributed by Klausner to the writing of history, it is not
surprising that he chose to devote his time and energy during the war years
to rewriting and updating The History of the Second Temple, a five volume
series, which he first published as The History of Israel in Odessa in
1909–1924/25.24 Although, during the war, he did join a short-lived, small,
spontaneous protest group of intellectuals who called themselves Al Domi
(“do not keep silent”), the few articles devoted to the unfolding tragedy in
Europe were written by Klausner with the intention of providing explicit
Zionist lessons.
In “The Balance of Accounts” (1942), for example, Klausner dealt with
the question of the uniqueness of the present Jewish situation in Europe.
Klausner, who viewed antisemitism as an inevitable part of life in exile,
argued, that the current Jewish catastrophe was no exception but an
extreme manifestation of antisemitism. “There is indeed hardly one peace-
ful period of ten years in the entire history of Jewish exile. The mass mur-
der of Jewry and the letting of the blood of its individual members have
become the common order of its daily life. The mass butchery of the
Crusades and the mobs of Chmelniecki (1648) were merely among the
most prominent episodes in Jewish history but were far from being excep-
tional; they were the rule rather than the exception to it.” The current
venom of antisemitism, disseminated by the Germans, “will not disappear
with the end of the war” because “thousands of years of wandering have
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convinced us of the truth of the Biblical statement: ‘But amongst these

nations thou shalt find no peace’ (Deuteronomy, xxiii, 65).”25
According to Yitzhak Baer too, the source of the unfolding tragedy of
European Jewry remained, as in previous epochs, the Israelites’ exilic
condition. The refusal of the majority of European Jewry, despite their
increasingly grave situation following the Nazi rise to power, to draw the
necessary (Zionist) conclusion frustrated Baer, especially after he visited
Germany in the summer of 1933 and again in the summer of 1938. The
Jerusalem scholar felt particularly distraught after meeting with relatives
and friends, especially his aunt, the wife of the German-Jewish philoso-
pher, Hermann Dessau, who refused to consider leaving Germany.26
Baer expressed his growing anguish in his work, Galut (Exile), first pub-
lished in German in 1936. In the introduction to the Hebrew version in the
1950s, Baer acknowledged his overwrought state of mind while writing the
book: “I wrote this little work of mine in a state of emotional turmoil,
although, at the time, I could not imagine the events to come and the even-
tual destruction of millions of our people by the German Nazis.”27
Unlike his previous works, marked by the author’s mastery of histor-
ical research and of the sources, Galut is characterized by its brevity and
lack of footnotes. It seems as if Baer was in a haste to finish his work in
time, with the hope that its central message: the “enormous tragedy of the
Galut situation”28 may deepen the historical and national consciousness
of European and especially German Jewry and encourage them and west-
ern European leaders to take an active stance toward redemption (from
Galut) which, as he contended, especially at this moment in history, is an
absolute necessity:
There was a short period when the Zionist could feel himself a citizen of two
countries...Now that the Jews have been denied the right to feel at home in
Europe, it is the duty of the European nations to redeem the injustice committed
by their spiritual and physical ancestors by assisting the Jews in the task of
reclaiming Palestine and by recognizing the right of the Jews to the land of their
fathers.29
Galut examines the idea of Exile among Jewish and some antisemitic
authors from the Hellenistic era to the early modern period. Noting the his-
torical and psychological circumstances in which leading explanations for
the concept of Galut emerged, Baer distinguished between Jewish authors
who interpreted and sought to transcend the tragedy of exile, such as
Yehudah Ha-Levi, and Jewish skeptics, particularly of the early modern
period, such as Baruch Spinoza. Baer’s harshest words were reserved for
the assimilationists’ explanations of Galut in the modern period:
All modern views of the Galut, from whatever orientation they arise, are inade-
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INTRODUCTION ) XIX
quate: they are unhistorical; they confuse cause and effect; they project the
nineteenth century into the past...This is true equally of the anti-Semitic concep-
tion of the Galut as a symbol of political decay and general disintegration and
exploitation and of the assimilationist idea that the Galut serves as an instrument
for progress and the spread of culture...All modern interpretations of the Galut
fail to do justice to the enormous tragedy of the Galut situation and to the reli-
gious power of the old ideas that centered around it....The Galut has returned to
its starting point. It remains what it always was: political servitude, which must
be abolished completely.30
Baer concluded his book with a quotation (with which he obviously iden-
tified) from the great sixteenth-century Rabbi Judah Liwa ben Bezalel of
Prague (“Maharal”):
For the Galut is the abolition of God’s order. God gave to every nation its place,
and to the Jews he gave Palestine. The Galut means that the Jews have left their
natural place...The dispersion of Israel among the nations is unnatural. Since the
Jews manifest a national unity, even in a higher sense than the other nations, it
is necessary that they return to a state of actual unity. Nor is it in accord with
the order of nature that one nation should be enslaved by the others, for God made
each nation for itself. Thus, by natural law, the Galut cannot last forever.31
Despite his sincere concern with the plight of his brethren in Europe,
all in all Baer’s view of antisemitism and, following the war, of the
Holocaust, as a natural manifestation of Jewish life in exile, did not change.
Antisemitism constituted a major part of Jewish history in exile but did not
pose an intellectual challenge. For Baer, who tended to emphasize the
immanent factor in Jewish history, exile and antisemitism were seen as
aberrations, external components, which twisted the path of Jewish his-
tory. Now, following the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel, Jewish
history was returning to its due course.32 Hence Baer’s harsh criticism of
his student and later colleague, Shmuel Ettinger, for his absorption, in the
1960s, in the study of antisemitism. He would have preferred Ettinger to
deal with the internal life of the Jews, meaning, with the essential, and not
with an external phenomenon such as antisemitism that was necessarily
marginal, from his point of view.33 As has been noted by Ettinger himself,
Baer’s and the other Jerusalem historians’ often bitter and sharp indict-
ment of their contemporaries for not doing enough to save European
Jewry was more an expression of searing pain in the face of the immense
catastrophe and loss and an attempt at hasty soul-searching than a sober,
systematic analysis.34
Like the other Jerusalem scholars, Ben-Zion Dinur found little reason
to recall the Holocaust beyond its direct link to the Jews’ exilic condition
or, conversely, to the new state. According to Dinur, Jewish communal life
in the Diaspora followed a set pattern of destruction and regeneration. In
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his view, the Holocaust, despite its scope, was yet another expression of
this dialectic process. Only with the establishment of a strong and sover-
eign Jewish state, he argued, would this pattern be broken.35 In his article
“Diaspora Communities and their Destruction,” for example, which was
written in 1944, under the immediate influence of the Holocaust, Dinur
argued that the current Jewish catastrophe is not unique since hatred
and destruction of the Jewish people have always been a part of European
history: In the ancient Greco-Roman world, millions of Jews were presum-
ably annihilated during the transition to the Middle Ages; later, Jews were
persecuted and killed during the Black Death, in the Chmielnicki mas-
sacres, and, in the modern era, toward the end of World War I, in the
Ukraine. According to Dinur, the Jewish catastrophe of our time, although
more radical and systematic, is yet another manifestation of that murder-
ous hatred of Jews.36
In a sketch from that period, “Five Beginnings from the Day of
Mourning and Outcry,” Dinur introduces us to a group of discussants,
which includes a philosopher, a Hassid, a historian, a writer and a soldier.
The group debates whether the Holocaust was a unique phenomenon in
Jewish history or a mere stage in the evolution of antisemitism, albeit an
extreme one. The historian in the group clearly expresses Dinur’s opinion:
Did this evil really come upon us suddenly? Have we not for generation after gen-
eration been sitting upon smoking volcanos, and every time the earth quakes
beneath us and the volcanos spew forth flames which destroy us, we stand
shocked and dumbfounded, because we shut our eyes to seeing and proclaim
loudly again and again that the volcanos are long extinct, that it is not smoke issu-
ing from their craters but rather the morning mists which cover them and are no
danger at all? ‘Suddenly!’ Is this the first frightful holocaust which has come upon
us in the thousands of years of our exile and wanderings? Did not great Jewish
centers fall ‘suddenly’ and cover with their ruins hundreds upon hundreds of thou-
sands of Jews, old and young, women and children—who became as if they had
never been? Did not these centers, by their fall, seal the chapter off of the life’s
works and soulful tribulations of tens of Jewish generations who entombed their
bodies and souls in the walls of ‘Pithom and Ramses’ throughout the world?...37
Even long after the magnitude of the Jewish catastrophe in Europe had
been fully realized, Dinur’s views remained intact. In a memorial service,
which took place on the eve of the “Day of Destruction”—(Nissan 27,
1955)—in the Martyrs’ Forest in the Judean Hills, he stated: “It is our duty
to remember the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust...which is that Exile
is not only a misfortune and adversity but also is a transgression and a sin.
‘Exile’ and ‘destruction’ are not two separate categories for exile always
includes destruction. We must continually, therefore, repeat to ourselves:
a nation must not be dispersed and splintered or its factions will eventu-
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INTRODUCTION ) XXI
ally unite in a march of death.” 38

The sense of self-evidence, which characterized these scholars’ pre-
sentation of the Holocaust as an inevitable outcome of the Jewish exilic sit-
uation and of the return to Eretz Yisrael as the ultimate act of redemption
was prevalent also in Gershom Scholem’s few references to the Shoah.
“The great historical catastrophe of the Jewish people and redemption are
inseparably connected, dialectically intermeshed,” Scholem wrote in “Israel
and the Diaspora” (1969). “...‘Redemption’...always terminates in the resti-
tution of the destroyed central focal point: a restitution drawing its strength
not only from the intercession of a supernatural, divine power, but also
from the depth of the catastrophe itself, from the experience of exile,
which was the experience of Israel’s homelessness in the world of histo-
ry.”39 In another article, Scholem clearly integrated the Holocaust and the
rebirth of the state of Israel into his above mentioned “formula” of cata-
strophe and redemption in Jewish history: “...The establishment of the state
of Israel,” Scholem wrote in 1961, “is, for now, the first positive conse-
quence of the Shoah...Both events are, after all, two sides of one immense
historical process.”40
On the emotional/ideological level, a deep sense of guilt and shame at
their inability to come to the aid of European Jewry may have contributed
to the Jerusalem scholars’ sustained silence. Although there was hardly a
family which had not suffered some personal loss, the overall prevailing
spirit in the Yishuv was that of normalcy: The Yishuv continued to invest
its best energies in political-partisan problems and to allocate most of its
meager resources to building a state.41
At the end of 1942, greatly shaken by the near annihilation of European
Jewry and the Yishuv’s inaction, Dinur, like Klausner, joined and became
an active member of Al-Domi. The group’s expressed purpose was to
rouse the Yishuv and the free world to action against the Nazi menace. Al-
Domi consisted of no more than twenty intellectuals holding to diverse
political and ideological perspectives, such as Fischel Schneerson, Joseph
Klausner, Shmuel-Yosef Agnon, Martin Buber, Judah Leib Magnes, and oth-
ers. The motivation for joining Al-Domi was evidently shock over reports
of the unfolding Nazi genocide and a need to respond. Its objective was
to incite the institutions of the organized Yishuv to act. During its two years
of activity, Al-Domi’s many suggestions, such as a nationwide mourning—
one day a week for a year, the establishment of an institute for propagan-
da to counter the effects of Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda, or the
establishment of a central institution “that would deal exclusively with
urgent rescue activities,” received little sympathy from the organized
Yishuv.42
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That, beyond rhetoric and memorial assemblies, the Holocaust had not
affected the Yishuv’s way of life frustrated and infuriated the Al Domi
members. In 1945, Fischel Schneerson, a psychologist and one of the
leaders of Al Domi, evaluate of the Yishuv’s behavior during those years.
“There is a very paradoxical psychology at work here,” he observed. “We
have here some mysterious power that lies behind our national con-
sciousness and which does not allow us to observe the calamities we have
experienced.” This, in his mind, is an “historic phenomenon,” in accor-
dance with traditional Jewish behavior for coping with catastrophe: “...after
a massacre there is day of fasting, [we set up] a pogrom relief committee,
and then we go on with our business.”43
As an active member of the majority Mapai party,44 Dinur also voiced
his criticism against the Yishuv’s apathy during those years in countless
political forums, articles and radio interviews.45 Unlike Schneerson, how-
ever, Dinur blamed the Zionists’ failure to act upon their earlier observa-
tion and prediction of a looming catastrophe. “And who is to blame that
the Holocaust had found us so unprepared?” charges Dinur in a lecture he
gave at the Teachers’ Conference in 1945:
We cannot, in my mind, find solace in the answer: Zionism predicted the destruc-
tion...and, therefore, should not be blamed because it was the Jews who paid no
attention to her warnings. Zionism also laid the foundation for the rebuilding of
the House of Israel that served, and is serving, as a refuge haven for the surviv-
ing remnants...And if rescue attempts were minimal, again, this is not Zionism’
fault but that of the Yishuv’s apathy, the weakness of its leaders...It seems to me,
however, that there is nothing in these facts, which are in and of themselves true,
to provide us with an answer. After all, although the vision was there the actions
were not. Our guilt, therefore, lies in the fact that the rate of the Zionist real-
ization never corresponded to the Zionist prognosis. This is a grievous histor-
ical sin...There is no doubt, that the judgement of history will be severe, just as
its judgement will be harsh on everything that is being done in Eretz Yisrael today
[emphases in the original].46
Despite their rhetoric and outcry, however, the Jerusalem scholars

themselves could offer little practical and spiritual assistance. This aware-
ness may have, eventually, evoked a “protective numbing,” or uncon-
scious distancing.47 To this first generation of Zionist historians in Eretz
Yisrael, who viewed themselves as the forerunners, the vanguard, whose
main task was to prepare the Jewish people for its eternal salvation in the
land of its fathers, the failure of Zionism in the face of the extermination
of European Jewry meant an impossible confrontation with the basic
tenets of their predominantly ideologically-dominated historiography.
Dinur, for example, concluded the above mentioned 1945 lecture with the
following solemn words: “We knew how to be the forerunners for the
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INTRODUCTION ) XXIII
building of the land but we have not managed to be the pioneers in res-
cuing the nation” [emphases in the original].48
The Jerusalem scholars’ silence may have been further reinforced by
their common German-educational background: Yitzhak Fritz Baer
(1888–1980) was a graduate of Freiburg University; Ben-Zion Dinur
(Dinaburg) (1884–1973), who was born in the Ukraine, graduated from the
universities of Bern and Petrograd.49 Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), was
educated at the University of Berlin; and Joseph Klausner (1874–1958),
who was born in a little village near Vilna, was educated in Heidelberg.
It is possible to assume that the Jerusalem scholars found it difficult
to turn their backs completely on the German part of their intellectual her-
itage.50 The Holocaust placed them under paralyzing contrary pressures of
empathy to the plight of their Jewish brethren, on the one hand, and loy-
alty to the German intellectual tradition, on the other. Indeed, what had
happened in Europe was viewed by this group of scholars as a European
rather than as a particularly German phenomenon.
In “In the Absence of God” (1944), for example, Klausner explained the
Germans’ unparalleled cruelty as a consequence of the general European
revocation of God:
From where comes this horrendous cruelty of the Germans? We are told that it
comes from Nietzsche and his theory of the Super Man. “Yet Nietzsche, despite
his objection to the ‘slave morality’ of the prophets and of Socrates, thought high-
ly of the Jews as a nation, commended and praised the Holy Scripts of Israel as
compared to the New Testament. And where is this positive influence on the
Germans? I think, therefore, that the answer to the question (How can a civilized
people commit such atrocities?) is different. The majority of the German peo-
ple—and not only the Germans—were left without God; and in His absence
everything is permissible, everything allowed51 [emphasis in the original].
If there is no God, Klausner contended, all is permissible because all is rel-

ative. The tragedy of our generation derives from this sophist view that
everything is relative, that there is no absolute truth and there is no
absolute justice. Indeed, for the Germans, the State and the Führer came
to replace God; not only did they not forbid horrendous acts, they demand-
ed them.52
Klausner’s colleagues at the Hebrew University concurred. Unlike
Klausner, however, all found the seeds of the recent disaster in the opti-
mistic illusions of the Age of Enlightenment and its consequence: Jewish
emancipation. For example, the Holocaust had proven to Scholem his
pre-war assertions that Jewish existence in the Diaspora was an existence
that was based on the principle of accommodation and self-delusion on
the Jewish part, and complete rejection of the Jew, and especially the
“assimilated” Jew, on the part of the Gentiles. Scholem’s disdain for Jewish
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XXIV ( B E T W E E N M E M O RY A N D H I S TO RY
assimilation and accommodation was influenced by his own experiences

as a German Jew. The bourgeois values of his parents’ generation, who
believed that they had achieved a harmonic symbiosis with German cul-
ture and society, were based, he argued, on total self-delusion.53 “For it was
precisely this desire on the part of the Jews to be absorbed by the
Germans,” Scholem asserted in a lecture he delivered at the World Jewish
Congress in Brussels in 1966, “that hatred understood as a destructive
maneuver against the life of the German people.”54 Even in circles “where
Germans ventured on a discussion with Jews in a humane spirit, such a
discussion...was always based...on the progressive atomization of the
Jews as a community in a state of dissolution.”55
Interestingly, and perhaps related to the above mentioned phenome-
non, no German-Jew chose to pursue the history of the Holocaust as a sub-
ject of research during the immediate post-war period.56 With the
establishment of historical commissions in the DP camps, whose explicit
aim was “documentation per se, documentation to embrace all...histori-
cal features during the Nazi regime...”57, none of the surviving German Jews
chose to enlist in this enterprise, a fact that drew sharp criticism from Jews
of East-European background. “We, the Jews of Eastern Europe,” wrote
Moshe Feigenbaum, a founder of the Central Historical Commission in the
Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Munich and later a researcher at Yad
Vashem, “initiated this historical activity in a foreign land, with no autho-
rization as well as without any help from the remnants of German Jewry
who exhibited no interest in this work...The Jewish community in
Germany...did not share the dynamics that characterized the Jewish com-
munities in Eastern Europe. It was hard to imagine that German Jews,
instilled with total obedience,...would, under the Nazi regime, especially
in its final years, participate in conspiracy actions, hide or conceal writ-
ten notes.”58 When the Central Historical Committee in Munich request-
ed the members of the various Landsmanschaften in the DP camps to fill out
a questionnaire as to their personal memories from before and during the
war, the Committee received detailed answers from the various Polish
and Lithuanian Jewish organizations. Although the questionnaire was
especially translated into German in order to encourage German-speak-
ing Jews to participate, not one completed questionnaire was returned by
this group of survivors.59
Even the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) of Jews from Germany, founded in
1954 in Jerusalem, New York and London, set out to record Jewish life in
Germany only up until the war years. In the introduction to the first vol-
ume of the Institute’s Yearbook (1956), the chairman of its board, Dr.
Siegfried Moses, stated: “Primarily, but not exclusively, the Institute would
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INTRODUCTION ) XXV
like to concern itself with the history of German Jewry since the
Emancipation. The factual events leading to the catastrophe under the Nazi
regime, however, will not be included, as various other institutions have
undertaken the collection and description of material on the murderous
actions of the Nazis.”60 Indeed, during the first three decades of its exis-
tence, the LBI continued to follow this policy, publishing only studies that
dealt with the inner development of German Jewry in the fields of philos-
ophy, historiography, religion, science, economy and art. This conspicu-
ous exclusion of the Holocaust period in its publications lasted up until the
mid 1980s.
Finally, the domination of Holocaust research in the state of Israel by
East-European Jews, who came from a different intellectual tradition, may
have deterred the Jerusalem scholars from participating in this enter-
prise.61 The survivors’ historiographical methods mainly followed the
Dubnowian-Anskian tradition of the mass accumulation of primary
sources, with the assumption that the gathered documents, once arranged
according to a chronology of events, would “speak for themselves.” This
popular tradition continued in underground conditions during the war
years,62 in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Europe, and, later, was
applied to the study of the Shoah also in the state of Israel.63
The Jerusalem scholars’ approach to the study of history was the
inverse of that tradition. The accumulation of documentary and testimo-
nial material, the stepping-stone of any historical work, served them as a
means rather than as an end in itself. Their objective was not the accu-
mulation of popular documents per se, but rather their reformulation, in
adherence with their Zionist objectives, within the framework of critical
scholarship. Even Dinur, who was intimately familiar with the work of doc-
umentary compilation from his days in Russia and was later engaged in
his own work of Kinus of the history of Jews in the various European
countries and in Palestine, continuously argued, in his role as chairman
of Yad Vashem, for a greater emphasis on historical analysis rather than
on the mere accumulation of historical documents, and for a greater coop-
eration between the Institute for Holocaust research at Yad Vashem and
the Hebrew University.64 Gershom Scholem, who was a member of the
World Council of Yad Vashem, made similar comments during the one
recorded meeting of the Council in which he participated.65 Up until the late
1960s, however, the Jerusalem scholars’ suggestions fell on deaf ears.
Given this reticence on the part of the Jerusalem historians to partake
in the writing of the history of the Holocaust,66 the development of the early
“historiography” of the Shoah has been largely determined by factors that
are independent of any systematic historiographical endeavor: The early
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XXVI ( B E T W E E N M E M O RY A N D H I S TO RY
history of the Shoah was either written by survivors who became chron-
iclers and historians of sorts or by a few historians trained in pre-war
Eastern Europe (mainly in Warsaw and in Vilna). Once these chroniclers
and “historians” moved to Eretz Yisrael, the work started in the DP camps
and other European frameworks found its major hold at Yad Vashem, the
state created institute for the commemoration and study of the Holocaust
period.
At the state-run Yad Vashem, the early writing of the history of the
Shoah was influenced by a common ideological ground: Zionism, with its
specific relation to the diaspora and its particular vision of Jewish histo-
ry from catastrophe to redemption. As we shall see, this ideological frame-
work directly impinged upon the formation of a “dominant school” of
history writing by the systematic exclusion of those researchers that did
not fit the pre-established framework. In fact we will witness an extreme
form of politics of memory and historiography during this early period.
Although professional historiography was never directly involved in the
early writing of the history of the Shoah, nonetheless, a series of interac-
tions, “negotiations” and common endeavors between Yad Vashem and
academic historiography evolved during these early years, mainly due to
the influence in those various fields of Ben-Zion Dinur, who served in the
1950s as both Chairman of Yad Vashem and as Minister of Culture and
Education.
Following this early period, we witness the uncertain stages of the
establishment of an increasingly professional historiography of the Shoah
in Israel mainly via the study of modern antisemitism and its conse-
quences (Jacob Katz, Shmuel Ettinger, Jacob Talmon). It is on this basis that
a synthesis between the predominantly non-professional historical writ-
ing of the Shoah in the 1940s and the 1950s converges with the new pro-
fessional studies just mentioned as well as with work done in the US and
partly in various European countries and leads to an authentic Israeli his-
toriography of the Shoah, from the mid-1960s onwards (Dov Kulka, Yehuda
Bauer, Yisrael Gutman, Uriel Tal, Saul Friedländer and others).
This study will be divided into three main interrelated parts. In the first part
(chapters one and two), I shall analyze the Zionist-oriented perception of
the Holocaust in the Yishuv, during and following the war years and up until
the early 1950s. I shall also focus on the intertwining of memory and his-
tory in the survivors’ representation of the Shoah in the DP camps, from
1945 to 1948: I shall, first, examine the survivors’ initial attempts at
memorializing the recent catastrophe. These attempts, as we shall see,
compelled them, at the same time, to face and confront the agonizing
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INTRODUCTION ) XXVII
memories of their recent past. I will then discuss the beginning of their his-
torical writings and the nature of the historical commissions which sprang
throughout the Displaced Persons (DP) camps. Finally, I shall distinguish
between the collective memory of the majority of survivors and the much
smaller group of Jewish fighters. Besides the shared harrowing memory,
the latter’s ideological orientation and distinct collective experience dur-
ing the war, evolved, in time, into a collective memory markedly different
from that harbored by the majority of survivors.
In the second part of my work (chapters three and four), I shall exam-
ine the politics of Israeli historiography and memory of the Holocaust peri-
od during the 1950s: the establishment of Yad Vashem and its struggle for
hegemony over the memory and historiography of the Shoah; the attacks
on Mapai, the ruling socialist party, by parties in the opposition, from the
left and from the right, who latched on to the Holocaust as a convenient
issue on which to attack the establishment. I shall also observe the reac-
tions and activities during that period of both groups of survivors: the
Jewish fighters and the “ordinary” survivors—the unorganized majority of
survivors who, unlike the Jewish fighters, did not belong to any ideologi-
cal movements (Zionist or non-Zionist) in Europe before and during the
war. In the final part (chapter five), I will offer a brief overview of the evo-
lution and changes that occurred in Israeli historiography of the Holocaust,
following the Eichmann trial to the present.

kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:28 AM Page 1
() PART ONE
&'
Different Perceptions of
the Holocaust: the Yishuv,
the Survivors and the
Jewish Fighters—during
and following the War Years

DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST ) 3

The following two chapters will lay out the groundwork for understand-
ing the various and distinct memories of the Holocaust among the three
groups: the Yishuv, Jewish fighters and “ordinary” survivors, who, from the
early 1950s onwards, would find themselves living side by side in the State
of Israel. Their often competing memories, the result of their different
backgrounds and experiences, would (as we shall see in chapter 5), from
the 1960s onwards, converge and create a synthesis that would constitute
a distinct Israeli interpretation of the Holocaust period.
As this and following chapters will demonstrate, Zionist collective
memory in the Yishuv and, later, in the state of Israel represented the polit-
ical elite’s construction of the past, serving its ideological goals and pro-
moting its political agenda. Inspired by the nationalist credo that called for
a revival of national culture and life in the ancient Jewish homeland, the
Yishuv constructed a negative image of the exilic past, an image which
served as a necessary counter-model to the two national periods, the one
experienced in the pre-exilic period, in biblical times, and the one begin-
ning to take shape in Eretz Yisrael.
The negative perception of Exile not only repudiated life in exile but
often the people who live in the Diaspora. According to this view, life in
Exile turned the Jews into submissive, acquiescent and cowardly people.
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the socialist Zionist leader who later became Israel’s sec-
ond President, expressed the view of many in the Yishuv when he stated:
“The spirit of heroism and courage disappeared in the Jewish ghetto.”
Instead, he argued, the Jews adapted “a sharp mind..., submissiveness
toward others...cowardice and timidity in their relation with neighbors and
rulers.” This Jewish behavior, “resulted in a tendency to rely on miracles,
since the Jews lacked both confidence or self-motivation.”1
Yet, although Zionist collective memory emphasized a wide “qualita-
tive” gap between the “new” Jews in Eretz Yisrael and the exilic Jews, it pre-
sented the former as the transformation of the latter. That is, although the
Zionists accentuated their disassociation from Jewish tradition, they relied
on this tradition as their legitimizing framework. As the historian Shmuel
Almog points out, a complete break with the Jewish tradition would have
undermined the Zionist claim for historical continuity between the nation-
al period in Antiquity and the present, between the ancient Hebrews and
contemporary Jews.2
The Yishuv’s approach to Exile and to the Jews living in the Diaspora
became more salient during and following the Holocaust.3 Indeed, it was
only with the Holocaust, due to its magnitude, that Zionism was able to
draw a clear line indicating the end of viable life in exile: The fate of
European Jewry sealed the period of persecution and repression and val-
4 ( B E T W E E N M E M O RY A N D H I S TO RY
idated the Zionist contention in favor of a Jewish national life in Eretz

Yisrael.4
The survivors, especially the “ordinary” survivors’ memory, constitut-
ed a countermemory,5 one that stood in oppositional and subversive rela-
tion to the hegemonic Zionist memory. Although it was limited to a single
past event, it was highly subversive precisely because the implication of
its claim tended to go beyond the memory of the Jewish catastrophe,
challenging, in fact, the dominant Zionist memory in general. The Zionists,
as mentioned before, held to an activist approach to history, deliberately
using Exile and its spirit as counter-model to the construction of a new
Hebrew identity. Hence, for example, for them, the concept of “martyrdom,”
upheld by the survivors, represented the exilic Jews’ failure to actively
defend themselves.6
As we shall see, for the most part, the much smaller group of Jewish
fighters fueled and often surpassed the Yishuv’s harsh criticism of Jewish
behavior during the Holocaust. In fact, it was this group of young men and
women, many of whom were associated with non-Zionist and Zionist
movements before the outbreak of the war, who first used the Biblical term
for martyrdom “like sheep to the slaughter,” turning it into a contemptu-
ous epithet for the “ordinary” Jews, whom they accused of going to death
without resisting.7 At the same time, they also criticized the Yishuv lead-
ership for its conspicuous lack of empathy to the Jews in occupied Europe
as a whole, exemplified by the Yishuv’s failure to come to the aid of the vic-
tims during the Shoah and to the survivors in the months following the war.
When Yishuv emissaries did arrive in Europe, they came as representatives
of quarreling parties and completely disregarded the survivors’ thrust for
unity (this point will be discussed further on in this chapter).
However, and for reasons that will be explored in chapter 3, upon their
arrival to Eretz Yisrael the Jewish fighters opted to “surrender” their criti-
cism of the Yishuv’s behavior during and following the Holocaust years.
Henceforth, their story of Jewish resistance came to accentuate and mag-
nify their role as the bearers of Zionist ideology.
() CHAPTER ONE
&'
In the Yishuv
The Yishuv’s approach to the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was affected,

from the outset, by the Zionist attitude toward Diaspora Jewry prior to the
war years. The prevalent myth was that of the “new Jew”: independent,
brave and strong. Conversely, European Jewry became, as mentioned, a
symbol of Diaspora passivity, meekness and humility.1 In 1943, for exam-
ple, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a leading member of the Jewish Agency
Executive, echoed this negative image of Diaspora Jewry in a Memorial
gathering for the national Hebrew poet, Chaim Nahman Bialik:
And this is the most terrible curse of the Diaspora, this is its very essence: loss
of the capacity for self-defense, an intensified desire to live under any conditions,
to maintain a totally empty life, a life of debased bondage and humiliation. To
overcome the Diaspora means not only to leave it and to build the homeland. A
member of the Diaspora...lacks the strength to seize for himself a life of liberty
in the homeland, [a life] which is based on the readiness to sacrifice one’s life
in order to defend it.2
This negative image, expressed in insensitivity and indifference

towards Jewish tradition and the Jewish diaspora led, during the 1940s and
1950s, to the emergence of “Canaanism” (or “Young Hebrews,” as they
called themselves): an anti-Zionist and, in a sense, “non-Jewish” cultur-
al movement that wanted to bring back into life the mythical biblical
(Canaanite) people in Eretz Yisrael and “do away” with Jewish exilic his-
tory.3 Although the movement consisted of a small group of intellectuals,
most of whom came from the extreme right, some of its nihilistic ideas
found their way into Israeli literature and, at times, the press, and became
widespread, particularly among the younger generation.”4
Indeed, the arguments in Hayyim Hazaz’s well-known short story, “The

Sermon” (“Ha-derashah”), first published in the fall of 1942, are marked-
ly similar to those of the Canaanites. Yudke, the protagonist, denounces
Jewish history, characterizing the period between the destruction of the
Temple and the modern return to Israel as a one of misery and shame that
should be forgotten:
I would like to state...that I object to Jewish history...I have no respect for
it...What’s in it?...persecutions, libel stories, prohibitions and martyrology...and
once again and again and again ad infinitum...Jewish history is boring, uninter-
esting. It contains no tales and plots, no heroes and world conquerors...only a
community of eroded mourners who sigh and cry for mercy...I would complete-
ly forbid teaching Jewish history to our children. What an evil to teach them their
fathers’ disgrace...5
Yudke’s dismissive depiction of exilic Jewish history reflected the

Yishuv’s feeling of dissociation from the “diaspora.”6 Exilic Jewish history
was significant for many only so far as it pointed to a Zionist lesson: To
overcome the Diaspora, its “persecutions, libel stories, prohibitions and
martyrology...,” Jews have to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael and establish a
state.
The Holocaust too was viewed through the same lense: Without a state
and the power to defend their survival, Jews would always be vulnerable
to this kind of a catastrophe.7 In the words of Evyatar Friesel: “Considered
alongside the establishment of the Jewish State, the Holocaust represent-
ed the other side of Jewish history—the side of darkness and extermina-
tion against the side of creation and continuity.”8
The establishment of a causal link between extermination and creation,
between the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel, clearly repeated the
sequence of catastrophe and redemption that is deeply embedded in
Jewish tradition. According to tradition, every catastrophe is understood
as a link in a chain that leads back to the first major catastrophe, the
destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans and the exile of the
Israelites from their land. Even this catastrophe is connected in turn with
the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian
captivity. In this traditional perspective the destruction of European Jewry
too has been linked to the archetypal catastrophe and to redemption at the
end of days.9
The secular Zionists’ interpretation too sought to explain the extermi-
nation of European Jewry by means of a general historical interpretive pat-
tern, that of modern antisemitism, which brought about a series of ever
more severe persecutions. These persecutions, directly linked to Jewish
existence in exile, found their most extreme form in the extermination poli-
IN THE YISHUV ) 7
cies of Nazi Germany, thereby reaching their final stage, which, of neces-
sity, would lead to deliverance, to the founding of a Jewish state.
Yet, while the orthodox view catastrophic events as divine punishment
and redemption as dependent on God’s will, in the secular Zionists’ inter-
pretation the emphasis shifted from a passive acceptance of catastrophe
to redemptive struggle for the Yishuv, later for the state.10 However, by link-
ing the rebirth of Israel to the Holocaust, the pre-state Yishuv and later the
state of Israel thereby also located the Jewish tragedy at the center of
national identity. In the words of James E. Young: Israel came to be a nation
“condemned to defining itself in opposition to the very event that made it
necessary.”11
This essential dichotomy was expressed as early as March 18, 1943,
in a speech given by the leader of the Yishuv and the future Prime Minister
of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, at a commemorative gathering for Yosef
Trumpeldor, the hero of Tel Hai and one of the mainstays of the Yishuv’s
mythology.12 On this occasion, Ben-Gurion made the distinction between
the majority of European Jewry who did not know how to live and how to
die as free men and between the few who had decided to defend them-
selves and to die in a different way. They had done this since “they had
learned the new manner of dying which the defenders of Tel Hai and
Sejera established for us—a courageous death.”13 Later, Israel would
“appropriate” the Warsaw ghetto fighters’ heroism as its own.14
The Yishuv’s arrogant and contemptuous attitude towards European
Jewry was combined, however, with a strong sense of commitment. This
was an a priori commitment, rooted in the Yishuv’s self-image as the dri-
ving force of the Jewish people, the chosen vanguard of the Jewish nation.
It stemmed from the fundamental Zionist tenet that the establishment of
a Jewish state in the land of Israel would ultimately bring salvation to the
entire Jewish people. Ironically, this “future-oriented” ideology served
many from among the Yishuv’s leadership as a moral justification for con-
centrating on domestic problems to the point of disregarding other urgent
problems in the Jewish world at large.15 In December 1942, for example,
upon hearing of the mass killing of Jews in Radom, Poland, Yitzhak
Tabenkin, leader of Hakibbutz Hameuchad movement, stated: “We have
nothing more valuable to give to the Diaspora than the Yishuv. We can
retreat from every territory in the world—but we may not retreat from this
one. The entire Jewish people needs to see its central concern in defense
of the settlement in Palestine.”16
Thus, when the war broke out, the Yishuv’s main concern was to
return its delegates in Europe safely back to Palestine. While many among
the leaders of the ghetto revolts, such as Zivia Lubetkin, Frumke Plotnicka
and others, refused, when given the choice, to desert their comrades and
go to Palestine, Yishuv emissaries in Europe were called to return home
immediately.17 Late in grasping the dimension and the significance of the
Holocaust-in-progress, the Yishuv was immersed in its own problems.
“We were never really shaken to the roots,” wrote Moshe Braslavsky, of
Hakibbutz Hameuchad. “True, we did have sleepless nights. That was
when the danger appeared to be at our very doorstep and the whole
country trembled under the impact of impending catastrophe. During that
time, a small window was opened onto the great tragedy, opened and then
shut.”18 Indeed, before October 1942, Eretz Yisrael seemed to have been
threatened by the Axis Armies and this threat overshadowed the news from
occupied Europe. After the victory at El-Alamein, in October of that year,
the life in the Yishuv returned to normalcy, marked by a sense of vibrant
renewal, rebuilding and economic prosperity.19
There were some in the Yishuv, especially from among the Zionist
right-wing Revisionist movement headed by Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky,
who regarded the rescue of the Jews from a threatening holocaust as the
primary historic purpose of the Zionist movement.20 Already in 1940
Jabotinsky called for the speedy evacuation of a million Polish Jews and
their resettlement in Palestine within one year. In the Revisionist interpre-
tation of Zionism, the Evacuation Plan was regarded as the most profound
and ambitious manifestation of “humanitarian Zionism”21 (in contrast to
the socialist parties who preferred, at least until the magnitude of the
Holocaust became known, a gradual and selective absorption of Diaspora
Jewry). This mass emigration scheme was rejected by leaders of the major-
ity socialist party, Mapai, as unrealistic.22 Following the Holocaust, the
Revisionists repeatedly argued that with this plan they would have been
able to save many Jews, if only they had led the Zionist movement. This
claim became the subject of historical myths which, from the 1940s
onwards, were cultivated by the younger Revisionist generation, adding fuel
to the already bitter Revisionist accusations about Mapai’s behavior dur-
ing the Holocaust.23
Such accusations could also be heard, although to a lesser extent, from
members of the left-wing socialist parties. For example, at the Hakibbutz
Hameuchad movement’s Fourteenth Conference in the fall of 1943, numer-
ous speakers, particularly former emissaries, addressed the issue of res-
cue attempts, or, better put, the lack of it. Nahum Benari, who served in
the 1920s as an emissary of his movement to Hehalutz in Poland, said:
I am here...and they remain there, abandoned. I am obligated to examine myself
on this point: perhaps all the good things I spoke about with them were nothing
IN THE YISHUV ) 9
but idle talk if I was unable to do the main thing: to save as many Jews as pos-
sible from the abyss.24
Feelings of guilt and shame were also expressed over the petty polit-
ical squabbling, which, in 1944, split Mapai at a time when the Jews in
Europe were being exterminated.25 Enzo Sereni, for example, insisted that
“our split today...would not have been possible if we were all living the
calamity which has struck us.”26 And, in one of his most quoted statements
against the glaring lack of proportion between the undisturbed life of the
Yishuv and the suffering in Europe, the historian Ben-Zion Dinur charged:
“Try juxtaposing the dates of reports about the destruction of thousands
of Jewish communities...with reports on the splits and disagreements
within the parties and factions, and you will appreciate the full horror that
these facts imply for our future...We forget that future generations will
closely examine everything we did during these times...and I very much
fear that the judgment of the generation closest to us, the judgment of our
children, will be very harsh.”27
Contacts between Yishuv members and Holocaust survivors in Europe
and in Israel drew a further rift between She’erit Hapletah (the surviving
remnant) and the Yishuv. The different worldviews and experiences of
Yishuv Jews and Holocaust survivors produced an element of alienation
which led to disagreements and tensions that surfaced almost immediate-
ly upon the survivors’ arrival. Toward the end of 1944, when the first immi-
grants began to reach the country, complaints could be heard about the
kind of people arriving. “Are these the kind of immigrants you’re sending
us?...We want haluzim [pioneers], people like us, the kind of people we are
used to.”28 Even earlier, in May 1942, three months after meeting with
refugees who arrived in Eretz Yisrael via Teheran, Eliahu Dobkin, deputy
head of the Jewish Agency’s Immigration Department and a leading figure
in Mapai, complained: “The majority of the refugees are of broken spirit,
despairing, lacking in hope to one degree or another, and it is they who
confront us with a new and very serious problem. How are we to approach
this new oleh [immigrant]? According to all past criteria we would never
have agreed to approve them for aliyah [immigration]...”29
The first major encounter between the survivors and delegates from
the Yishuv took place in Europe. Soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who had
fought under British command and, months after liberation, emissaries
from the Yishuv, met the survivors in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in
Germany, Austria and Italy.30 Before long, this encounter took on a criti-
cal tone, reflecting the deep-seated negative attitude to all the Jews in the
Diaspora that had already been in existence in Eretz Yisrael for several
decades. Soldiers and emissaries’ reports described the survivors as

“human dust,” damaged not only physically and psychologically but also
morally.31 In a letter to his family, one soldier described his first impres-
sion of the Jewish survivors in the camps as unscrupulous and unwilling
to work. “Although there are some honest men among them,” he added,
“most Jews here live off of the German black market. In all European
countries Jewish livelihood is colored in black....Is it a wonder that the
whole world hates us so?”32 Haim Yahil (Hoffman), the head of the Jewish
Agency delegation in Germany, had a similar impression. The survivors
have no desire to engage in any kind of work. They strongly feel that they
“deserve” to live for a while at the expense of the German market, UNRRA,
or American Jewry, represented by the “Joint.” This kind of behavior, he
concluded, “desecrates the honor of Israel.”33
The emissaries attributed these negative characteristics not only to the
survivors’ horrendous experience in the camps during the war but also to
the survivors’ life in Exile before the Holocaust. A few years after the war,
Yahil wrote and published a detailed review on the DP camps in Germany
in which he recognized that “we never perceived the surviving remnants
and Eretz Yisrael to be one. We felt that they [the surviving remnants] will
have to undergo a tremendous mental and physical change in order to unite
with Eretz Yisrael. We situated the Israeli essence and the Israeli new man
against the diaspora essence and the diaspora man.”34
In contrast, the encounter between the soldiers of the Brigade and
emissaries from the Yishuv with Jewish partisans, Brichah activists and
ghetto fighters—many of whom belonged before the war to Zionist Youth
movements—was very different.35 The Jewish fighters’ heroic activities
coincided with the worldview of native Israelis, affirming the notion that
Zionist values generated active and heroic behavior, different from the one
exhibited by the survivors as a whole.36 One soldier described the first
meeting of soldiers from the Jewish Brigade with ghetto fighters and par-
tisans in northern Italy in a letter he sent to his kibbutz, on July 17, 1945:
Yesterday we participated in a very interesting meeting in the DP camp next to
the Brigade. Some of the survivors were from among the fighters of ghetto
Vilna...One of them, Kovner his name,...read from his diary...There were also
young women among them whose endless heroic deeds, we were told, included
transferring information and arms as well as maintaining contacts between the
various underground groups in the camp. Names and more names were men-
tioned of men, heroes, who succeeded sometimes more than once and eventu-
ally died a heroic death. Those who survived, survived by a miracle. We set
listening for hours fascinated by their stories. This handful of people are the sole
survivors of thousands like them, and this is the saddest thing of all.37
The special status of the Jewish fighters was officially “stamped” later
IN THE YISHUV ) 11
that year in the World Zionist Convention in London where Yitzhak
Zuckerman and Chaika Grossman, leaders of the Warsaw ghetto revolt,
were invited and delivered speeches as representatives of She’erit Hapleta
as a whole.38
The arrival to Eretz Yisrael of some of the more charismatic and out-
spoken leaders of the Jewish fighters (Ruzka Korczak and Abba Kovner in
1945, Zivia Lubetkin in 1946, Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman in 1947) only
widened the gulf between the heroic image of the ghetto fighters and the
partisans and the image of the “ordinary” survivors in general. In the fight-
ers’ many speeches and testimonies, the everyday struggles and dilemmas
facing the “ordinary” Jew in the ghettos served merely as background to
tales of their own heroic deeds, accentuating the historical uniqueness of
their revolts or, in Kovner’s words, “the miracle of heroism in the midst of
extinction [‘Hidalon’ in Hebrew].”39 To this deepening chasm was added the
fact that in 1946 and 1947 most of the Zionist leaders from among the
Jewish fighters had already emigrated to Palestine with the assistance of
their various party comrades in the Yishuv, while the majority of the
“ordinary” survivors were still residing in camps in Europe and their
“helpless” image was largely shaped by the emissaries’ reports.40 The
reference to the partisans and the ghetto fighters as the “Zionist” or
“Hebrew” youth, while referring to other Holocaust victims as “Jews,” rein-
forced this attitude.41
Dan Horowitz, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University,
described in his memoirs the sharp distinction made in the Yishuv’s pub-
lic opinion between the larger Jewish population which went to death unre-
sistingly, according to the traditional Jewish pattern of behavior, and the
minority, members of the youth movements who rebelled: “The first news
of the Holocaust—a horror story that penetrates the consciousness but
which remains incomprehensible on the emotional level, alien, not from
our familiar world...The ghetto uprising was easier to understand, closer
to the associational frameworks of a member of a youth movement in
Palestine, and therefore more easily accepted as an object of identifica-
tion.”42
The arrival of Ruzka Korczak to Palestine in 1945 and, a year later, the
publication of her book, Lehavot Ba-efer (“Flames amidst the Ashes”),
greatly perpetuated the Jewish-fighters’ heroic image. The very notion that
a girl fighter who was one of the leaders of the Vilna ghetto uprising had
arrived in Eretz Yisrael stirred emotions of pride and excitement. While still
living in the Atlit immigration camp, Ruzka was visited by many of the
Yishuv leaders.43 Her book, the first to be published in Eretz Yisrael on the
subject of the Holocaust, introduced into the Yishuv’s consciousness the
names of Abba Kovner, Chaika Grossman, Vitka Kempner, Tosia Altman

and other Jewish fighters, exalting and aggrandizing their heroic deeds dur-
ing the Holocaust.44
The receptivity to the stories of the Jewish fighters in Israel found its
greatest support in the kibbutzim, where many of them initially settled and
where their heroism became inextricably tied to the kibbutzim’s same
ideals. One of the ideological fundament of this approach was the claim
that a person’s worldview and ideological education determine his or her
behavior even in extreme events such as the Holocaust. As a result, it was
the fighters’ memoirs and testimonies which were published under the
imprint of the kibbutz publishing houses and put at the disposal of the
Israeli public, almost to the exclusion of the memoirs of the “ordinary”
survivors.45
The one exception was Ka-Tzetnik’s book, Salamandrah, published in
Eretz Yisrael in 1946. The book told the story of the Holocaust in harsh lan-
guage from the perspective of an “ordinary” survivor.46 There were no tales
of heroic acts in Ka-Tzetnik’s story, but rather an emphasis on Jewish help-
lessness in the face of the Nazis’ sadistic acts, which he described in great
detail.47 However, the descriptions of total Jewish helplessness under Nazi
oppression, at a time when the Yishuv was involved in a struggle for
statehood, reinforced the Yishuv’s identification with those who attempt-
ed to revolt, on the one hand, and diminished its ability to empathize with
those who did not, on the other.48
Yet even the Jewish fighters were viewed with suspicion by some
Yishuv leaders. Their common bond and short lived attempt, in Lublin in
June 1945, to unite the various Zionist factions were considered as pos-
ing a threat to the accepted ways of the Yishuv. The partisans, in partic-
ular, were regarded by some Yishuv leaders as unruly elements who tend
to disregard authority. Describing his encounter with Jewish partisans in
Romania, Y.Nussbaum, member of the Histadrut Executive stated: “Morally
speaking, they are different from the workers’ movement in Palestine in that
they don’t think twice about drawing their guns and shoot.” If these par-
tisans would not be provided with suitable guidance in Palestine, he
added, “this immigration will provide us with terrorism.”49
The most vocal critic of the Jewish fighters among the Yishuv leaders
was Meir Ya’ari of Hashomer Hatsair. “When it comes to dying a heroic
death,” he told a group of newly arrived partisans in a meeting held at
Kibbutz Evron in November 1945, “in this we have much to learn from you.
But when it comes to living a heroic life—allow us, if you please, to teach
you.”50 Ya’ari’s comment, although extreme in its articulation, reflected the
attitude of others among the Yishuv leadership toward the Jewish fighters.
IN THE YISHUV ) 13
Criticism of the “ordinary” survivors’ Galut mentality and fear of the
“unruly” and combatant spirit of the Jewish fighters stemmed, in part, from
the Yishuv veterans’ attempts to forge a collective national character and
a homogeneous collective memory, based on their interpretation of Zionist
goals and aspirations. But it also derived from the veterans’ own partisan
squabbling over the social construct and the political credo of the Yishuv.
The disputes between the Yishuv leadership and its delegates in Europe
and between the survivors over “unity” versus political separation and sec-
tarianism, a dispute that was initiated, as mentioned, by the Jewish fight-
ers drive for unity, clearly illustrates the widening gulf between the two
worlds. To many survivors the obvious conclusion drawn from the
Holocaust was for the Jews to unite. Political divisiveness should be set
aside for the sake of national unity. In fact, the first resolution passed by
the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria in the Feldafing DP
camp, on July 1, 1945, called upon “the Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael, upon the
whole Jewish people to unite and forget the partisan struggles that had
deprived the Jews so much of their strength and blood so that together we
may build a Jewish state!...When we arrive in Palestine, we intend with all
our strength to support the sacred work of unification!”51
In contrast, Yishuv emissaries arrived in Europe as representatives of
a wide variety of parties and movements who had been intensely quarrel-
ing with each other. As a dynamic society undergrowing growth and
development, the Yishuv was split into ideological camps competing with
one another for power. In general, the various political factions agreed on
the division of influence, establishing proportional allocations among
movements. But the prospect of mass immigration to Eretz Yisrael was liable
to disrupt the existing social and political status quo. Hence, one of the main
objectives of the Yishuv emissaries in assisting the surviving remnants in
Europe was to recruit them to whatever faction or movement the emissaries
belonged to in Eretz Yisrael.52 In her study on the relationship between the
survivors and the Yishuv, Anita Shapira goes so far as to state that “had
it not been for the inter-movement competition for the souls of the sur-
vivors, had it not been for the fear of each and every movement that it
would somehow lose out and find itself without manpower reserves, it is
difficult to imagine that they could have been motivated to mobilize them-
selves as they, in fact, did.”53
The bitter struggle among the three leading political parties in the
Yishuv: Mapai (the center-left party, which emerged in the 1930s as the
dominant political force in the Yishuv), Achdut Ha’avodah (which formed
as a result of a split within Mapai in 1944), and Hashomer Hatsair (the far
left-wing socialist party), led these movements to attach critical importance
to the recruitment to their own ranks of as many of the potential new immi-
grants as possible.54 Thus the drive for unity among the survivors was
viewed by the different Yishuv parties as a potential danger to the exist-
ing balance of power. The leaders of Hashomer Hatsair (who were ideo-
logically close to the Soviet Union) were especially apprehensive and
alarmed. The survivors’ drive to unity, they feared would undermine the
movement’s singular social outlook and its alliance with progressive
Europe.55 Moreover, Ya’ari viewed the negative image of the Soviet Union
by members of the movement who spent the war years in Russia as divi-
sive and dangerous. A revision in the attitude toward the Soviet Union, the
leader of the socialist world, may result in a disillusionment with social-
ism as a political system.56
On their part, the leaders of Achdut Ha’avodah suspected that the call
for unity served the interests of the largest Mapai party. And, although
Mapai’s views most closely resembled that of the majority of the survivors,
members of Mapai, who won by a slim margin in the Histadrut election of
August 1944, feared that the new immigrants would be swayed by the
ardent enthusiasm and dedication of the emissaries from the other par-
ties, whose number far exceeded their Jewish Agency and Histadrut quo-
tas.57 Furthermore, fate yielded that the leadership of parties affiliated
with Mapai in Poland before the war was almost completely eradicated
during the Holocaust, while some of the most outstanding leaders asso-
ciated with Hashomer Hatsair and Hakibbutz Hameuchad movements,
such as Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, survived the war, giving
Mapai’s rival parties a clear advantage in their efforts to recruit survivors
to their ranks.58
According to Yahil’s own testimony a few years after the war’s end:
Our attitude toward the surviving remnant was not based on humanitarian objec-
tives only but, first and foremost, on the evaluation of the role that they were to
play in our own struggle. For that reason we were not always compassionate but
often demanding. Despite our recognition of and identification with the unique
goals and demands of the surviving remnant, preoccupation with our own objec-
tive goal effected a distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ [my emphasis]—a distance
which was greatly criticized by the survivors but which allowed us to keep
focused on our objective goal.59
The “distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’“ was conspicuously expressed

in the first few years following the war in the absence of any significant
commemoration of the Shoah in the Yishuv and, after 1948, by the long
delay in establishing a national memorial day in memory of the victims
(“The Law of Remembrance of Shoah and Heroism -Yad Vashem,” was
passed by the Israeli Knesset five years after the establishment of the State,
IN THE YISHUV ) 15
on August 19, 1953).60
During the first few years following the war, two opposite approach-
es to the commemoration of the Holocaust existed in Eretz Yisrael. The first
approach, held by the political elite, the Zionist left, emphasized the cen-
trality of active heroism. Although, as we have seen, the Jewish fighters’
early independent ways animated some suspicion and disaffection, as a
group, they came to symbolize the “new Jew,” their heroic deeds directly
linked to the heroism of the ancient Hebrews and their successors, the
Zionist community in Eretz Yisrael. Hence, between 1946 and 1948, numer-
ous assemblies were held on April 19th—commemorating the outbreak of
the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In these commemoration services there was
little mention of the Shoah itself, the persecutions, Jewish existence in the
shadow of death in the extermination camps, or the killings. Instead, the
focus on armed struggle, especially the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was
decisive.61
The second approach was introduced by the chief Rabbinate in Eretz
Yisrael and by the relatively small group of religious Zionists. These groups
opposed the distinction made in Israeli public thought in the 1950s
between the Jewish fighters and the “ordinary” survivors, between the
uprising and the other types of ‘Jewish response’ during the Holocaust.
Zerah Warhaftig, for example, a leading Religious Zionist spokesman,
completely objected to criticism of the Jews for not exhibiting physical
resistance, considering a value distinction between the path of rebellion
and other Jewish reactions as blasphemous.62
Already in the spring of 1946, the chief Rabbis in Israel met to discuss
the form and manner in which to commemorate the victims of the
Holocaust. In a proclamation published in the summer of that year “to our
brothers and sisters in Eretz Yisrael,” the Rabbis stated that “the chief
Rabbinate had decided to commemorate the memory of the martyrs in
accordance with the laws of the Torah and the spirit of the Jewish tradi-
tion.” This would include the kindling of “a national memorial candle” in
memory of the victims in holy sites in Israel, the reading of “Tehilim,” and
Kaddish prayers.63 In this plan, no distinction was made between the Shoah
and the Gvurah. All the Jewish victims, those who were led to their death
without resisting and the Jewish fighters, were described in the Rabbinate
proclamation as “martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the name of the
nation’s God.”64 The tenth of Tevet was suggested by the chief Rabbinate
as the appropriate date for the commemoration of the Shoah. On this date
began the first siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar
and, in Jewish tradition, the beginning of the sequence of catastrophes
marked by repeated destruction and exile.65
The Chief Rabbinate, however, did not object to having a separate day
of commemoration to the Warsaw ghetto revolt. On April 19, 1948, follow-
ing a request from Zvi Lurye, Mapam’s representative at the National
Committee of the Jewish Agency, the chief Rabbis, Yitzhak Herzog and Ben
Zion Uziel, declared the tenth of Nissan (April 19th in 1948) as a memo-
rial day to the ghetto fighters.66 It seems that the chief Rabbis did not see
any contradiction in their decision to declare the tenth of Tevet as a
memorial day for the Shoah and their endorsement of the tenth of Nissan
as a memorial day for the Jewish fighters in Warsaw. Henceforth, memo-
rial services to the Holocaust were taking place on both dates. While the
tenth of Tevet was marked as a day of mourning the Jewish victims in gen-
eral, with no regard to the manner in which they died, the tenth of Nissan
became a day for the commemoration of the heroic deeds of the ghetto
fighters and the partisans.
In early 1950, representatives of Mapam in the Knesset (the far-left
socialist party, formed in 1948)67 worried that, in time, the tenth of Tevet
would become a state-recognized memorial day for the Holocaust while
April 19 (which falls around the mid Hebrew month of Nissan) would be
commemorated by left Zionism only. Therefore, they proposed to enact a
law that would recognize April 19 as a unifying national Holocaust memo-
rial day.68 In turn, Rabbi Mordecai Nurok, a member of the Knesset repre-
senting the National Religious party, proposed that memorial services to
the Jewish fighters be included as part of the general Kaddish day that falls
on Tevet tenth.69
On March 21, 1951 a compromise was reached. The Knesset would
pass a law marking “Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and the Revolt
in the Ghettos,” (later amended to “Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’
Remembrance Day”)70 The date chosen, Nissan 27, was as close as Jewish
law would allow to the date of the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto revolt,
which occurred on Passover night. It was also the date in which the mas-
sacres of Jews by the Crusaders, “ancestors of the Nazis, destroyed so
many holy [Jewish] communities.”71 Thus was laid the foundation for the
main element in the collective Israeli consciousness of the Holocaust: the
juxtaposition between the Holocaust, evoking the passivity of the major-
ity of European Jewry who “went like sheep to the slaughter” (Katso’n lat-
evah), and between the “heroism” (gevurah) of the few, in the ghettos and
in the forests, who took to arms.
For the next several years, memorial ceremonies were held annually
by various organizations of survivors, including the kibbutzim established
by Jewish fighters and partisans, by municipalities and political parties. All
in all, however, the majority of participants in these ceremonies were sur-
IN THE YISHUV ) 17
vivors themselves. In the rest of the country the memorial day was rarely
observed. “Places of entertainment are wide open on this day,” objected
Rabbi Nurok. “The radio plays cheerful music, dances and humor, and the
display windows glow. Joyfulness and happiness instead of sorrow and
mourning.” In June 1958, Rabbi Nurok proposed enforcing the mourning
by law—closing stores, for example, initiating commemorative ceremonies
in schools and synagogues and requiring radio programs and movie the-
aters to accord with the solemnity of the day.72
In 1961, three years after Nurok’s proposal, the Knesset decided to
implement the law. From then on, observance begins with a two minutes
siren sounding, at which time the Israeli flag is lowered to half-mast and
all work and traffic stop; all places of entertainment and amusement close
down; schools, radio and television programs dedicate the day to the
study and remembrance of the Holocaust; commemorative ceremonies and
assemblies are held in all army camps and educational institutions; work-
ers are given time-off to participate in memorial services.73

() CHAPTER TWO
&'
The Survivors and the Jewish

Fighters in the DP Camps,
1945–1948
In dealing with the memory of their recent past, the survivors’ recollec-
tion of the events often became intertwined with their historical represen-
tation of the Shoah period. This chapter will focus on the “twilight zone”
between memory and history in the survivors’ representation of the Shoah
in the DP camps, from 1945 to 1948. I shall, first, examine the survivors’
initial attempts at memorializing the recent catastrophe. These attempts,
as we shall see, compelled them to confront and publically debate some
sensitive issues of the past. As we shall see, quite astonishingly and in
stark contradistinction to their total silence following their immigration to
Israel three years later, the “ordinary” survivors chose to deal openly and
candidly with all aspects of the past. In the second part of this chapter,
we will observe a distinction between the collective memory of the major-
ity of “ordinary” survivors and the much smaller group of Jewish fighters.
Besides the shared traumatic memory, the latter had lived through a
unique collective experience that, in time, evolved into a collective mem-
ory different from that of the majority of survivors.
The term She’erit Hapletah (the surviving remnant)1 applies to all sur-
viving Jews in Europe but came to be associated in particular with the
some 300,000 survivors who concentrated in the Occupied Zones of
Germany, Austria and Italy between 1945 and 1952.2 By 1946, over 80 per-
cent of the surviving remnants in these three countries concentrated in
Germany and, of those, 78 percent lived in the American zone of occupa-
tion, 14 percent in the British zone (primarily in Belsen), and the rest
resided in the French zone and in Berlin.3 Ironically then, Germany, the
land of the perpetrators of the Jewish tragedy, became, after the war, the
largest and safest sanctuary for Jewish refugees waiting in DP camps for
the opportunity to emigrate.
Immediately after liberation, survivors residing in the DP camps
thought it would be in the best interest of She’erit Hapletah if they them-
selves organized and took responsibility for shaping their own future.
Hence, already in the early summer of 1945, self-help committees and
groups were formed in a number of camps. The major task of these com-
mittees and groups was to improve the living conditions of the camps’
inmates and prepare them for life outside the camps.4 Kibbutz Buchenwald,
a pioneer youth agricultural training farm, was the first of its kind to be
established and, soon, other such kibbutzim were organized throughout
the camps. And, with the help of the World Jewish Congress, the first
Conference of Displaced Persons in the American zone of occupation met
in the latter part of 1945 in Landsberg am Lech (the town where Adolf Hitler
had written a large part of Mein Kampf) to address the hopes and aspira-
tions of the Jewish survivors as a whole.5
Beginning in May 1945, a Jewish press developed. Tkhies-hameysim
(“Resurrection”) was the first survivors’ newspaper to be published in
Buchenwald, Germany; it was followed by others who were issued first in
Germany and, soon after, in all other camps in Austria and Italy. 6 All in
all, some 75 newspapers appeared throughout the DP camps.7 Given the
fact that paper was rationed and typewriters and other equipments were
hard to come by, the publication of such a large number of newspapers was
quite impressive. Besides the imminent prospect of emigration, most of
these publications limited themselves to camp news, remembrances of
those who had perished and to lists of missing persons. Camp residents
frequently contributed articles and the editors reprinted reports from the
international press. The most important camp newspapers of this type
were: Oyf der fray, Dos fraye vort, Der nayer moment, Aheym, Tkhies-hameysim,
and Undzer hofenung.8 The various political parties also published their own
newspapers and there were even special interest magazines, including
sports magazines, that were written mainly in Yiddish and Hebrew but also
in Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Italian, English and German.9
By 1946, the everyday life of the survivors was governed by central
committees, whose members were elected by the DPs, according to their
party affiliation. The largest and most influential of these representative
bodies was the Central Committee of the liberated Jews in the American
zone of occupation in Germany, founded in June 1945. In most camps,
Jewish DP police departments were established, whose main task was
maintaining law and order in the camps. And, although the Jews were sub-
ject to American military courts, Jewish courts were appointed to settle civil
SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 21

disputes and deal with cases in which former kapos10 and ghetto policemen
were accused of brutality against Jews. Also in every major camp, cultur-
al committees organized numerous cultural and educational programs,
including the establishment of kindergartens and schools, libraries and
reading halls, drama classes, theaters, music orchestras and choruses,
youth and sports clubs.11
The survivors’ many activities, imbued with energy, vitality and initia-
tive, seemed to have grown as they recuperated and recovered, signaling
their obsessive will to live normally again, to reclaim their full rights as free
men. Some, however, saw in these feverish activities a natural reaction to
the trauma that they had suffered during the war years. At the liberation
concert which took place in St. Ottilien on May 27, 1945, Zalman Grinberg,
chief physician of the Hospital for ex-political prisoners in Germany,
observed: “...I found our brothers full of energy and cheerful. Nevertheless,
it seems to me that in this cheerfulness...the main element is a frantic
desire to suppress the past, the urge not to confront one own’s memories
to one’s self...because otherwise, if one constantly looked into the
abyss,...the only way out would be suicide.12
Indeed, for the survivors, living with the memory of the past constitut-
ed, first and foremost, dealing with a horrifying personal experience. The
trauma of the Holocaust stamped deep scars that left their marks on their
minds and bodies.13 Leo Srole, a social psychologist who served as an
UNRRA Welfare Officer in Landsberg, found that many among the camp’s
survivors suffered, in various degrees of severity, from what psychiatrists
define as “war shock,” the result of “exposure to catastrophic danger in
situations of individual helplessness.” This kind of trauma induces over-
whelming anxiety and tension, impaired memory, changes of mood and
more.14 All in all, he concluded, “the camp communal organizations have
been a vital counterforce without which there would have been mass
psychological disintegration.”15
Despite the difficult personal grappling with the memory of the recent
catastrophe, the past found a range of public expressions: During the
first year after liberation, between May 1945 and May 1946, various
Landsmanschaften within She’erit hapletah held private memorial services to
their dead. These services were held on different dates and took various
forms, according to the customs and history of each particular communi-
ty.16 In the different camps Yizkor bulletin-boards were installed in public
locations.17 At Landsberg, one of the largest of the DP camps in Germany,
an impressive memorial was constructed, consisting of a waist-high red
brick wall, adjoined by two pylons. Set into one of the pylons was a
memorial tablet to the six million Jewish dead, and, onto the other, a
tablet expressing Jewish aspirations for the future. Crowning the pylons
were a statue of the Jew in exile, bent by the Torah scrolls on his back and
of the halutz (pioneer)—standing upright, with a shovel on his shoulder.18
Towards the end of the first year after liberation, some survivors began
to request the establishment of a general memorial day. The separate
commemorations held by each and every community, they argued, creat-
ed a situation in which one memorial day followed the other. Moreover, it
was imperative to determine a unified date of remembrance so that Kadish
could be said for the many whose date of death was unknown.
The survivors’ desire to establish a unified date of remembrance was
first addressed in Munich on May 5, 1946, by members of the Central
Committee of the Liberated Jews in Occupied Germany who met to discuss,
among other topics on their agenda, the character and form of a day to
commemorate the first anniversary of their liberation by the Allied armies
in the spring of 1945 (einheitlicher gedenk-tog fun der bafreiung).19 The meet-
ing was conducted by the President of the Central Committee, Zalman
Grinberg, and included representatives of the J.D.C. (“Joint”), Leo Schwarz
and Sylvia Weinberg, the editor of the Zionist newspaper, Undzer veg, Levi
Shalitan, as well as the cultural delegation of the World Jewish Congress,
which included the famous Yiddishist poet Leyvik Halpern, the scholar
Israel Efrat and the singer Emma Shaver. A representative of the Yishuv del-
egation to She’erit Hapletah, Ernest Frank, also participated in the discus-
sion.20
One of the main questions debated was whether the liberation anniver-
sary should be commemorated as a day of mourning and suffering or of
redemption.21 All agreed that the martyred dead, “their mass grave, degrad-
ed and desecrated, will, on this day, be transformed into a monument of
the holy martyrdom of a nation.”22 As for the celebration of the liberation,
a marked difference of emphasis between the representatives was
expressed. Some felt that the day should combine grieving for the dead with
the celebration of life and liberation, while others argued that, due to the
magnitude of the catastrophe, mourning is the only appropriate form of
commemoration.23
It was the former’s opinion which eventually prevailed; the participants
agreed that the day of remembrance should include both themes. They
asserted that although a new world was not yet born, antisemitism still
abounded and Jews were still suffering, one had to be careful not to lose
the overall historical perspective: Without the Allies, who payed a high
price to wipe out the Nazis, the civilized world would have been destroyed
and with it any chance for Jewish survival—and this should be noted and
celebrated.24 Furthermore, She’erit Hapletah constituted a living bridge

between the periods of catastrophe and of redemption, of death and of res-
urrection; as such, it was only appropriate that their day of remembrance
would address both motifs.25
In the following “Proclamation of the First Anniversary of Liberation,”
which was published in Germany and in a matter of days was sent to the
Jewish press and to Jewish organizations all over the world, the fourteenth
of Iyar, the day of Liberation (which fell on the 15th of May in 1946), was
proclaimed as the official Day of Remembrance and Liberation.26
On May 15, the new commemorative day was celebrated throughout
Germany in the DP camps, kibbutzim and schools of She’erit Hapletah. The
largest commemorative meeting was held in an auditorium at Munich
University and indeed combined mourning for the dead with the celebra-
tion of survival and hope for a coming redemption in the form of the
establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael. “She’erit Hapletah,”
announced Grinberg in his opening speech in front of thousands of sur-
vivors, “wishes to institute one day a year that would serve as a monu-
ment to the marked and unmarked graves of our brothers and sisters, a day
in which we shall also remember and commemorate the miracle of our sur-
vival and liberation...Out of deep sorrow and admiration for our holy
martyrs and with a spirit of resilience indicating the end of Exile and the
beginning of redemption, I hereby open the gathering of this memorial
day.”27 Following two minutes of silence and the reading of Yizkor, the
speakers all emphasized the need to establish a Jewish home in Eretz
Yisrael. Said Abraham Reisman, a Treblinka survivor: “No other people has
shed as much blood as Israel. Hence we demand a secure home for our
future generations, and it can only be in Eretz Yisrael.”28
For many survivors, however, the yearning for Eretz Yisrael displayed,
more than anything else, their sense of disillusionment with the situation
in Europe after the war, rather than a “pure” Zionist commitment. Indeed,
the displaced Jews were of different social and ideological backgrounds.
Before the war, Eretz Yisrael was a personal choice for relatively few of them
and, according to a survey, conducted by the American Authorities at
Dachau immediately following their liberation, the wish of the overwhelm-
ing majority of survivors was to return to their home countries or emigrate
to the United States or elsewhere overseas.29
This trend, however, soon weakened as a result of the survivors’ dis-
appointing encounter with the often hostile post-war European world.
Despite the recent catastrophe, many survivors discovered that antisemit-
ic sentiments in Europe had lingered on. Between the second half of 1945
and 1946 tens of thousands of Jews from East-European countries poured
into Germany, fleeing waves of antisemitic outbursts, including assaults
and murders that swept over liberated Poland, Romania, Hungary,

Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Notwithstanding their antisemitism, many
in these countries were also fearful that they would be pressed to return
confiscated property to its Jewish owners. This context, combined with the
general state of insecurity in these countries, created a psychosis of fear
which drove those Jews to start on the harrowing trek to the DP camps in
Germany with the hope of eventual migration to Palestine or to some
other non-European country.30 The stories of antisemitic outburst against
Jews that the East-Europeans had brought with them to the DP camps were
widely circulated and often published in the local papers. These, in turn,
heightened the survivors’ conviction that their future lies elsewhere, most
commonly in Palestine. Indeed, in new surveys conducted in the fall of
1945, 80 percent of young people between the ages of 12 and 25 stated
that, given the chance, they would emigrate to Palestine.31
For many survivors their new found Zionism was more than “party
Zionism.” It was a symbol of a defiant affirmation of life. In the words of
the German-Jewish lawyer and president of the Congress and Council of
Liberated Jews in Germany, Samuel Gringauz: to the survivors “it is a
historical-philosophical Zionism felt as an historical mission, as a debt to
the dead, as retribution toward the enemy, as a duty to the living. It is,
moreover, a Zionism of warning, because the She’erit Hapletah feels that
the continuation of Jewish national abnormality means the danger of a rep-
etition of the catastrophe.”32
“Should we help in the rebuilding of Europe so that Europe in time will
erect new crematories for us?” Asked Zalman Grinberg in early 1946.33
Other survivors too expressed their pain and disappointment with the
Jewish situation in Europe. As one Landsberger expressed it: “We Jews in
Galut have always been insecure, but we never suspected the potentiali-
ties of that insecurity until we saw them written out in the blood and ashes
of our wives, children and brothers. We have learned the lesson. We want
no more of Galut.”34 In one of the last issues of Undzer veg, another sur-
vivor expressed the same sense of disappointment: “We believed that it was
time to conquer evil and inhumanity,” he wrote, “that it would be a long
time before bestiality would again be able to surmount the idea of free-
dom.” Instead, he found shortly after the war’s end that hatred and the
forces advocating destruction and murder emerged freely and openly to
attack the democracies they so hated.35 These and many other survivors’
conclusion was that there seemed to be no future for them on European
soil.36
The renunciation of Europe was often brought up in discussions and
articles written by survivors throughout their years in the DP camps. For

example, in a letter to Nizoz, written in December of 1945, one survivor
insisted that refraining from the use of European languages was a ques-
tion of honor: “On our lips we bear the shame of Exile...An elementary
sense of dignity should move us to overcome this blemish, the blemish of
assimilation..., especially today in view of the horrors we have experi-
enced.”37 The most intense feelings of resentment and hatred were direct-
ed against Germany, the heart of European culture before the war and the
‘birthplace’ of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” “How was it pos-
sible,” wrote Gringauz, in December 1947, “that professors and writers,
priests and philosophers, artists and judges—how was it possible that
almost the entire intellectual elite of Germany rapturously cheered on the
blood-drunk murderers? And if it was possible once, where is the assur-
ance that it won’t happen tomorrow...?”38 “For me,” wrote Jean Amery, the
Jewish-essayist and Auschwitz survivor who was born in Vienna as Hans
Mayer, “the potato-field and war-ruins Germany was a lost area of the
globe. I avoided speaking it, my, language and chose a pseudonym with
a Romance ring.”39
The repudiation of Europe did not necessarily imply, especially for
those from central Europe, the rejection of European culture. As Gringauz,
reiterated in a series of essays in the years 1946 to 1948: “Our resolve to
quit Europe is based precisely on the conviction that Europe itself has
betrayed the legacy of European culture and that European culture must
be carried on outside of Europe. We have been too much part of European
culture to abandon it now. As we once expressed it: ‘We leave Europe
because Europe has injured us in our very quality as Europeans.’”40 At the
same time, it is the duty of the surviving remnants, because they had expe-
rienced the depth of evil, to help elevate western civilization back to its
finest ideals and values. And this, according to Gringauz, is indeed the
main task of She’erit Hapletah in the new post-war world: “the moral and
social perfection of humanity.” This “neo-humanism,” as he termed it,
would contribute to mankind’s wider moral development by helping it
bridge the gap between its moral development and modern technological
advances, so that mankind would be able to “resist the pressure of its
instincts...and follow its conscience only,...cast evil aside and make the
good prevail.”41 Since this, however, could no longer be achieved on
European soil, Gringauz hoped that Zionism would go beyond the neces-
sary return of the Jewish people to its homeland and would also involve
a commitment to universal ideals. She’erit Hapletah could then leave Europe
while the legacy of European culture would be carried with them to where
a new Jewish history was being acted out.42
It was partially for this reason, that the survivors’ official memorial day:
the fourteenth of Iyar, was rejected by Zionist organizations in Palestine

and abroad. In fact, for the most part, they chose to ignore the survivors’
proposal altogether: In public debates in the US and in Palestine over a pos-
sible date and the manner in which to commemorate the recent tragedy,
there was no mention of the survivors’ declaration.43 The survivors’ empha-
sis on the universal celebration of victory over the Nazis had no bearing
on the particular Zionist emphasis on the struggle and resilience of the
Jewish fighters, perceived to be the carriers of the Zionist ethos.
The survivors’ attempt to formulate the meaning of liberation and the
public reflections over the breakdown of western, particularly European,
ethics and morality also compelled the survivors to confront some sensi-
tive issues of their own “culpability,” such as the question of Jewish behav-
ior during the Shoah, mainly in relation to Jewish collaboration with the
Nazis, but also in regard to accusations that the majority of the victims
went to their death like “sheep to the slaughter.” In regard to Jewish col-
laboration, its agents were hated, despised and reviled by the Jewish pop-
ulace at large. The Jewish Councils (Judenräte) and their executive arm, the
Jewish ghetto police in particular, were portrayed unequivocally by the sur-
vivors as traitors who betrayed millions of Jews, letting them go into the
gas chambers in order to save their own skin. The local newspapers
reported from time to time about Kapos who were identified, beaten and
turned over to the military authorities44 and, already in the latter part of
1945, local Courts of Honor in Germany, Austria and Italy were set up to
deal with Jewish collaborators.45 Each defendant was judged in accordance
with standards set for the prosecution’s presentation of sufficient evidence
and for the defendant’s rights, including appeal. In October 1946, for
example, in the camp at Föbernwald, the local Court of Honor, presided
over by five judges, found a Jewish ex-Kapo guilty of torturing Jewish
inmates in the concentration camp of Görlitz in Silesia. However, as with
other cases in which the local courts actually imposed prison sentences
(in this case, five months), the US military authorities refused to recognize
the jurisdiction of the local court and forced the camp Jewish authorities
to release the man from prison.46
The subject of Jewish collaborators became openly debated in March
of 1946 following the publication of an article in Undzer veg, written by the
poet Leyvik Halpern. In the article, Leyvik demanded to put an end to the
trials and public discussions of this matter. Practically, he suggested, tes-
timonies on the matter of Jewish collaboration “should be written down
but ‘stashed’ in a separate part of our atrocious national diary, to be for-
gotten and left behind in a corner.” It was imperative to ‘conceal’ the deeds
of the Jewish collaborators, lest the guilt of the few would shift the blame

from the Nazis and their local collaborators.47
Most of those who responded to Leyvik’s article strongly felt, on the
contrary, that it was necessary to deal openly and candidly with all aspects
of the past, not only because it would help the survivors to face the chal-
lenges of the future but mainly because it would help “exonerate” the dead
martyrs’ honor. According to one survivor, for example, those who lost their
dearest cannot and wish not to ignore the devastating existence of some
“criminal ‘Kapos,’ cowards, informers, and other villains.” Another argued
that the distinguished poet, himself not a survivor, could not understand
how much the martyrs’ honor was tied up to that of those who survived.
It was, therefore, not only wise but imperative to open old wounds and act
against those who collaborated with the Nazis and defiled their brethren’s
honor.48
The question of honor was also tied to the survivors’ definition of resis-
tance. Unlike for the Jewish fighters, for the majority of “ordinary” sur-
vivors, especially those of East- European background, martyrdom, the
traditional concept of dying for one’s Jewishness (“Kiddush ha-Shem”),
remained as in previous generations, a form of heroism.49 For survivors
mostly of Central and Western European background who, as a group,
assimilated the basic tenets of modern European culture, preserving their
humanity in the face of inhumanity served as a parallel response to the tra-
ditional Jewish response of martyrdom.50
Interestingly, the emphasis of survivors of Central European back-
ground on the preservation of humanism as a form of heroism reveals, indi-
rectly, their views regarding the roots of the recent catastrophe: the
breakdown of morality and the desertion of a commitment to universal
concerns in modern European society as a whole.51
As for the survivors’ definition of resistance, in the memoirs and tes-
timonies, written mostly in the DP camps in the years immediately follow-
ing the war years, there was no apparent tension between the component
of Shoah (or churbn) and that of heroism. In their writings and discussions
of churbn and heroism, what the “ordinary” survivors wished to convey,
above all, was that notwithstanding the inhumane suffering that they had
endured the Jews did manage to maintain life, against all odds. The tradi-
tional Jewish commitment to the sanctification of life, expressed in the
ghettos in the fight against cold, hunger, disease and dehumanization, was
their model and source of inspiration.52
The subject of armed resistance, however, did receive attention and
admiration. The majority of survivors saw in the Jewish fighters a group
that fought for all of them, a symbol worthy of reverence and admiration.
In conquered Europe, theirs was the only resistance movement which ini-
tiated open warfare with no hope of success nor any chance of receiving
outside help. And yet, the Warsaw ghetto fighters were not necessarily por-
trayed by the “ordinary” survivors as an anomaly within the overall Jewish
population. In fact, stated one, “they were made of the ‘same dough’ as
the millions of other Jews who lived under different objective conditions,
which made it impossible for them to stage an open revolt.53 Unlike most
other places, the Jews in Warsaw were numerous and had a tradition of
political activism. But even there the revolt did not break out until the
spring of 1943, when only 20,000 men and women of the over 400,000
Jews who originally inhabited the ghetto were left and the only thing they
could hope to achieve was to exact a high price for their lives.54
One has to remember, however, that, against all reasonable expecta-
tions, underground resistence movements were organized in many ghet-
tos and that revolts, on a smaller scale, did break out. For many survivors
the explanation for these out of the ordinary and brave reactions was clear.
In the final analysis, the armed revolt was possible because the fighters
drew on their Jewish moral/spiritual heritage. Without the spiritual dimen-
sion, which allowed the Jews to fight against hunger, disease and the
depression born from the horrendous conditions in the ghetto, the fight-
ers would not have been able to resist or sustain their resistance for as long
as they did.
However, the growing emphasis set on the celebration of armed resis-
tance, especially in commemoration services held by Jewish fighters,
angered some survivors who warned against a distortion of the past.
Every survivor knows, claimed the editor of the Landsberger Lager Cajtung,
Yosef Gar, that he survived by pure chance and that this had nothing to
do with either wisdom or heroism. Although the Jews who took to arms
should be commended, these were few and far between and their role
should not be overstated.55 Other survivors concurred. If we are to learn
from the past, some argued, we must present the facts as they were. On
the whole, the objective conditions did not give the Jews the possibility of
an armed revolt. Moreover, Jewish heroism was not in the main the hero-
ism of the armed fighter but of the martyrs: of the woman who spat in the
face of a Nazi in the streets of Lwow; of ghetto and camp inmates who,
under possible death penalty for their actions, gathered, in secret, for
prayers on holidays and celebrated the Sabbath; of the mother who would
not abandon her children and, voluntarily, chose to die with them.56 In fact,
the distinction between martyrs and heroes encapsulated the wide gap
between the majority of survivors and the small group of Jewish fighters.
The latter, be they Zionists, Bundists or Communists, held to an activist
approach to history. Hence, in their discussions and writings about Jewish

behavior during the war years, the dichotomies of acquiescence and resis-
tance, of the Jewish Councils and the Jewish ghetto fighters and partisans
were dominant. In these discussions, armed resistance was generally
marked as “heroic,” while all other aspects of the Jewish experience were
lumped under the label “churbn” (meaning destruction or catastrophe by
Yiddish speakers).
The “ordinary” survivors’ concern with martyrology found widespread
expression in the work and writings of Jewish historical commissions for
the study of the Holocaust, which began to spring up as the war drew to
a close and during the first post-war years, in France, Poland, Hungary,
Slovakia, Bohemia, in neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden
and, in the DP camps, in Germany, Austria and Italy. During the Second
World Congress of Jewish Studies, which took place in Jerusalem in the
summer of 1957, the historian Philip Friedman, the director of the Jewish
Historical Institute in Warsaw after the war and, later, the Yiddish Scientific
Institute’s (YIVO} most renown historian of the Holocaust,57 defined the
aims of these Jewish historical commissions and appraised their work and
contributions. According to Friedman, the aim of the Jewish historical
Institutes was “documentation per se, documentation to embrace all his-
torical features during the Nazi regime, including the internal life of the
Jewish community at that time, its social, cultural, religious, artistic, and
literary activities.”58 Yet, Friedman asserted, the spirit of Martyrology
(Leidensgeschichte), expressed in excessive emotionalism and the passion-
ate desire that their work would serve, in effect, as an eternal monument
in honor of the victims, greatly affected the quality of their work. As a result
of this approach, their material is mainly of one kind, namely, “of descrip-
tions of the suffering and acts of cruelty inflicted by the Nazis.”59 Similar
criticism was voiced even earlier by Samuel Gringauz. In an article he wrote
in 1950, Gringauz described the survivors’ tendency to focus on their
personal suffering as “judeocentric, logocentric and egocentric.” In his
view, most of their memoirs were one-sided, based on unqualified rumors
and assumed an apologetic tone.60
The methodology employed by these historical commissions was in
line with the established tradition of historical research that began in
Eastern Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Under the guid-
ance and influence of the Jewish historians and writers Simon Dubnow
and, during and following the First World War, S. Anski, it concentrated
mainly on the establishment of “folk” archives—the accumulation of vast
amounts of primary source material for the construction of a chronology
of events.61 This tradition continued in underground conditions during the
war years.62 The same kind of methodology was applied, following the war,
in the work of the historical commissions in the DP camps and, later, with
the enlisting of survivors of mainly East-European background to the
study of the Shoah, also in the State of Israel. Indeed, under the survivors’
influence, Yad Vashem’s publications have been primarily documentary in
character, focusing mainly on the memorialization of the catastrophic
events of the war years, “if only in their bare detail, in their heart-rend-
ing repetitiveness.”.63
Among the historical commissions in the DP camps, the first, and, sub-
sequently, the largest and most important to be established, was the
Central Historical Commission, founded in Munich in December 1945 by
the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the American Zone of
occupation in Germany.64 Its founders, Moshe Joseph Feigenbaum, the his-
torian Israel Kaplan, the archivist, S. Gluber and others, began with the
recording of personal testimonies, hoping that these would eventually
constitute the foundation for historical research of the extermination of
European Jewry.65 For the same reason, the Commission set out to inves-
tigate the internal life of Jewish communities under Nazi occupation.
Already in December 1945, Kaplan composed a questionnaire, using a
linguistic-anthropological method, that aimed at penetrating the subjec-
tive Jewish experience during the Shoah by uncovering the distinct linguis-
tic expressions that had developed in the ghettos, forests and concentration
camps. These expressions reflected the attitude of these Jews toward their
tormentors and their collaborators, the Judenräte and the Jewish police;
they depicted the victims’ struggle with hunger, forced labor and disease.
The questionnaire also requested the survivors to describe their hopes,
dreams and prayers, as well as those stories, songs, anecdotes and para-
bles that affected them most during those trying days—all of which,
Kaplan believed, would ensure that the Jewish struggle for life in the midst
of destruction would be forever immortalized.66
Despite scant material resources, the Central Historical Commission
created during its three years of operation 37 active local committees
throughout the DP camps in Germany, of which the most important were
in Bamberg, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart and Landsberg. Between 1947
and 1948, it extended its activities to the British, French and Russian
zones.67 With the assistance of these sub-committees, the Commission
managed to collect some 2,550 personal testimonies about the fate of the
Jews during the Holocaust in twelve countries. Most of these testimonies
were written in Yiddish, although a few were written in Hebrew, Polish,
Hungarian and German.68 Close to 5000 statistical questionnaires on com-
munities that had been destroyed had also been completed. Additional
questionnaires about the fate of children, resistance and popular culture

were also circulated. The Commission also managed to obtain a large num-
ber of documents from the Munich municipality relating to the Jews of the
city, as well as to the Dachau camp administration. Material published by
She’erit Hapletah in the DP camps was also documented. These included
collecting and archiving all printed materials in the camps, including
newspapers, posters and photographs, 195 short descriptions of sur-
vivors communities, as well as material describing the survivors’ cultur-
al, educational and political activities in the DP camps.69 This wealth of
material was then archived in the Commission’s Munich headquarter and
in various of its branch offices.70
At the outset, the Central Historical Commission did not intend to
publish the material it had gathered, mainly due to the small number of
professional scholars capable of undertaking such an assignment, but
also for technical reasons (lack of typewriters and linotypes); soon, how-
ever, it discovered that a publication was imperative in order to prompt
more survivors to contribute to the documentation project.71 Furthermore,
it could encourage the ‘local-patriotism’ of the various Landsmanschaften—
each one of them wanting the name of its town or community to appear
in print in the paper.72
In consequence, and following some assistance from the “Joint” which
donated a Linotype machine and Israel Kaplan’s willingness to serve as the
paper’s editor, the first issue of Fun letstn khurbn (“From the Last
Catastrophe”) was published in August 1946 and soon reached a circula-
tion of 10,000–12,000 copies.73 Most of the published testimonies related
to the destruction of various communities and only a small number dealt
with resistance. As editor, Kaplan’s approach was quite unprofessional. He
frequently omitted parts of or made stylistic and even contextual changes
in the witnesses depositions, thereby limiting their future historical value.
Nevertheless, according to Philip Friedman, the paper was the best of its
kind and credit should be given to its editor and staff for their diligence and
resourcefulness in collecting primary sources.74
Each issue also carried original Nazi documents in translation togeth-
er with photographs of Nazi atrocities and poems that had been written
in the concentration camps and ghettos, as well as personal records of
work done in the ghetto schools and other facilities.75 Particularly moving
were the written recollections of children in which they described their
experiences during the war. In 1949, Leo Schwarz published excerpts
from these recollections in his book, The Root and the Bough.76
In contrast to the “ordinary” survivors’ main concern with martyrol-
ogy, the Jewish fighters in the DP camps wished to amend the former’s his-
torical account, to balance the record of Jewish suffering with a record of
active heroism. This desire was expressed immediately following the war
with the establishment of their own organizations, separate from those of
the “ordinary” survivors.77
The Jewish fighters held their own memorial services and ignored fre-
quent requests from the Central Historical Commission to participate in
various documentary and testimonial gatherings. For example, a question-
naire relating to the activities of the partisans, the identity of the various
underground organizations in the ghettos and its relations with the sur-
rounding society was sent out by the Commission to different resistance
organizations but received little response. None of the pioneer Kibbutzim
chose to participate in the survey and only nineteen questionnaires sent
to all members of the various partisan organizations were filled out.78
Instead, the Jewish fighters established their own historical commissions
in the DP camps in Germany and in Italy in order to document and pub-
lish the heroic story of the Jewish war against the Nazis in the ghettos and
forests of Europe.79 The separation between the activities of the “ordinary”
survivors and the Jewish fighters established a pattern that would contin-
ue and, in fact, intensify in the state of Israel.
Although the Jewish fighters in the ghettos and in the forests were of
diverse ideological orientations (mainly Communists, Bundists or Zionists),
for the most part, those of them who remained in the DP camps upon lib-
eration were young committed Zionists. Fighters within the camps who
remained communists or Bundists were almost completely silenced (except
for a small group in Feldafing); others joined the communist parties in their
respective countries and, since a Jewish national and socialist solution in
the style of the Jewish-Polish Bund was no longer possible, its members
largely joined the communist party or one of the Zionist movements.80 As
a result, in the Jewish fighters speeches and writings, their heroism is often
attributed to the awakening to historical responsibility that Zionism gen-
erated: The background to the revolt, its leaders and its meaning were, they
insisted, essentially Zionist.81 Although there were some voices who exalt-
ed the part taken by the Bund in the rebellions against the Nazis and the
social militancy from which it drew its inspiration, these voices were few
and far between and remained marginal.82
Despite their loyalty to Zionism, however, many of the Jewish fighters
resented, even blamed the Yishuv for its detachment from the Jews of
Europe during the war and in the months that followed. In a letter sent from
Warsaw in December 1940 by Zivia Lubetkin (later one of the comman-
ders of the Warsaw ghetto revolt) she wrote: “More than once, I have decid-
ed not to write to you anymore...I will not recount here what I am going
through but I want you to know that even one word of comfort from you

would have sufficed...To my regret, however, I have to accept your silence,
but I will never forgive it.83 In 1946 she said: “...There were moments in
which we felt that the whole world, including the Jewish world had forgot-
ten us. Many Jews died with a curse on their lips for Jews,—for the Jews
in neutral countries, in countries overseas: why the silence? we hoped that
the Yishuv was doing all that it could to come to our aid, have they?”84 “And,
in a letter sent to the Ichud Olami “Poale-Zion-Hitachdut” in Tel Aviv in
October 1945, Moshe Schweiger complained: “Was it really impossible to
come? Was it impossible at least to send newspapers and textbooks?...I live
in fear and anxiety that people don’t understand us, and that we, should
we ever get to Palestine, will not understand you.”85
The accusations of Jewish activists from among the Brichah86
founders—Yitzhak Zuckerman, Abba Kovner, Eliezer Lidovsky, Chaika
Klinger, and many others—were especially harsh. The Yishuv emissaries,
they charged, had left Poland at the beginning of the war and were not
heard from again during and immediately following the Shoah period, leav-
ing the Zionist activists in Poland feeling abandoned and isolated.87
Speaking at a Zionist conference in London in August 1945, Yitzhak
“Antek” Zuckerman, who had been the deputy to Mordecai Anielewicz, the
leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, complained that even after the
war’s end, months had passed by before Yishuv emissaries arrived in
Poland. “I will forgive you everything,” he said, but, “I won’t forgive that
for those last eight months you did not reach us.”88
Upon their arrival to Eretz Yisrael, however, the Jewish fighters opted
to refrain from criticizing the Yishuv’s neglect to come to the survivors’ aid
upon liberation. The Yishuv’s struggle for statehood and the Jewish fight-
ers’ wish to assimilate into a society who viewed them as symbols of Jewish
heroism, impelled them to repress their sense of betrayal. Instead, in their
speeches and in their writings, the Jewish fighters mainly emphasized the
impact of Zionist ideology on their choices during the war years.
The largest and most important of the Jewish fighters’ organizations
in the DP camps was: “Pahah” (Hebrew acronym for Partisans, Soldiers,
Pioneers).89 It was Yitzhak Zuckerman who, in 1945, initiated the estab-
lishment of this Zionist-oriented organization. Its members included ghet-
to fighters, partisans and, shortly thereafter, Jewish soldiers from the
Polish and Red Armies.90 Initially, Pahah’s main center was in Lodz and
branches were established in other major areas of Jewish concentration in
Poland, such as Lublin, Byalistok and Krakow.91 Following the Bricha thou-
sands of Pahah members found themselves residing in the various DP
camps in Germany, Austria and Italy.92
Pahah’s Central Historical Commission was established with the move-
ment’s inception in Poland in 1945; it later moved to Austria and from there
to Italy (Milan and Rome), which became its main place of operation.93 At
the first conference organized by the Historical Commission of Pahah in
Bad Reichenhal, Germany, on October 3, 1947, one of its main organiz-
ers, laid out the Commission’s main goals: “Our movement holds, and
rightly so, that the accumulation of documents and testimonies pertain-
ing to the heroic portion of the recent atrocious past has an invaluable his-
torical value:” The documentation would serve as a memorial to those who
were killed in action; it would keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes; it
would open the way to national accounting of why the Shoah was possi-
ble and how its recurrence could be prevented and, finally, it would serve
to inspire and strengthen those who were to stand at the forefront of the
continuing Jewish struggle for life and freedom.94 “...Therefore,” he contin-
ued, “each story of a Jewish partisan is of the greatest importance for us
and a response from each Jewish partisan to the questionnaire which we
have distributed among our members is of great necessity. Let us make it
our goal to collect the testimonies of each and every one of the Jewish fight-
ers.”95
Indeed, the Central Historical Commission of Pahah in Italy collected
some 700 biographical reports on Jewish fighters; information on about 25
partisan units; about a 100 first-hand depositions from Jewish fighters, as
well as eyewitness records, diaries and other material. In 1948, the
Commission published a book, written by its chairman, Moshe Kaganovitch
on the Jewish role in the partisan movement in Soviet Russia. And, during
that same year, local branches affiliated with Pahah in Germany managed
to publish the accumulated testimonies in a collection entitled “Through
Fire and Blood: The Partisans and Ghetto Fighters Almanac.”96
As we have seen, in contrast to the “ordinary” survivors’ emphasis on
“Martyrology”, the historical commissions founded in the DP camps by
surviving members of the underground and youth movements emphasized
the acts of resistance during the Holocaust. However, as mentioned, the
method of collecting evidence, or, in fact, of chronicling those events was
similar in both types of commissions. Moreover, despite the wide gap in
the description and interpretation of the Holocaust between these two
“schools of thought,” the Jewish fighters’ work too “sinned against the
principles of scholarly research by adopting a romantic approach and
accepting unverified stories at their face value, without checking their
authenticity.” This approach greatly contributed to the establishment of the
new myth of heroism, which, according to Philip Friedman in 1957, “had
already struck deep roots in our historical consciousness” and would be
extremely difficult for historians to defuse, in years to come.97

In 1948, shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel, the
Jewish historical commissions in the DP camps, including Pahah’s, were
dissolved, primarily because of mass Jewish emigration, mainly to Israel
but also to the United States, which had liberalized its immigration laws
that same year.98 In the majority of cases, the commissions’ documentary
collections were transferred to the newly established archive at kibbutz Beit
Lohamei Ha-Getaot or, primarily, to the committee newly established by
the World Zionist Organization for the purpose of setting up “Yad
Vashem”—the Martyrs and Heroes Remembering Authority—in
Jerusalem.99

() PART TWO
&'
Politics of Memory
and Historiography

POLITICS OF MEMORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ) 39

As we have seen, the early history of the Shoah was written by survivors
in the DP camps who largely chronicled the events and by a few histori-
ans trained in pre-war Eastern Europe. With the immigration of the major-
ity of She’erit Hapletah to Eretz Yisrael, the work that had started in the DP
camps and other European frameworks continued, mainly, at Yad Vashem,
the state created institute for the commemoration and study of the
Holocaust period.
However, before the establishment of Yad Vashem in 1953, two kibbutz
movements, affiliated with the left-wing Mapam party: Hakibbutz
Hameuchad and Hakibbutz Ha’artzi (Hashomer Hatsair), established cen-
ters for the study of the Shoah. It was within these two movements that
survivors—members of Zionist youth movements and Jewish fighters—
were largely absorbed; and it was there that the first writings and publi-
cations of survivors’ memoirs and diaries took place.
Mapam, the left-wing faction of Mapai that seceded to form its own
party in 1948, sought to make the uprisings the focus of the memorializa-
tion and research of the Holocaust. The party identified with the Jewish
fighters, particularly those of the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish fighters,
Mapam leaders persistently argued, were largely members of pioneer
youth movements whose ideology most closely resembled its own pioneer-
ing and socialist values (although during the war years Mapam was
Mapai’s partner in running the Yishuv, under the British Mandate).1
The main center for the study and memorialization of the Shoah in the
early 1950s was The Ghetto Fighters’ House at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot
of Hakibbutz Hameuchad movement. The Kibbutz was founded by sur-
vivors of the camps and ghettos, many of them partisans and members of
the Halutz and the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto. The
proclaimed goal of the House (as it was called in short) was the memori-
alization and study of both the Shoah and the Gvurah,2 although its
research projects concentrated mainly on the history of Jewish resistance
in Poland and elsewhere in conquered Europe.
The House included a temporary museum, a library, and a growing
archive, as well as two periodicals: Yediot Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, edited by
Zvi Shner, and Dapim Leheker HaShoah ve-Hamered, edited by the histori-
an Nahman Blumental. Among the House’s first publications (published in
the its periodicals or in conjunction with the publishing house of Hakibbutz
Hameuchad) were: Jostina’s Diary (1951), which tells the story of the Jewish
Fighters’ organization in Cracow; Yitzhak Katzenelson’s writings, Ktavim
Akhronim (Last Writings) which includes his poetry, written in the Warsaw
ghetto (1953);3 and Gad Rosenblatt’s, Esh ahaza ba-ya’ar (The Wood’s on
Fire), first published in 1957, which describes the activities of a group of
Jewish partisans during the days of the “Aktzia” in a small town in Volin
(Volhynia).4 During those early years the House also published a variety of
memoirs and diaries that were written during the Holocaust or immedi-
ately thereafter by active participants in the fighters’ movements, such as
Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamrof’s Dapim min ha-delekah (Pages from the
Inferno), published in 1947,5 Tuvia Bozikovski’s Ben kirot noflim (Within
Falling Walls) (1950),6 and Batia Temkin-Berman’s Underground Diary
(1955). In 1954, the House published Sefer Milchamot Hagetaot (The Fighting
Ghettos)—a large volume containing documents written by eyewitnesses
and participants in the Jewish resistance movements in Eastern Europe
during the war.7
Hakibbutz Ha’artzi of Hashomer Hatsair movement was the second
center dealing with the memorialization of the Shoah. The memoirs of
Ruzka Korczak on Ghetto Vilna were published already in 1946;8 in 1950
it published Chaika Grossman’s memoirs on the activities of the Jewish
underground in Ghetto Byalistok—an exposition with a clear party ideo-
logical orientation.9 And, in the first volume of Sefer Hashomer Hatsair
(Book of Hashomer Hatsair), published in 1956,10 major parts of the book
are dedicated to the heroic deeds of the Jewish fighters, their ideological
orientation clearly described as being in line with that of Hashomer
Hatsair. Two years later, “Sifriat Hapoalim” published The Book of Jewish
Partisans in two volumes; there too the authors identify the descriptions of
Jewish resistance with the activities of Hashomer Hatsair.
These publications, as well as the prevalent “negation of Exile” ideol-
ogy of the Yishuv, on the one hand, while exalting the spirit of activism and
heroism of the Zionist few who resisted, on the other, all lay the founda-
tion for the domination of Mapam’s left-wing militant-ideological approach
to the history of the Shoah in Israel in the early 1950s.
The ruling labor party, Mapai, resented Mapam’s ‘monopoly’ on the
linkage between its ideology and Jewish armed resistance. On the ques-
tions of Jewish honor and of going to death unresistingly, the two parties
held identical views; the assumption that the Jewish fighters salvaged
theirs and Israel’s honor was agreed upon. Redeeming their honor meant,
according to this assumption, physical resistence. However, in the name
of mamlakhtiut (“statehood”), David Ben-Gurion’s campaign to grant the
state dominant institutional authority in the life of the community and also
a normative value in its own right,11 the link between Jewish heroism dur-
ing the Holocaust and Zionist ideology in general, had to be maintained.
Hence, despite Ben Gurion’s initial reluctance to memorialize the
Holocaust(as late as 1952 he stated that the only fit monument for
European Jewry was the State of Israel), Mapam’s attempts to link Jewish
POLITICS OF MEMORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ) 41

heroism with its own ideology convinced him that a national center for the
commemoration of the recent catastrophe was imperative.
Mamlakhtiut also implied the right of the Jewish state to represent and
speak in the name of world Jewry, including those who died in the
Holocaust. In the early 1950s, for example, referring to the debate over
Israel-German relations, Ben-Gurion stated that if the Holocaust victims
could express their opinion they would have insisted that “what is good
for the state of Israel is good for the entire Jewish people.”12 The plans of
Jews in the early 1950s to establish memorials abroad were seen by Ben-
Gurion and his party as a threat to Israel’s status as the legitimate repre-
sentative of the Jewish victims.13 Thus, a central commemoration and
research center would also serve as an answer to those who doubted
Israel’s exclusive right to speak in the name of the six million Jews who per-
ished in Europe.
This ideological framework directly impinged upon the formation and
orientation of Yad Vashem in 1953. Henceforth, the commemoration and
writings on the history of the Shoah in Israel were dominated by a com-
mon ideological ground: Zionism, with its specific relation to the diaspo-
ra and its particular vision of Jewish history from catastrophe to
redemption. Within the newly created national institution, this ideology
affected the formation of a “dominant school” of history writing. In fact,
during this early period we will witness an extreme form of politics of mem-
ory and historiography, manifested by a mounting tension and rivalry
between the formulators of Israel’s historiography and memory of the
Shoah within Yad Vashem, mainly Ben-Zion Dinur, and between other ide-
ologically oriented institutions in Israel and abroad. As we shall see, it also
resulted in the systematic exclusion of those researchers within Yad
Vashem who did not fit the pre-established framework.

() CHAPTER THREE
&'
The Israeli Representation

of the Holocaust in the 1950s
The proposal to establish a national institution to commemorate the

Jewish catastrophe in Europe was first voiced at a board meeting of the
Jewish National Fund (JNF), in September 1942, soon after the first reports
of the extermination reached the Yishuv. Mordechai Shenhabi from Kibbutz
Mishmar Ha’emek (of the Hashomer Hatsair movement) proposed to
commemorate both what he called the “Shoah of the Diaspora” and the
participation of Jewish fighters in the Allied armies.1 Shenhabi suggested
that the site be called “Yad Vashem” (literally, a monument and a name),
after a quotation from Isaiah (56:5), in which God declares how those who
keep his covenant will be remembered: “I will give them, in my house and
within my walls, a monument and a name, better than sons and daugh-
ters. I will give them an ever lasting name that will never be effaced.”2
Despite Shenhabi’s persistence, the establishment of the memorial was
delayed time and time again. In 1942, the Yishuv itself was under Nazi
threat and, although Shenhabi’s plan was approved three years later at
the 1945 Zionist conference in London, the struggle for statehood delayed
the proposal’s enactment for a few more years.
Shenhabi’s main achievement during this pre-state years was the
convocation in Jerusalem, on July 13 and 14, 1947, of an international con-
ference of Jewish historical commissions,3 under the auspice of the Jewish
Studies Institute of the Hebrew University. The conference itself, with
some 200 participants, was convened as the second part of a conference
on Jewish Studies. It was at this conference that Yad Vashem defined its
goals: the creation in Jerusalem of a world center for the gathering of all
historical material relating to the Jewish catastrophe and to Jewish hero-
ism; the establishment of a monument to the six million victims, to the

Jewish heroes who resisted and took to arms, as well as to those brave indi-
viduals from among the nations who risked their lives to save Jews. The
conference concluded with the election of members, from the Yishuv and
abroad, to the newly established administrative and working committees
and councils, including a World Council for Documentation, comprising of
representatives of 31 different organizations from all over the world.4
Following the 1948 War of Independence, Shenhabi proposed a bill that
would turn Yad Vashem into a national memorial authority. Although in
principle no one raised any objections, neither did any of the new state’s
leaders do much to promote the legislation. Not only were there more
urgent tasks but the plan itself was the subject of political and ideologi-
cal power struggles among the parties, especially among the two major
ones: Mapai and Mapam—each of which exploited the Holocaust for its
own ideological ends. As mentioned before, Mapam leaders wished to
emphasize that it was the merger of Zionism and socialism that produced
the heroism of the ghetto fighters; in the name of Mamlakhtiut, Mapai
leaders, on the other hand, aimed to foster a sense of commemorative unity
by presenting the Holocaust as the decisive argument in favor of Zionism
in general and the establishment of Israel in particular.
“The Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Law—Yad Vashem” finally
came up for consideration in the Knesset and was passed on August 19,
1953.5 The Law stated that the aim of the newly founded national institu-
tion would be to commemorate the martyrs and heroes of the Jewish
Holocaust.6 The Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Law also stated that one
of the institution’s tasks would be “to gather, investigate, and publish all
evidence about the Holocaust and heroism.”7
While presenting the Law before the Knesset, Education and Culture
Minister, Ben-Zion Dinur explained that the ultimate goal of the Nazis was
“to obliterate the name of Israel.”8 As has been pointed out by Tom Segev,
Dinur’s use of the term ‘Israel’ rather than the “Jewish people” clearly
meant to link the victims of the Holocaust and the State of Israel.9 Indeed,
Yad Vashem was authorized to grant citizenship to the Jewish victims.10
Dinur then praised the heroism of the Jewish fighters in Europe and linked
it to the heroism of the Yishuv in 1948. “The War of Independence, he
maintained, was a “direct continuation” of the war of the partisans and the
underground fighters, as well as that of more than a million and a half of
our soldiers who had fought the Nazis during World War II...Jewish hero-
ism is all one.”11
Dinur’s speech meant not only to reiterate the link between Holocaust
and statelessness, between heroism and national rebirth, but also to serve
ISRAELI REPRESENTATION OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE 1950 S ) 45

as an answer to those who doubted Israel’s exclusive right to speak in the
name of the Jews who perished in Europe. His words were probably direct-
ed in particular against Yitzhak Shneurson, a French Jew and the founder
and director of the “Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in
Paris” (Centre de documentation juive contemporaine).
The archival and research work of the French Center grew out of the
activities of French Jewish underground groups. It was created in Grenoble
in 1943 and eventually became the repository of all the archives of Vichy’s
Commissariat General aux Questions Juives. Within the first five years, the
Center managed to raise funds and establish Friends Associations in
France, England and Holland that helped support the rapidly developing
institute. In fact, the Center’s representative to the Jerusalem internation-
al conference of 1947, was the only foreign delegate who refused to relin-
quish the Center’s collection of documents to Yad Vashem. “The
compounded work of the Center,” said the delegate, “the support and
blessing it receives in different circles..., give hope that it will become cen-
tral to Europe as a whole....We should work in cooperation but I have not
been authorized to give all the documents in French that we have gathered
to the world center in Jerusalem. The people of the French Center wish to
keep this material in France.”12 Some four months later, in November
1947, the Center initiated a conference of all the Jewish historical commit-
tees in Europe on the subject of the Holocaust, as well as, a few months
later, with the active support of the historical committees and of renowned
Jewish historians, such as Philip Friedman, the first international exhibi-
tion on the extermination of European Jewry. In 1952, when reparation
funds became available, Shneurson proposed the establishment of a world
center for the memorialization and research of the Holocaust, to be built
by the Center and the French government, in Paris.13
To Dinur, the proposed world center in Paris reflected the “Diaspora
impulse” to question Israel’s primacy in this and all other Jewish matters
and “give Paris the place of Jerusalem.”14 Ultimately, the Israeli government
reached an agreement with Shneurson whereby the Paris project would be
given a lump sum of $500,000 to build a monument in return for relin-
quishing its original plan to establish a world center for the commemora-
tion of the Holocaust.15
The “threat” of a Paris world center for the commemoration of the
Holocaust persisted for a few more years. In 1956, when the monument
in Paris was about to be officially unveiled in the presence of world and
Jewish leaders, members of Yad Vashem Executive Board debated whether
to accept Shneurson’s invitation to participate in the ceremony. Dinur said:
“. .symbolic ties with the French documentation center are not to my lik-
ing. I thought that the French Center will be a branch [of Yad Vashem] but
Shneurson does not want that.”16 Yosef Weitz, representative of the Jewish
Foundation Fund (Keren Kayemet le’Israel) raised another objection: “I
would like to ask: should Dr. [Nachum] Goldmann be there? He is the
President of the World Zionist Organization and Chairman of the World
Jewish Congress; should he give legitimacy to this ceremony? I think not.
It is a disgrace moreover because he is also a member of Yad Vashem’s
World Executive Board! In case Dr. Goldmann decides not to attend and
Ambassador [Yaakov] Zur does attend,...then, when he delivers his speech
he should be advised to emphasize the Jewish world’s debt to the state of
Israel and that the main center for the memory of the Holocaust is in
Jerusalem, in the state of Israel.”17
The issue of Israel versus the Diaspora arose also when Yad Vashem’s
cornerstone was laid. The debate among the members of Yad Vashem’s
Executive Board centered around the question whether to invite Nahum
Goldmann, Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, to speak at the cer-
emony alongside Israel’s President, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. “The country’s
President unites world Jewry,” said one participant in the debate. Another
disagreed: “The President of Israel is not the leader of all Jews. Diaspora
Jewry participates in Yad Vashem. It is therefore proper and fitting that the
Diaspora be represented.” A third member contended: “The president of
the country is enough. We must do away, once and for all, with the sep-
aration between the State of Israel and the People of Israel.” Ultimately, the
board decided, by a vote of six to five, to invite Goldmann to the ceremo-
ny. However, President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi objected to there being another
speaker.18
Even within Israel, Yad Vashem wanted a monopoly on the memory
of the Holocaust period. Although the law requested that Yad Vashem
should cooperate and eventually assist in coordinating the activities of all
other institutions dealing with the memorialization or research of the
Shoah, in Europe and in Israel,19 Yad Vashem’s Executive Board viewed any
such institution as a threat to its hegemony.
Yad Vashem’s reluctance to share center stage with other institutions
was articulated time and time again by members of the Executive Board,
from their first meeting on December 2, 1953 and throughout the end of
the 1950s. Among the first institutions with which Yad Vashem became
embroiled in a lengthy struggle over its hegemony was the “Chamber of
the Holocaust” on Mount Zion, outside Jerusalem’s old city walls. The
Chamber was built in 1948 during the War of Independence on the initia-
tive of Rabbi S.Z. Kahana, a department director at the Ministry of Religious
Affairs. In 1948, after the Old City and the Western Wall were conquered

by the Jordanians, the Chamber became an element in a wider plan by
Rabbi Kahana to turn Mount Zion, and especially the area near King
David’s tomb, to a memorial center to Europe’s destroyed religious com-
munities. According to the Jewish tradition, Mount Zion is the burial place
of King David, one of whose descendants was to be the Messiah. Hence,
in Jewish tradition, the site is a symbol of redemption. In December 1949,
ashes of Jews burned in death camp crematoria were transferred to Israel
and buried, alongside torn fragments of Torah scrolls saved from the
Nazis, in the “Chamber of the Holocaust” on Mount Zion.20 By linking the
Jewish catastrophe in Europe to the redemption of Israel, Kahana, along
with other religious Zionists could both reiterate the link between catastro-
phe and redemption in Jewish tradition, as well as remain loyal to the
Zionist lesson of the Holocaust (In contrast, for ultra-Orthodox Jews
“redemption” remained outside of the process of historical time).21
The religious expression of memory in the “Chamber”, however, was
unacceptable to the secular Zionist founders of Yad Vashem. From the out-
set, Yad Vashem was meant to be an integral component of the national
emblem of the state, sharing and reinforcing Israel’s secular ideals and self
definition. “We are obligated to perpetuate the memory of the century’s
greatest catastrophe within the framework of our Zionist enterprise,”
Shenhabi stated in 1954. The sanctuary would teach the lesson of “a
thousand years of trying to live in countries that are not ours.”22 In fact,
the founders of Yad Vashem actively rejected the import of any religious
connotation and meanings.23 Memorial sculptures built later on at the
site of Yad Vashem are in breach of Jewish religious law and most read-
ings in remembrance of the dead are from secular Israeli poets. Often read,
for example, is a poem by Haim Guri which affirms that the ultimate
monument to the dead is the State of Israel.24
Hence, for example, when, in 1958, a proposal was made by leaders
of “Hamizrahi,” the orthodox Zionist party, to link the commemoration
activities at Mount Zion with those of Yad Vashem, the members of Yad
Vashem’s Executive Board were infuriated. Yosef Weitz who, along with
other members of the Board, had just returned from a visit to the site on
Mount Zion, expressed the members outrage: “The suggestion made by the
Mount Zion Association to connect...‘traditional commemoration’ with
Yad Vashem is out of the question because of the form of commemoration
[on Mount Zion] and its orientation...the creation of fables and dates that
have no historical base...and the establishment there of cult-like ritu-
als.”25 Other members of the Board concurred. Dinur added that “...the
commemoration at Mount Zion borders on idol worship. Everything that
is done there is a disgrace which is backed by the Ministry of Religion.”26
Yad Vashem also opposed Kahana’s attempts during the 1950s, to

expand the activities and spectrum of the “Chamber” by conducting annu-
al memorial services for destroyed Jewish communities and by proposing
a plan to build 50 chambers for their commemoration, in accordance with
the Jewish tradition.27 These activities were viewed by Yad Vashem as an
attempt to sabotage the existence of one central national-memorial site.
However, pressure from the Rabbinate and “Hamizrahi” and from other
orthodox groups in Israel and abroad forced Yad Vashem to reluctantly
accept Kahana’s plan and even to allocate some funds for its
implementation.28
The “Chamber of the Holocaust” on Mount Zion, however, did not pose
a major “threat” to Yad Vashem’s hegemony. After all, The “Chamber’s”
religious orientation was geared toward a relatively small segment of the
population. The real “threat” to the hegemony of the new Authority was
perceived to be the The Ghetto Fighters’ House at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot.
The proclaimed goal of the House was the memorialization and study of
both the Shoah and the Gvurah,29 although, as mentioned earlier, its
research projects concentrated mainly on the history of Jewish resistance.
The existence of an independent institution which was working in par-
allel to Yad Vashem raised fears that this would limit Yad Vashem’s author-
ity, diminish its achievements and hinder its activities. The members of the
Ghetto Fighters’ House were equally concerned (also because in early 1954,
two of their most renowned historians, Nahman Blumental and Yosef
Kermisz decided to join the Yad Vashem staff). Shortly after the law of Yad
Vashem passed in the Knesset, Moshe Zuckerman and Moshe Kaplan of
The Ghetto Fighters’ House wrote to the Executive Committee of the General
Labor Federation (Histadrut): “Let it be known that “the Authority is not
starting its operation in a vacuum...the House was and is the only institu-
tion in this country that actively commemorates the memory of the Shoah
and the uprising...we demand a full moral and financial support for the
House—the founding father of all memorial institutions in Israel” .30
The House’s insistence on remaining independent irritated and worried
the members of Yad Vashem Executive Board, as is evident from the fre-
quency and the length of the debates dedicated to the subject in their week-
ly meetings. The contexts of these debates demonstrate not only Yad
Vashem’s reluctance to cooperate with any other institution dealing with
the memorialization of the Holocaust but also the ambiguous attitude of
Yad Vashem’s leadership toward the Jewish fighters, whom they revered
as a symbol of the renewed Jewish spirit of heroism but whose indepen-
dent activities were viewed as an obstacle to the creation in Israel of a unit-
ed collective memory of the Holocaust period. As we shall see, this attitude

was also “reserved” for survivors who worked within the framework of Yad
Vashem but who, until the late 1950s, had no representatives in its
Executive Board.
Already during its first session, on July 17, 1954, the Executive Board
protested the existence of an independent House, and attempted to formu-
late strategies that would limit its field of research and achieve control over
its activities. Moshe Kol, representative of the Jewish Agency to the Board,
stated that although Yad Vashem was established relatively late, there
should be only one memorial authority. “We do not want to terminate the
activities of the House but there can be no two parallel authorities.”31
Zalman Shazar, also a representative of the Jewish Agency (and, years later,
Israel’s third President), suggested to accept, on principle, the existence of
one central authority with affiliated branches. “The House has to become
an integral part of Yad Vashem,” he proposed, “so that they can deal with
the ghetto resistance and not with all forms of resistance, as they sug-
gest.”32 Only Yitzhak Gruenbaum, Minister of the Interior, objected: “The
Knesset did not declare Yad Vashem to be a monopolistic authority....we
cannot order an existing institution to join us in exchange for our support.
There is no law about a monopoly.” The members, however, overwhelm-
ingly accepted the other position and concluded the meeting by deciding
not to collaborate with institutions who refused to accept the central
authority of Yad Vashem.33
The House’s reluctance to relinquish its independence continued to
occupy the members of Yad Vashem’s Executive Board throughout the
1950s. On November 15, 1955, for example, Mordechai Shenhabi com-
plained: “We offered them the Warsaw Ghetto and [Yitzhak] Katzenelson,
but not the whole resistance...yet they insist that Yad Vashem is not the
leading institution of either world or Israeli Jewry, but an organization that
the state established. Therefore, one should encourage and strengthen any
of its counterparts in Israel and abroad. Their attitude is that dispersion
is a blessing, while our attitude is that diffusion is a catastrophe. Only
when they realized that we have the support of the Knesset...did they sug-
gest the following division: To us the Shoah, to them—the Gvurah.”34
Four months later, on March 2, 1956, Dinur informed the members of
the Board that he received a letter from Zivia Lubetkin of The Ghetto
Fighters’ House in which she requests that Yad Vashem allocate some
funds for an exhibition and a memorial service on the occasion of the fif-
teenth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Yad Vashem Board
members reacted angrily to her request. “I don’t know if we can do that,”
Judge Shalom Kasan, representative of the Claims Conference, said, “We
tried to establish a committee that will work in cooperation with the
House, we tried to establish ties, but they reject all of our efforts. Not long
ago, I met with Lubetkin and again attempted to initiate relations. She
promised to write back but I never heard from her again.” Another mem-
ber added: “...We have encountered an incomprehensible stance on their
part. They will not sit with us at the same table. They came to us with an
offer to publish all of [Emmanuel] Ringelblum’s writings but on the con-
dition that the money for this project should not come from the shilumim
[reparation money from Germany]...Now, not only do they demand that
we partake in funding them but they plan the memorial service on the same
day as ours and without our participation...They do not want to be taint-
ed by money from Germany nor to have any direct contact with Yad
Vashem. They do not want partnership, they only want money. Besides,
we have none to give.”35 Dr. Mark Dworzecki warned the participants that
rejecting the House’s request would make a bad impression on the public.
Dinur, in turn, suggested a compromise. Yad Vashem will agree to help the
House on principle, and ask Lubetkin to come to Yad Vashem and speak
to the members of the Board.36
The following week, on March 13, 1956, Shenhabi reported to the
members about the failure of the attempted negotiations with the House:
“The House held and is holding on, unyieldingly, to one principle: indepen-
dence, and they are not ready to give it up. On my own initiative, I ven-
tured to offer them one hundred percent funding if they let us oversee their
activities...Even this offer was angrily rejected on the spot...We have to seri-
ously consider what to do with an institution that chooses such a course
of action.”37
The tension and rivalry between the two institutions eventually sub-
sided in the early 1960s. By that time, Yad Vashem established itself as the
main commemorative institution in Israel and felt more secure. The
Eichmann trial, in a sense, too, contributed to a greater opening and will-
ingness for cooperation among researchers of the Holocaust in Israel and
abroad.
The ideological orientation of Yad Vashem also resulted, during the
1950s, in constant attempts to limit, or, at times, outwardly ban, the work
of survivors, whose academic background as well as their vision of the
Institute’s aims, were often at odds with that of its founders, most notably
with that of Ben- Zion Dinur.
Funded by money paid by West Germany as collective indemnity to the
Jews, Yad Vashem was obligated by its contractual arrangements to employ
Holocaust survivors.38 For that reason, and because no Israeli historian of
the postwar era chose to study the Holocaust,39 the majority of researchers
at Yad Vashem were East-European Jews, survivors themselves, with lit-

tle academic training, or who came from a different intellectual tradition.
For the most part, they wished to turn Yad Vashem into a folsky enterprise,
to strengthen the Institute’s ties with the Landsmanschaften and to increase
the volume of publications of survivors’ memoirs and testimonies.40
As already mentioned, the methodological approach of this group of
East-European Jews owed much to the pioneering work of the Jewish his-
torians and writers Simon Dubnow and S. Anski. To compensate for the
lack of Jewish municipal and national archives, Dubnow started a popu-
lar movement amongst thousands of Jews in the Tsarist empire who, fol-
lowing his guidance, accumulated for him great numbers of documentary
sources for the construction of a chronology of events in Russian and Polish
Jewish history. Dubnow’s final legacy when he was seized by the Germans
in Riga on December 8, 1941 was to urge his brethren to continue and
chronicle the unfolding events: “Brothers,” he is said to have called out,
“write down everything you see and hear. Keep a record of it all.”41 S. Anski
too signed a call for historical chronicling during World War I. In a long-
winded manifesto, issued on new Year’s Day 1915 he warned his readers:
“Woe to the nation whose history is written by foreign hands and whose
own writers are left to later compose only songs of lament, penitential
prayers and threnodies.”42
The Dubnowian/Anskian tradition was kept alive during the Holocaust.
Many of the Jewish victims made great efforts, often at considerable risk,
to record the life, the suffering and the deaths of their fellow Jews under
German rule. In the Warsaw ghetto, for example, Emmanuel Ringelblum,
inspired by Anski’s most important Jewish chronicle from the Great War,
Khurbm Galitsye (The Destruction of Galicia), organized a team of archivists
(in what came to be known as the “Oneg Shabbat” underground archive)
“who collected, evaluated and preserved the record of perfidy and mar-
tyrdom in the very midst of total destruction”;43 in Auschwitz and other
camps too, records were kept by individual inmates; the Labor-Zionist
underground and the Bund kept records, as did many Judenräte.44 As we
have seen, after the war, this urge to record what had happened led to the
creation of historical commissions in many of the DP camps.
This tradition was later transmitted by the survivors to Yad Vashem.45
Some of the survivors who were now employed by the Jerusalem center
were formally associated with the work of the underground archives in the
ghettos of Europe;46 others were involved in the work of the Jewish histor-
ical commissions in the DP camps or with the Historical Institute of
Warsaw, which had been formed in 1944 in order to gather documentary
evidence of German war-crimes against the Jews.47 At Yad Vashem, too,
much of their work concentrated on what Yehuda Bauer termed “factog-
raphy,”48 on collecting raw data, functioning, in fact, as chroniclers rather

than historians. Among the researchers of the Holocaust who adhered to
this methodology were H.G. Adler, who worked mainly on Theresienstadt,
and Lucjan Dobroszycki, the specialist on Lodz. Both Adler and
Dobroszycki made extensive use of full texts, replicating documents with
brief explanations that did not distort the records in their original form.49
Indeed, under their influence and that of the other East-European sur-
vivors, Yad Vashem’s publications in the 1950s have been primarily doc-
umentary, focusing mainly on the conservation and memorialization of the
Holocaust years, “if only in their bare detail, in their heart-rending repet-
itiveness,”50
As noted earlier, for the Israeli scholars the study of history did not
mean the accumulation of documents per se, but critical analysis of his-
torical facts, based, at the same time, and, in a sense, in contradiction to,
on their Zionist goals and aspirations. Even Dinur, despite his own work
of Kinus of the history of Jews in the various European countries and in
Palestine, advocated greater emphasis on historical analysis. “Teaching the
lesson [of the Shoah] to the nation,” Dinur asserted during a meeting of
the Executive Board in 1959, “means deriving conclusions based on
researching and analyzing the facts. It is not enough to collect all the evi-
dence...The way to fulfill this requirement is through constant and system-
atic research work on the Holocaust and heroism, its extent, roots and
consequences.”51
Another, perhaps more complex, element which enhanced the tension
between the survivors and the Israeli scholars derived from the “formula”
at the base of the Yad Vashem Law. The Law, as mentioned earlier, stat-
ed that the national institution was to fulfill the two (related but not
always compatible) functions, that of preservers of memory and that of his-
torians. Mark Uveeler, representative of the Claims Conference at the
Board described the confusion: “...There is the opinion that Yad Vashem
should cater to the public and there is the other that its work should be
intended to a certain strata that can receive and ‘digest’ a more scientific
approach.” In his (previously mentioned) report to the “Claims Conference”
in 1960, Jacob Robinson explained that this unnatural symbiosis was at
the root of the difficulties facing Yad Vashem. In reality, he argued, both
functions are not fully fulfilled because of the different approaches that
each demands.52
Dinur, on the other hand, saw no contradiction between the two aims.
In his resignation speech to the members of the Executive Board on March
11, 1959, he reiterated his conviction that a strong, in fact, unbreakable link
exists between memory and history: “A few words on the term “memory”

and its significance. Memory in Hebrew does not means simply the past;
memory means recalling and keeping in one’s heart all that was and ana-
lyzing the past in order to learn about the future: ‘Remember that we are
but dust’; ‘And Jerusalem did not remember its fate.’The purpose of the
Memorial Authority is both to preserve the past and to determine its
lessons for the future...Only by espousing both interwoven meanings of the
term can we discuss Yad Vashem’s aim...The aim of Yad Vashem is to study
the past in order to teach its lesson to the people, for, otherwise, what is
the purpose of remembering?”53
In his scholarly work, Dinur defined this “symbiosis” between mem-
ory and history as “historical consciousness.” In his article on “The
Historical Consciousness of the People and Problems of Its Study,” Dinur
defined historical consciousness (hakarat he-avar) as “an acquired knowl-
edge which confers emotional confidence.” And, since historical and
national consciousness were, for Dinur, interchangeable,54 he saw in the
study of history not only a scholarly pursuit but, even more so, a histor-
ical calling. Not only did he, as an ardent Zionist, actively participate in
changing the course of Jewish history, but his historical writings neatly cor-
responded to his ideological convictions.55
Also based on his historiographical stance that the Holocaust, despite
its magnitude, was yet another manifestation of the dialectic process of
destruction and regeneration that characterized Jewish life in exile,56 Dinur
believed that it was imperative to study this period within the overall con-
text of Jewish history. Such a task could only be undertaken by researchers
with a broad historical overview in general, and expertise in Jewish his-
tory in particular. Hence, already at the end of 1954, he appointed the his-
torian Israel Halperin of the Hebrew University, whose field of research was
early modern Jewish history, as the scientific advisor to Yad Vashem and
he nominated Joseph Melkman, whose dissertation dealt with the Jewish
poet of the seventeenth century, David (Franco) Mendez, as manager of
the scientific branch and as General Director of the Institute.57 Dinur also
worked relentlessly to involve renowned Israeli historians, such as
Gershom Scholem, Efraim Urbach, Jacob Talmon and others, in the work
of Yad Vashem. Moreover, he attempted to encourage young researchers
who had a university training to deal with the Shoah period and become
involved in the scientific work at Yad Vashem, although with little result.58
He did manage to enlist his student, Shaul Esh, to research the period. With
Dinur’s encouragement and support, Esh became, until his death in the late
1960s, one of the leading Israeli scholars of the Shoah and of Nazism, as
well as Chief Editor of Yad Vashem’s publications.
Due to the influence of Dinur, who viewed the lack of qualified
researchers willing to work in this field as one of the major obstacles fac-
ing the Jerusalem institute, a series of interactions, “negotiations” and com-
mon endeavors between Yad Vashem and academic institutions evolved
during these early years.59
Dinur believed that the way to attract young scholars to the subject
would be through the establishment of an academic institute in conjunc-
tion with the Hebrew University. The new institute, in fact an extension of
the University, would be located in the Yad Vashem building at Har
Hazikaron and would concentrate on a scientific study of the Shoah, its
roots and its consequences.60 Some members of the Board, including Yad
Vashem’s General Director, Joseph Melkman, anticipated that the estab-
lishment of such an institute would also help solve the major difficulty fac-
ing Yad Vashem since its inception: operating as a memorial center, on the
one hand, and as a center of scientific research, on the other. They hoped
that the proposed institute, directed by the University, would deal with the
academic study of the Shoah period while the other existing departments
at Yad Vashem would focus on memorialization and documentation.61
Dinur suggested to call the new academic center the “Institute for the
Study of the Destruction of European Jewry—Yad Vashem” and to consid-
er the destruction as beginning with racial antisemitism and not with
Hitler.” This, he argued, is also in accordance with the spirit of the Law of
Yad Vashem: “The Law states that our task is ‘to commemorate the com-
munities destroyed, to gather, research and publish all testimonies of the
Holocaust and to teach the nation its lesson.’ In order to teach its lesson
we have to ask ourselves, when was this plan born and who prepared it?
These questions can only be tackled by persons with a wide knowledge
in modern history...By expanding the period of research we have a better
chance of attracting young scholars to the subject.”62 Haim Yahil, a mem-
ber of the Board and a senior official at the Foreign Ministry, concurred.
It is important to study the roots of the destruction, he said, even though
there is a good chance that young researchers will deal, primarily, with the
Dreyfus Affair or the emergence of antisemitism and less with what hap-
pened in the ghettos. Yet, restricting the period of research will dissuade
historians and lock the door before any scientific study of the Shoah peri-
od itself.63
Dinur’s plan evoked a series of debates above and beyond the most
“vociferous” one concerning the survivors’ role in the study of the Shoah.
These included heated discussions about whether the Shoah, as the sur-
vivors within and outside Yad Vashem, along with some public figures,
argued, should be viewed as an extreme event whose study, therefore,
requires a different approach than the one usually applied by historians?

Or, should it, as Dinur and most other academics involved with the
Institute maintained, be described and interpreted according to the con-
ceptual and representational categories commonly applied in history?
Should research in this domain deal exclusively with the Nazi period or,
should it, in order to better understand its roots, also include the study of
antisemitism?
Some members of the Board sternly objected to the idea of expanding
the period of research. Yosef Weitz, for example, argued that such an
expansion will diminish Hitler’s responsibility. Moreover, he added, we
know that for hundreds of years there were many Hitlers but if we deal with
the antisemitism of two thousand years ago we will never get to the mod-
ern period and to the Holocaust. Therefore, he concluded, the institute
should deal exclusively with the period commencing with Hitler’s ascen-
dance to power to the end of the war in 1945.64 Avraham Harman, a
senior official at the Foreign Ministry, concurred, insisting that the
Holocaust years should suffice as a subject of research, since they them-
selves are infinite in scope.65 Mark Dvorzecki too voiced his disagree-
ment: “Indeed,” he said, “what happened in Nazi Germany was the result
of historical developments that began thousands of years ago. However,
we are witnessing a sad phenomenon in Israel where young intellectuals
abstain from dealing with the Holocaust period and I am afraid that schol-
ars at the proposed institute will, if given the choice, concentrate for the
rest of their lives on the history of the past century and will never reach
our period. We are obligated to study the Shoah period first, and, maybe
later, expand backwards.66
Eventually, the majority of participants embraced Dinur’s position: Yad
vashem will deal exclusively with the Shoah period while the proposed
academic institute will commence its investigation with the inception of
modern antisemitism.67
Professors Halperin, Mazar and Urbach, representatives of the Hebrew
University in its negotiations with Yad Vashem, doubted, at first, the wis-
dom of pursuing such a joint enterprise. They found it difficult to enlist
scholars to deal with this field and refused to participate in financing the
new academic center.”68 It was Dinur’s relentless efforts and talent for per-
suasion that tilted the scales and brought them around. Yad Vashem, he
promised, will finance the new center and “recruited” scholars will con-
duct “a directed and guided research of European Jewish history from the
1870s, with an emphasis on the history of the Shoah and the uprising
(1933–1945), its roots and its consequences in Europe and elsewhere.”69
In accordance, the proposed academic center was renamed and hence
called: “The Hebrew University and Yad Vashem Institute for the Study of
the European Jewish Catastrophe.”70

At the same time, Dinur rejected attempts made by survivor organiza-
tions, mainly the organizations of the Jewish fighters, to influence the poli-
cies of Yad Vashem, on the basis of their conviction that Holocaust
survivors were the rightful heirs and spokespersons of the victims who per-
ished in Europe. For example, Nathan Eck, a survivor who worked as a
researcher at the Institute, insisted that “the task of Yad Vashem is not to
assure the Holocaust period its place in Jewish historiography; there is no
need for that. Rather, it has to fulfill a unique, and not necessarily acad-
emic, national/educational mission. This mission should have nothing to
do with glorifying science; it should aim at endowing its lesson to those
who need it..., first and foremost to those of our generation and to the
younger generation who grow up in its still looming shadow. The object
of Holocaust research at Yad Vashem is to find scholarly answers [under-
lined in the original] to questions and problems that arise regarding the
Holocaust. There are questions and problems that should be addressed but
many of them cannot be scholarly expressed and defined in scholarly terms
because they are gnawing at and piercing our very souls.”71 Most mem-
bers of the Board, however, supported Dinur’s view.72 Yosef Weitz, for
example, said: “I cannot imagine that the sick can deliberate about their
own sickness. Among the surviving remnants there are no scientists and
no researchers.”73
The survivors, on their part, refused to accept the Institute’s attitude
and harsh debates among representatives of survivors’ organizations and
members of the Executive Board followed. Jacob Robinson, a historian, an
international lawyer and member of the World Council of Yad Vashem,
described the essence of the controversy in a special report on the activ-
ities of Holocaust research institutes prepared for the “Claims Conference”
(an organization that had been formed to represent Jewish material claims
against Germany) in 1960: “Can only those who experienced the Holocaust
describe it? On the one hand, there are those who hold that only survivors
of Nazi persecutions possess the ability to do so. On the other hand, there
are others who claim that it is impossible for survivors to be objective;
objectivity can only be attained by those who were not direct victims of
the Nazi regime, although the latter lack a major advantage, i.e., compre-
hension of the period’s ambiance...”74
Four survivors in particular led the confrontation with the Board:
Rachel Auerbach, one of only two survivors of Emmanuel Ringelbaum’s cir-
cle in the Warsaw ghetto,75 Nahman Blumental and Joseph Kermisz, who,
along with Auerbach, were among the founding members of the first
Jewish Historical Institute for the research and study of the Holocaust,

established in Poland in 1944 (Zydowski Instytut Historyczny);76 and,
Nathan Eck who was active in the Polish Jewish underground movement
and Principal of the underground Hebrew secondary school, “Tarbut,” in
the Warsaw ghetto.77 They complained that their work was being ignored
or undermined in an attempt to push them to resign. They especially crit-
icized the Institute’s efforts to foster greater cooperation with the Hebrew
University. Its scholars, they claimed, should learn from the experience
gathered by survivors who were working relentlessly already during the
war and in the DP camps on documenting the Jewish Holocaust. Some such
qualified survivors, as Moshe Joseph Feigenbaum and Israel Kaplan,
founders of the Central Historical Commission in Munich after the war,
expressed their wish to work for the Institute but were rejected. The fact
that they experienced the Shoah, the four persons argued, should be con-
sidered as an “advantage” rather than an obstacle.78
During the spring months of 1958, the four survivors decided to voice
their grievances publicly. Along and with the support of several survivors’
organizations and a few journalists, they published letters in the daily
papers, Davar and Ma’ariv, in which they accused Yad Vashem of attempt-
ing to curtail the work of survivors at the Institute and called for a funda-
mental revision of its policies. An illustration of the accusations against Yad
Vashem in the papers is the one which appeared in Ma’ariv on June 18:
“Several historians who were employed by the Ghetto Fighters’ House were
invited to work for Yad Vashem. They accepted the Institute’s invitation
willingly and enthusiastically. They assumed that they would be given
every opportunity to demonstrate their ability. They came with plans and
awaited for a go-ahead. They are waiting—to this day...”79 As a result of
these publications, Nathan Eck, Nahman Blumental and Joseph Kermisz
were temporarily dismissed from their work at the Institute. A few weeks
prior to their dismissal, Rachel Auerbach had already been suspended from
her work as the manager of the testimonies gathering department of Yad
Vashem in Tel Aviv.80
On May 22, 1958, the Executive Board met to discuss the “organized
defamation campaign against us in the papers.”81 The question on the
agenda was whether to negotiate with the four “insurgents” or turn their
temporary dismissal into a permanent one, a difficult choice in light of the
widening public support for the plight of the four employees.82 Moshe Kol,
representative of the Jewish Agency, was against the proposed dismissal:
“It is natural that whoever went through the Shoah finds it difficult to get
used to working in a set framework...Yet, we shouldn’t dismiss them. No
one will understand that, even if the chairman and [Joseph] Melkman
appear in countless news conferences and attempt to explain it...One of
these men, Mr Kermisz [Director of Yad Vashem’s Archive] came to see me

and said some very harsh words. He feels that he is being deprived, that
his work is being diminished, that we try to turn him into a tiny cog in the
machine, he feels hounded....Moreover according to Kermisz, although he
is a member of the editorial board, he gets access to the material only after
it is published. Since the public has deep feelings for these people,” Kol
concluded, “their dismissal may haunt Yad Vashem forever.”83 Avraham
Harman concurred: “We have to come to terms with these people even if
it is not in the interest of the Institution, because as things stand now, not
to do so would be worse for us.”84
Doubts arose especially about the removal of Nahman Blumental from
his senior position as Director of Yad Vashem’s library. “Publicly,” Harman
said “we will not be able to dismiss him [Blumental] even if we wanted to.
He is known to the public as a man who dedicates his time and effort to
the subject of the Shoah. The question is, does he have a place with us?
Maybe not. Even so it is our duty to secure for him a place of employment
and let everyone know that this place was found thanks to our efforts. In
fact, there is nothing wrong in asking the Ghetto Fighters’ House to rehire
him.”85
The General Director of Yad Vashem, Joseph Melkman, denied any con-
nection between the publications in the papers against Yad Vashem and
the four’s dismissal: “From the moment I began my work,” he argued, “I
was asked to dismiss some people in order to increase efficiency. And, any-
way,” he added, contradicting his previous statement, “unlike the others,
Blumental was not exactly dismissed and we have to talk about him sep-
arately.”
Interestingly, Melkman, a scholar whose field of research was Hebrew
literature in Holland, was himself a survivor who spent the last two war
years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Following the war, he was
active in numerous educational and cultural frameworks of the Zionist
movement and the Jewish Agency in the Netherlands. In 1957, he was
invited by Dinur to head the scientific department at Yad Vashem and, a
few months later, he was appointed as its General Director.86 His nomina-
tion was meant, above all, to counterbalance the prevailing tendency to
concentrate almost exclusively on researching the fate of East-European
Jewry in general and of Poland’s Jewry in particular and to give more weight
to the study of the plight of West-European Jewry during the Holocaust.87
Melkman’s position that the work of the four survivors at the Institute
was terminated in order to “increase efficiency” was embraced by most
members of the Board who went on to discuss in detail the inadequacies
of each of them. Dinur, for example, accused Blumental of receiving a

salary yet doing nothing in return but lying and threatening Yad Vashem
in the papers: “He continues to reside in Tel Aviv...and here [in Jerusalem]
there is nothing...,” Dinur said, and added: “Furthermore, he signed a con-
tract about his book which he did not fulfil. He promised to finish his work
within ten months but finished it after twenty, and even then handed in
material that is not worthy of publication.” Melkman, in turn, denied
Kermisz and Eck’s accusations that their work was being minimized and,
along with other members of the Board, attributed their excessive sensi-
tivity to their experiences during the war years. “One has to remember,”
said Yehudah Leib Bialer, representative of the Ministry of Religion, “that
their sensitivity is much more acute because they are survivors of the
Holocaust.”
The harshest words were directed toward Rachel Auerbach, Director
of the Collection of Testimonies Department. Dinur described her meth-
ods of gathering testimonies as flawed and her attitude in general as
insulting and uncompromising: “I invited professors Eisenstadt and Talmon
and two more experts to evaluate her way of gathering testimonies...,” he
told the members. “They said that her methods are erroneous because she
influences the witnesses’ accounts: she incites them to talk by bringing up
memories and she spends too much time with each witness; in a year and
a half she managed to interview only some fifty survivors. And, when these
men [the professors] met with her to discuss the matter, she insulted
them by saying that she is willing to talk only with people who understand
what it takes to interview survivors. Furthermore, she writes all of her
defamation letters to the press from the Yad Vashem office!....She wants
to be the administrator even though she understands nothing about admin-
istrative work. Moreover, we invited a lawyer from Yugoslavia to assist her
in collecting testimonies from Yugoslavs, yet she refused to accept him
because, according to her, he does not speak Yiddish. Why does he need
to speak Yiddish to get testimonies from his fellow Yugoslavs? Obviously,
she sees the whole thing as her own private enterprise. The partisans, for
example, asked us to gather testimonies from their comrades. We request-
ed that they send some people to assist us in this task. They sent many
but Mrs. Auerbach rejected all of them with the argument that they were
not intelligent enough. She turned to the press and defamed us. What
should we do in order to please her short of nominating her as our General
Director...?”88
Despite the general criticism, some members of the Board expressed
their sympathy and even admiration for this group of survivors and its
achievements. Yehudah Leib Bialer praised Kermisz’s work and reminded
the members that it was he who saved and brought thousands of docu-
ments and other priceless material from Europe to Eretz Yisrael. Mark
Dworzecki, himself a survivor who spent the war years in the Vilna ghet-
to, described the group of four as “living monuments,” and “my brothers
who are revered by all.” Moreover, he himself felt that Dr. Eck was mis-
treated and, as for Rachel Auerbach, he stated: “I read the exchange of let-
ters between her and Dr. Melkman and I have to declare that had I received
such letters from Dr. Melkman, I would probably have reacted much
stronger than she did.89
Indeed, furious and hurt, Auerbach continued to publically criticize Yad
Vashem’s orientation and its Executive Board, well into October. Following
her dismissal, she sent an open letter to the Davar newspaper, titled
“What the Struggle within Yad Vashem is All About.”90 “Our struggle,” she
wrote, “aims at returning the national Institute to the mission and roles for
which it was created.” The original goal, she maintained, was to establish
a creative and dynamic Memorial House, “with the people and for the peo-
ple, not an aloof scientific Institute...and certainly, not a bureaucratic
fortress void of content.” The Institute’ strayed from its original design,
mainly because of the composition of the Executive Board, all of whose
members, she wrote, are highly influential people who are, nonetheless,
distant and removed from the concrete work on which they have to delib-
erate and decide. Except for one member who is also a survivor [Mark
Dworzecki], all members of the Executive Board are veterans of the Yishuv,
heads of different organizations, politicians or senior administrators who
are busy, head over heels, with other matters. “Researchers like us, who
are not part of the ‘in-circle,’ receive no kind of support, monetary or oth-
erwise...In fact, every effort has been made to dismiss us, one by one, so
as to ensure the veterans’ total control over the course and management
of Yad Vashem.”91
Support for the Executive Board in its confrontation with the survivors
came from an unexpected source. In 1958, the State Controller’s annual
report found the financial management of the Institute to be in disarray.
The following year the criticism of the State Controller, Siegfried Moses,
was even harsher, yet he put the blame on the survivors. “The adminis-
trative management of Yad Vashem,” he reported, “suffers since 1958 as
a result of personal tension that was and is present at the Institute and
which affects all practical matters.” The Controller went on to explain the
root and cause of the paralyzing situation: “Severe transgression of dis-
cipline occurred, that should not have happened in a state-run institution:
disgruntled employees turned with their complaints not to the Executive
Board but to the public.”92
Following the State Controller’s first report and the articles in the

press, members of the World Council of Yad Vashem also expressed their
desire to investigate the problems at the Institute. On June 17, 1958, the
Fourth World Council of Yad Vashem convened at Har Hazikaron in
Jerusalem. The members elected a Committee to study the Executive
Board’s activities in detail and make recommendations for improvement.
On November, 9, based on the Committee’s conclusions, the World Council
established the following points: “The ‘Holocaust and Heroism Memorial
Act—Yad Vashem’—passed by the Knesset on August 19, 1953—imposed
on Yad Vashem two functions, the kind of which were never forced upon
any other institution. The Law states that the aim of the newly founded
national institution is to commemorate the martyrs and heroes of the
Jewish Holocaust and, at the same time, “to gather, investigate, and pub-
lish all evidence of the Holocaust and heroism.” Yet, the Executive Board
failed to elicit the public’s interest or support in its commemorative efforts.
Therefore, The Council determines that the Executive Board should put a
greater emphasis on the commemorative side of its activities and diligent-
ly work to increase the public’s awareness of the Jewish tragedy. This
would be better achieved if Yad Vashem were to include members of
She’erit Hapletah and the Jewish fighters in these efforts. Hence the World
Council demanded that adequate representation be provided to organiza-
tions who represented the surviving remnants and the Jewish fighters. The
Council, therefore, recommended the nomination to the Executive Board
of five new members from among the survivors that would participate as
observers in its meetings.93
On November 11, 1958, in view of the mounting public pressure and
the World Council’s recommendations, the Executive Board convened in
a compromising mood to conclude its discussions on the matter. It
announced that although the Institute regretted the wrongful actions of its
employees, the four would be reinstated under certain conditions:
Blumental would move to Jerusalem and return the compensation money
which he received upon the termination of his work. As for Auerbach, the
department for the collection of testimonies would be divided in two: the
first, under her supervision, would deal exclusively with the collection of
testimonies from Polish Jews; the second, for whom Yad Vashem would
nominate another supervisor, would collect testimonies from people of all
other countries. Nathan Eck and Joseph Kermisz would resume their pre-
vious positions and, in addition, Kermisz and Blumental would also be
included as members of the Editorial Board.94 Each of them, except for
Auerbach, accepted Yad Vashem’s proposals.95
It is at this conjunction, in the late 1950s, that the politics of memo-
ry and historiography of the Shoah assumed a clearer, less contentious
path. Yad Vashem was recognized as the leading Institute for the commem-
oration and study of the Shoah and the Gvurah in Israel and abroad; it
resolved the problematic “division of labor” with competing institutions,
mainly The Ghetto Fighters’ House, and also lent an increasingly greater role
to survivors in its research work as well as in its policy making, mainly in
their new role as members of the Executive Board.96 This trend was
enhanced following Dinur’s resignation as head of the memorial founda-
tion, on March 11, 1959, and his replacement by Aryeh Leon Kubovy, a
much gentler, compromising figure. Kubovy declared, shortly after his
nomination: “There is nothing...more dangerous for our future than turn-
ing Yad Vashem into an ivory tower, distanced from the life of the nation
and detached from its feelings and demands, especially from those who
experienced the Holocaust first hand.”97
() CHAPTER FOUR
&'
Israel’s “Pantheon” and the

“Silence” of the Survivors
during the 1950s
The Yad Vashem Museum was constructed so that it leads from destruc-
tion to rebirth, from the Holocaust to the establishment of the Jewish state.
The exhibition begins with the Nazi rise to power in 1933 Germany and
ends not with the war’s end in 1945 but with the creation of Israel in 1948.
The museum itself is divided into three main sections: The first section is
dedicated to the evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish laws and policies between
1933 and 1939. The struggle to survive during the first three years of war
(1939–1941) is presented as an extension of the first phase. The next sec-
tion is devoted entirely to the exterminating process, between 1941 and
1945. The third section is dedicated to Jewish attempts to resist the Nazis
and concludes with the establishment of the state of Israel, thus linking
death and resurrection, catastrophe and redemption—conceptually and
ritually.1
The division of the museum into three equal parts, in accordance with
the Zionist narrative, came to reflect and perpetuate the myth of active
heroism, exalting and magnifying the Jewish fighters’ role as vindicators
of Zionist ideology. At the same time, it implied the rejection of Exile and
the exilic Jews, perceived to have gone to the their death unresistingly.
In fact, one of the early plans for the site, discussed and debated at
length during the 1947 International Conference organized by Yad Vashem,
would have visibly accentuated the difference between the passivity of the
majority of Jewish victims and the heroism of the Jewish fighters. The idea
was to build two commemorative houses on one of the hills surrounding
Jerusalem. The first would have been dedicated to the six million Jewish
victims of Nazism and would have include their names according to the
towns and countries from which they came. On the opposite side of the
hill would stand the “Hall of Heroism,” where the names and deeds of the
ghetto fighters and partisans, of the more than one and a half million
Jewish soldiers who had fought the Nazis during World War II, of individ-
uals who risked their lives to save Jews, as well as of volunteers from the
Yishuv who fought to free European Jewry and died in battle, would have
been commemorated.2
During this conference, Abba Kovner, the leader of the Vilna ghetto
resistance movement, a partisan and a major Hebrew poet, even demand-
ed that in the construction and orientation of the two commemorative
Houses a special emphasis be put on the differences between the two
groups. The “victims’ House” was to point to the visitor that the tragedy
of the Shoah was neither in the defeat of European Jewry nor in the mag-
nitude of its suffering, nor in the fact that it was left isolated and alone.
Rather, the tragedy lied in its loss of capacity to defend itself. Skeptic, indi-
vidualistic, nihilistic and assimilatory, this generation of Jews had lost its
spiritual foundation and remained empty and hollow, “without the devo-
tion of the believer and the primitive boldness of the partisan.” Indeed, “the
spirit of the nation was nullified before the nation itself was annihilated.”
And this, according to Kovner, should be the main lesson taught to the vis-
itor in the “victims’ Commemorative House.” Only then should he enter the
“hall of heroism” where Resistance would be revealed to him in its true
character: a Jewish revolt, carried out by young men and women with
strong spiritual and ideological convictions. “This revelation may not
always be consoling....but it will allow the visitor to understand the revolt
not as an act of desperation but of great choice [emphasis in the original].3
During the 1950s, this perception was also reflected in the education-
al domain. The main goal of Zionist education was to forge a “new Jew”—
a national Jew,4 one, that could not develop in the Diaspora, but which
existed in the pre-exilic past. This perception also shaped the image of the
“new Jew,” defined as the very opposite of the rejected exilic Jew.5 Hence,
Zionist educators put great emphasis on Bible studies rather than on the
major corpus of Jewish literature that developed in exile, with the explic-
it purpose of undermining 2,000 years of Jewish history in the Diaspora,
on the one hand, while establishing a direct link between the people of
modern Israel and the exalted archetype of the ancient Hebrews, on the
other. Moreover, under Ben-Gurion’s inspiration and Dinur’s guidance
(in his role as Minister of Culture and Education in the early 1950s), the
Bible was “secularized” and “nationalized,” as a means to derive a con-
temporary lesson. Indeed, considered from a secular and national point
ISRAEL’ S PANTHEON & “ SILENCE ” OF SURVIVORS ) 65

of view, the Bible provided many images with which the nation could
identify: an independent state inhabited by free and courageous people,
historically “active” biblical heroes, such as Joshua and King David.6
Second, and connected to the former, great emphasis was put in
Israel’s national schooling on Moledet studies (the study of one’s home-
land). The study of Moledet enhanced the symbolic use of the Bible, their
common purpose being “to root the children in Eretz Yisrael, the land of our
fathers, the birthplace of the Hebrew nation,” in order to nurture “the con-
sciousness that [the Moledet] is our national home, the basis for the cre-
ation of our material and spiritual culture.”7
Third, in history teaching, the submission of Jewish history to the
dictates of Zionist historiography denoted not only an emphasis on the
inevitability of Zionism but on the rejection of exile, which was increased
by the shock of the Holocaust.8 According to Aryeh (Arik) Carmon, for
example, during the 1950s, 33 out of 39 topics in the section on modern
Jewish history presented the Zionist viewpoint in a positive light and the
Diaspora experience negatively.9 The interpretation of Jewish history in the
spirit of Zionist ideology was provided for the authors of textbooks, who
were mostly high school teachers, by Ben-Zion Dinur. Rabbi Abraham
Hacohen Kook helped the authors of textbooks geared for the national-
orthodox schools to formulate this interpretation in religious terms.10
For Dinur, ideas and deeds were interwoven. A “renewed historical
consciousness,” to be determined by way, among others, of school curric-
ula, was for him “a first condition for great historical deeds which fate
tossed upon us forcefully and which move us forward, willingly or not.”11
Given the role attributed to historical consciousness by Dinur, it is not sur-
prising that the emphasis on the Zionist message in Israeli textbooks was
expressed by detailed discussions about ‘Heroism’ under the Nazis while
the Shoah as such was given only secondary attention. In fact, until the
late 1970s, there was not one textbook available on the subject of the
Shoah.12 Instead it was incorporated into study subjects, in different chap-
ters, within the framework of general history lessons. The main issues dealt
with in these chapters were: the atrocities of the Nazis, the indifference of
the free world and the heroism of the few who revolted, described as bear-
ers of that national spirit out of which Zionism emerged.13
The Nazis were described as “blood-thirsty beasts,” their murderous
conduct “the devil’s design.”14 The demonization of Nazism and its mythol-
ogization served the writers as a means to enhance the Zionist lesson. If
the Nazis’ incensed hatred was an expression of “dark-evil forces,” spread
among the nations with “demonic efficacy,” rational-historical explications
of this irrational phenomenon were unnecessary. The obvious implication
of such an approach was that the only “counter-force,” the only “salva-
tion” for the Jewish people, the only place where their safety could be guar-
anteed, was in the state of Israel.15
The relation between Israel and the nations, too, was characterized by
the latter’s irrational and permanent hatred of the Jews.16 Thus, the silence
of the free world in the face of Jewish extermination was described as the
history of inaction and indifference: Jews were refused refuge, Allied gov-
ernments rejected rescue suggestions and the railway line to Auschwitz
was not bombed. This account, too, highlighted the prevailing notion
that, as long as the nation was in exile, antisemitism was a universal and
permanent fixture.
Little was written in history textbooks about the widespread percep-
tion in Israel that the majority of Jews went to their death “like sheep to
the slaughter.” Yet the long descriptions of Jewish resistance were often set
in contrast to the passivity of those who perished without attempting to
resist, lacking in personal and national dignity.17 According to one author,
for example, “the heroic stand of the Jews in the ghetto provided a com-
pensation of sorts for the shameful surrender of those led to the extermi-
nation camps.”18 The fighters, wrote another, “preferred an honorable
death to a disgraced and dreaded life;”19 and yet another declared that
“within the deep ugliness in which the Nazis attempted to drown them [the
Jews], there were also sons of Israel who were determined to act against
a certain death and wished, at least, to die with weapons in hand.”20
According to the usual Zionist “formula,” the heroic deeds of Jewish fight-
ers, particularly in the Warsaw ghetto, were described as rooted in Zionist
ideology. The Jewish fighters themselves were referred to as “Hebrews” or
“Defenders of Masada,”—labels that were usually “reserved” to describe
the heroic early Israelites and their heirs, the Zionist-pioneers.21
Identification with the Jewish fighters was further strengthen by referring
to them as “the youth,” or as members of “youth movements,” terms
which were often used in Israel to describe the new, proud and brave gen-
eration of young Israelis, the majority of which belonged to one Zionist
youth movement or the other.22
In most textbooks, the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was used as a
proof of the righteousness of the Zionist warning and its solution. Dinur
himself described the Zionist lesson as follows: “Zionism predicted ahead
of time, although not in such a horrendous magnitude, the threat of a com-
ing Holocaust in the Diaspora, and it is not Zionism that should be blamed
but the Jews who did not respond, who paid no attention to its warnings.”23
Accordingly, in the description of Jewish suffering in the years prior to the
Holocaust, the authors of history textbooks emphasized the Jewish will-

ingness for self deception, their refusal to acknowledge Zionism and its
warnings. Implicitly, these evaluations gave the impression that the
Holocaust was a historical punishment for those who ignored the Zionist
call to European Jewry to save themselves by immigrating to Eretz Yisrael.24
This line of thinking, expressed not only in education but, as we saw,
by the national memorial authority and the country’s leaders, left most
native and veteran Israelis estranged from and even contemptuous toward
the majority of survivors, whose stories did not fit with the linkage between
Zionism and active heroism. Engagement with the themes of the Holocaust
became a domain of deep denial. The survivors, on their part, felt alien-
ated and offended. Ruth Bondi, a survivor of Theresinstadt and Auschwitz,
described the survivors’ pain and sense of total isolation:
To tell we must until our wit’s end, but no one wanted to listen. Only stories on
doll-houses were listened to; to all the rest of the horrors, who can listen? They
lowered their eyes as if they were told something too private, too personal, not
to be mentioned in public. We learned quickly: Be an Israeli outside and a sur-
vivor at home, and even not at home—why burden those dear to you—but only
in your heart.25
The negative image of the survivors in Israel manifested itself also in

the often asked question: “How come you survived?” “I had a feeling that
I am guilty for staying alive,” remembered Simhah Wtthoiser, a survivor
of the Warsaw ghetto.26 Indeed, the common assumption in Israel was that
the best had probably perished while those who managed to survive were
the unscrupulous ones, those who knew how to take care of themselves
at the expense of the others, or those who collaborated with the Nazis. The
fact that ghetto fighters and partisans were also among the survivors was
perceived as an exception that confirmed the general rule.27
Ashamed of telling a story that appeared out of tune with surround-
ing society, the survivors, many of whom felt it their moral and historical
obligation to tell and chronicle their war-time experiences while in the DP
camps in Europe, chose to remain silent. On their part, native and veter-
an Israelis could not or did not want to listen. The survivors came from
another, incomprehensible world and there was genuine fear of con-
fronting their suffering and torment.28 Mark Dworzecki explained the
“ordinary” survivors’ silence as the direct result of this sense of estrange-
ment which “afflicted” both groups:
Conspicuous is the sense of loneliness and isolation from the veterans in the
Yishuv who did not experience the Nazi atrocities and are not particularly inter-
ested to hear about them...In any case, they are not interested to hear, as much
as they [the survivors] are willing to tell. Thus an orphanhood complex was cre-
ated...The new immigrant found among the Yishuv people only a few who want-
ed to soothe and comfort him, to pay him individual attention outside the offi-
cial attention that he receives in dealing with this or that institution.29
Another survivor complained in his memoirs: “It was important that what
happened should be told, but in the years immediately after the war it was
difficult to find anyone willing to listen. You spoke but it was as if you were
talking to yourself...”30
This mutually imposed silence was twice broken in the early 1950s:
during the debate over the “Reparations Treaty” with Germany and, with
even greater intensity, during the Kastner trial. In both instances, howev-
er, it was the opposition to Mapai, from the left and from the right, that
turned the Holocaust as a convenient issue for attacking the government.
The Reparations Treaty with Germany, according to which survivors
would receive monetary compensation from Germany for their suffering
and the property they had lost, was the initiative of Ben-Gurion. Although
a few ministers opposed the idea, especially because of the ethical prin-
ciple involved in granting Germany even indirect rehabilitation through
negotiations, it was the economic consideration, specifically the financial
affliction of the state, which decided the matter. The burden of national
reconstruction, mass immigration and security costs, have all led to a debil-
itating economic crisis.
At the end of December 1951, Mapai’s cabinet approved the Prime
Minister’s proposal to start negotiating with Germany for a treaty. However,
in the following weeks, before the matter was presented to the Knesset, the
notion of taking “blood money” from Germany rocked Israeli public opin-
ion. Some Knesset members of the coalition government demanded that
they be allowed to vote according to their conscience, lobbies and pres-
sure groups sprung up as did public rallies and protest demonstrations.
In accordance with Mapam’s affinity to the Soviet line, the party
adopted the Soviet distinction between communist East Germany, which,
in their view, carried no responsibility for the actions of Nazi Germany dur-
ing the war, and between West Germany, whom they held accountable for
the crimes of the Third Reich. All Mapam members of the Knesset, there-
fore, voted against negotiations with West Germany.
The right-wing Herut party, led by Menahem Begin, had its own argu-
ments.31 In the first Knesset, elected in 1949, Herut had received 14 out of
120 members. In the election to the second Knesset, the party had gone
down from 14 seats to 8. The decline in his party’s strength led Begin to
adopt a policy of intensified militancy against the government. The oppor-
tunity to gain public support for Herut came when the Reparations Treaty
with Germany became a hotly-debated national issue.32
Although the issue was manipulated for political purposes, it should

be added that the Holocaust was at the center of Begin’s system of values
and emotions; its lesson as he perceived it—“we shall never again go to
our deaths like sheep to the slaughter”—guided his national policy until
his death in the 1980s. On January 7, 1952, a few hours before the Knesset
was to vote on the proposed treaty, Begin addressed a crowed of some
15,000 in Jerusalem’s Zion Square. With great pathos and emotions, he
called the agreement a “holocaust,” equated Mapai with the Nazis, and
charged that Ben Gurion’s real intention was to use the “blood money “
to enhance Mapai’s economic position, as in the 1930s, when Mapai
signed the haavara agreement with Nazi Germany.33
Despite the fierce opposition, from the left and from the right, the
Reparation Agreement with Germany was concluded in September of
1952. Both Herut and Mapam failed in their campaign, mainly because
they conducted their struggle as part of their battle for political power. In
their rhetoric they attempted to “adapt” the memory of the Holocaust and
its lessons to their own dogmas but failed to address the individual needs
and feelings of the victims themselves. Indeed, except for a handful of sur-
vivors,34 the majority, hundreds of thousands of them, elected to accept
their share of the compensation money.35
The Kastner Trial too turned into a hot political issue. In 1952, Malkiel
Gruenwald accused Dr. Rudolph Kastner, a Hungarian Zionist leader who
negotiated a trucks-for-Jews deal with Adolf Eichmann, of having collab-
orated with the Nazis.36 Kastner admitted that he had negotiated with Nazi
representatives in Hungary, but he claimed that he did so in order to try
and save Hungarian Jewry and that, indeed, he managed to save thousands
of them.37 In 1954, Gruenwald was tried for libel, but was acquitted by the
Jerusalem District Court on the ground that there appeared to be some evi-
dence for his accusations. In reading the verdict, Judge Benyamin Halevy
accused Kastner, a Mapai activist and a spokesman for the Ministry of
Trade and Industry, of “selling his soul to the devil.”38
The verdict, handed out on June 22, 1955, several weeks before the
Third Knesset elections, was again quickly seized by the radical right and
the left in an attempt to destroy the power and credibility of the Mapai
establishment.39 The trial’s proceedings became also the trial of the vic-
tims and survivors of the Holocaust. Survivors who testified on Kastner’s
behalf were accused of collaboration, deceit, or of going like “sheep to the
slaughter.”40
The accusations against Mapai included criminal and immoral acts,
including suppression of information about the mass killings of Jews in
Europe as well as indirect responsibility for the eventual destruction of
Hungarian Jewry: Like Kastner, Mapai leaders deliberately concealed
reports about the Holocaust. Had they revealed the truth to the public, it
was argued, the Yishuv might have rebelled against the British and forced
them to try and save the Jews of Europe.41
In March 19, 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary. They immediate-
ly summoned the local Jewish leaders, assuring them that they had no
intention of harming the Jews and that Jews who were arrested were
charged with criminal conduct that had nothing to do with their racial ori-
gin.42 Nonetheless, arrests and deportations began within a short while.
Gruenwald’s defense attorney Shmuel Tamir, who would serve in the early
1980s in Begin’s government as Minister of Justice, was then a young
lawyer affiliated with the right-wing Revisionist movement. Tamir assert-
ed that Kastner (along with the rest of the Jewish leadership in Hungary)
chose to conceal this information for his own personal gain. Had the Jews
been warned, Tamir insisted, thousands may have had the chance to flee
or organize armed resistence.43
During the trial, Tamir described the failed trucks-for-Jews deal and
charged that Mapai leaders deliberately sabotaged the negotiations. They
did so, he insisted, in the service of the British who did not want anymore
Jews coming to Palestine.44 The Herut party and its newspaper, Herut,
supported Tamir’s line of defense: “We have to admit that we are not inter-
ested in Kastner himself but for the fact that he represents a certain pol-
icy, a certain moral atmosphere. The moral decadence began with
cooperation [of the Yishuv leadership] with the British. On the defendant’s
chair sits the establishment.”45
As for what came to be known” the “VIP train,” with 1,685 Hungarian
Jewish passengers whom the Nazis allowed to leave for Switzerland, Tamir
charged that this was given to Kastner in exchange for his silence.46 Records
showed that among the passengers selected by Kastner, several hundred
were people from his hometown and many others were members of his
family. The link between Kastner’s selection and that of the Jewish Councils
(Judenräte) was emphasized in both left and right-wing publications. In
various articles the authors argued that just like Kastner, the Jewish
Councils’ “institutional compliance,” including the compiling of transport
and “roundup” lists, while concealing the truth from the masses, prevent-
ed any chance for organized or spontaneous acts of resistence.
Kastner’s selection was also equated with Mapai’s policy of “selective
immigration,” which, during the 1920s and 1930s, mainly encouraged the
immigration of pioneers and young people to Palestine.47 Yohanan Bader,
a Herut leader, insisted that there was a clear connection between these
two issues: both distinguished between those whom they believed worthy
of being saved “and the rest who were human dust and, if they were dust,

should not endanger the chosen.”48
Throughout the proceedings, Tamir presented Kastner, who was not
even a member of the Hungarian Judenrat as the very archetype not only
of that leadership but also of diaspora mentality. The defense attorney
compared the courageous character of the Israelis to the contemptible
nature of Diaspora Jewry which, according to him: “in periods of trouble
tended to resort to bribery and solicitation.”49
The question of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust was addressed
daily in the general press where the overall consensus was that the Jews
by their passivity, were responsible for their own death.50 Indeed, in Israel
of the 1950s, there were many, from the left and the right, who had ready-
made prescriptions for what the Jews ought to have done in the countries
occupied by the Nazis. In left-wing publications, however, an effort was
made to distinguish between the majority of Jews who did not resist and
the Jewish fighters. As mentioned previously, the Zionist left viewed armed
resistence in the ghettos as the utmost expression of revolutionary
Zionism—the rebellion against passivity. The verdict in the Kastner trial,
which condemned Jewish cooperation with the Nazis, was presented in
both left-wing newspapers, Al Hamishmar (Mapam) and Lamerhav (Achdut
Ha-Avodah—a faction of Mapam, established in 1954), as proof of the
virtue of their own ideological way, applied during the war in Europe
mainly by members of the Halutz movements (associated with Mapam),
who chose to fight back.51
Clearly then, the issues involved in the trial went far beyond Kastner’s
guilt or innocence. Notwithstanding the political manipulation of the trial
by all parties, from the left and the right, for their own ends, the context
of the trial expressed and heightened the predominant ideals of Zionism
and Israel’s perception of the Holocaust and its victims: active heroism ver-
sus passivity and compliance, Diaspora mentality versus the courageous
character of the Israelis, collaboration versus resistance.52
Despite these two heated political debates and, perhaps, because
these debates accentuated the “difference” between native and veteran
Israelis on the one hand, and the survivors, on the other, the latter, feel-
ing more alienated than ever, continued to maintain their silence. Many
survivors found some solace within the framework of survivors’ organiza-
tions: the Landsmanschaftn.53 The Landsmanschaft organizations held annu-
al memorial ceremonies, usually on the anniversary of the liquidation of
the town’s ghetto, organized cultural and social events, as well as estab-
lished committees whose task was to assist members, materially and
psychologically.54
The Bergen Belsen Survivors Association, for example, was founded in
Tel Aviv on March 27, 1950. On the membership cards, given to the sur-
vivors of the Bergen Belsen camp after they filled out a lengthy and
detailed questionnaire regarding their wartime experiences, were stamped
the four main goals of the Association: “a) Remember that which was done
to us by the Nazi Amalek b) Remember Iyar 2 [the day the camp was lib-
erated by the Allies] c) Perpetuate the memory of the martyrs of Bergen
Belsen d) Defend the rights of the members and provide mutual help to sur-
vivors from Bergen Belsen and [from other camps within] the British zone
of occupation in Germany.”55
In 1955, the Association, with 2,000 registered members, had its own
constitution, directorate, national council and various committees for pol-
icy making, culture, information, reparations, welfare, philanthropy, social
work, youth and more. A special emphasis was set by the members on per-
petuating the memory of the Holocaust among the youth (a committee
organized separate activities for them which included Hanukka and Purim
parties, arts and crafts, as well as contests with prizes on such subjects
as the Holocaust, the Bible and modern Israel). The children were also
asked to contribute essays and poems to a special volume, The Bergen
Belsen Youth Magazine, which was eventually published in 1965 and includ-
ed sections on the life of children in the camp, Jewish education in the ghet-
tos, and much more.56
In the late 1950s, the members, who until then held their meetings at
various temporary locations, purchased a house in Tel Aviv where they
established a memorial center and a library of the Holocaust, dedicated to
the martyrs of Bergen Belsen.57 Since then, the members held their com-
memoration services in their new house. Each year they held three memo-
rial services: A religious ceremony on the tenth of Tevet (the date chosen
for its religious significance by the chief Rabbinate) and the twenty sev-
enth of Nissan, the official “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.”
The largest and most “elaborated” service was held in a rented lecture or
theater hall, in the presence of thousands of survivors and their families,
on the second of Iyar, the day the Bergen Belsen camp was liberated,.58
The commemorative services of the Bergen Belsen Survivors
Association as of most Landsmanschaftn followed an identical pattern. The
Israeli flag, raised throughout the year over the Association’s building, was
lowered to mid mast, six candles were lit, followed by Kadish and Yizkor
prayers. Holocaust poems were read, often by children of the survivors. The
chairman would then exhort the audience against forgetting, about their
obligation to the dead who willed life to the survivors. The evening’s
speaker would be introduced and deliver his address.59 The topics includ-
ed memories from the days of destruction, contemporary problems relat-

ing to the Jewish nation and to Israel and discussions of the attitude of
Israelis to the Diaspora and Diaspora Jewry. In 1965, for example, in a
commemoration service on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of the
liberation of Bergen Belsen, Dr. Nachum Goldmann addressed that last
issue. In Israel, he said, there exists today a tragic tendency to skip over
the history of the Diaspora and to forget the Holocaust. If this tendency
takes root, it will, undoubtedly, lead to the moral and spiritual degenera-
tion of the State of Israel.60
In contrast to these memorial services, which were maintained during
the 1950s almost exclusively within the survivors’ community, the Jewish
fighters’ memorial gatherings were frequently attended by political figures
and often received admiring attention in the press. Rachel Auerbach, for
example, described her impressions of some of those meetings: “Among
the various memorial gatherings those of the partisans are marked by a
somewhat different audience and a somewhat different style. Here too
memorial candles are lit and here too the Kadish and Yizkor prayers open
the ceremony; nevertheless, the atmosphere here is that of vigor and
hope. These Jews made their way out to freedom from behind thick walls
and barbed-wire fences. When you hear them speak, you are able to
ascend somewhat above the deadly fog that surrounds the memories of
those days. For a brief while one may inhale the unmistakable scent of
cedar and pine trees. Undoubtedly, the Jews of the forests were also sur-
vivors of slaughters and horrendous atrocities. Moreover, they emerged
from one jungle, that of the Nazi domain to a place where the dominant
law was also the law of the jungle: each for his own. Here too the Jew was
faced with numerous perils and fears, yet his chances were that of an
equal. Here the Jew was also feared; here the Jew proved that he could
inflict wounds upon his enemy and cause him real damage, avenge spilled
Jewish blood...It is no wonder, therefore, that these remnants...represent,
almost each and every one, the elect, the best who knew how to defy real-
ity.”61
The imposition of a Zionist paradigm of explanation on the Holocaust
hindered the survivors’ natural desire (expressed, as we saw, before their
arrival to Eretz Yisrael, by the establishment of memorial days and histor-
ical commissions in the DP camps) to publically acknowledge, experience
and mourn their loss. To give vent to this repressed impulse, the
Landsmanschaftn encouraged their members to write down their experiences
during the war. Over the years, those writings were assembled in what
came to be know as the memorial, or Yizkor books (“Yizker-bikher” in
Yiddish), each one memorializing a destroyed community.62
Most of these books were written by any number of survivors with lit-
tle writing experience, from each particular town; they got together,
exchanged recollections, gathered testimonies, impressions and memoirs,
and wrote them down63. Between 1954 and 1972, some four hundred
such books were printed, each with an average circulation of two to three
hundred copies, in Hebrew and Yiddish.64 From the outset, the memorial
books were designed solely for members of the Landsmanschaft of their city
and the material used to portray the history of their community was cho-
sen to suit their emotional interpretation of the past. Since their murdered
were left without graves, these memorial books often came to serve as sym-
bolic tombstones: “The memorial books which will immortalize the mem-
ories of our relatives and friends, the Jews of Pshaytsk, will also serve as
a substitute grave. Whenever we pick up the book we will feel we are
standing next to their grave, because even that the murderers denied
them.”65
Thus, more than once, according to Abraham Wein who studied the
Landsmanschaft memorial books, “a book has been printed without any dis-
tinction between factual material and articles that speak only of grief and
agony.” Indeed, many survivors who participated in their editing believed
that their personal experiences made them better qualified than persons
who had only book-learned skills. They feared that the use of profession-
al historical discourse would turn the Holocaust into a subject like any
other.66 For example, in the foreword to the memorial book of Olkieniki, the
editor wrote: “It must be pointed out from the outset that we have no delu-
sion of giving a scientific, historical evaluation of our small town, nor are
we presenting to the public distinguished literary material. Most of the
material comes from the painful hearts and soul-yearning of the older gen-
eration which witnessed the Holocaust and desired to erect some kind of
memorial to their city.” A similar emotion was expressed by the editor of
the memorial book of Kowel: “We decided from the outset that this chron-
icle was not to be written by a professional writer or journalist, but instead
by an ordinary member of the community. We wanted the chronicle to be
written by someone who personally knew the town and its people, to be
written not in a literary style but in a simple language telling the facts and
events which really did occur. Afterwards the historian may come and
extract from this book the information that he needs.”67
Not surprisingly, since most writers and contributors themselves expe-
rienced the terror of the war and survived the death camps, they devoted
considerable attention to the Holocaust years. Yet the events of the
Holocaust were only part of the experience depicted in the memorial
books. Survivors felt obligated not only to bear witness to the Nazi atroc-
ities but to the world the Nazis destroyed—a testament for future gener-

ations. Most of the books, for example, begin with a substantial account
of the history of the town from the time of its first Jewish settlement,
including depictions of traditions and transformations that marked every-
day life in the Shtetl, communal disasters and celebrations, town charac-
ters, parables, maps, pictures and drawings.68 Rather than follow a
particular historical sequence, the chapters usually adhere to configura-
tions of the authors’ memory, often reflecting what they considered the
most important aspects of their community. Most of these books conclude
with a memorial section which contains a name list and, when possible,
pictures of the community’s martyrs.
A central contributing element to the shaping of the memorial books
was the centuries-long tradition of Jewish mourning literature, evident as
early as the Book of Lamentations, or, later, the litanies over the persecu-
tions and destructions of Jewish communities in the Middle Ages. During
the Middle Ages, Ashkenazic Jews, in particular, developed and wrote the
Memorbücher, which contained the names of important communal and reli-
gious leaders as well as the names of the martyrs, and were read during
memorial services.69
“And yet,” in the words of Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin who
published the only comprehensive study to date of the yizker-bicker, “the
memorial books are not theological, their concern is primarily with human
experience in history. The covenant sealed by the publication of the memo-
rial book is with the dead: to sustain their memory and to be sustained by
their memory in turn.”70 In writing the book, the survivors of each partic-
ular community gave its murdered Jewish brethren the most fitting burial
they could think of.71
The urge of survivors to participate in this collective endeavor was evi-
denced by the scores of contributors who wrote for the first time in their
lives and by the many others, with scant economic means, who donated
the little they could to finance the books’ publication. Israel, however,
showed no interest in the “ordinary” survivors, who represented and
mourned their murdered Diaspora brethren. Their kind of representation
had no place in the country’s pantheon of the 1950s, occupied by the par-
tisans and ghetto fighters.

() CHAPTER FIVE
&'
The Turning Point,

1961 to the Present
While in the 1950s, the Holocaust and its victims came to represent the
shame of Exile, between 1961 and 1967 efforts were made to “redeem” the
image of the Holocaust victims and survivors. This change in attitude was
motivated by the emotional reaction of Israelis to the trial of Adolf
Eichmann. The trial, which took four months, from April to August 1961,
impelled the generation of native and veteran Israelis to confront on a daily
basis the years of Jewish extermination. The amount and intensity of
survivors’ testimonies provoked countless questions and uncertainties
which shuddered the simplified image of the passive victims, which had
prevailed until then vis-a-vis the dominant image of the “heroic” Israeli
or, its mirror image, the heroic ghetto fighter.1
The growing sensitivity concerning the Jewish catastrophe concurring
with the realization that neither the Holocaust nor the establishment of
a sovereign Jewish state helped diminish the use of antisemitic stereotypes
led also to a modification in the ‘negation of Exile’ ideology and the dis-
integration of the Catastrophe-to-Redemption myth.
The purpose of the trial was not only to prove Eichmann’s guilt—for
that only a small number of testimonies and documentation would have
sufficed. The national meaning of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the
ignorance of the younger generation, on the other, were foremost in Ben-
Gurion’s mind when he decided to bring Adolf Eichmann to trial in the
state of Israel. He wanted to remind the Jewish people and the world why
a Jewish state was necessary. In a speech on Israel’s thirteenth
Independence Day, he said: “Here, for the first time in Jewish history, his-
torical justice is being done by the sovereign people. For many generations
it was we who suffered, who were tortured, were killed—and were
judged...For the first time Israel is judging the murderers of the Jewish peo-
ple...And let us bear in mind that only the independence of Israel could cre-
ate the conditions for this historic justice.”2
Although appropriated and invested with official meaning, the
Eichmann trial had a “deeply cathartic effect” and served as a first oppor-
tunity for many Israelis to face the past.3 The long sequence of individual
testimonies during the trial succeeded, in the words of the novelist Moshe
Shamir, in bringing the subject home, particularly to the younger gener-
ation, as a “personal, moral problem.” In an interview in the daily news-
paper Maariv in 1963, Shamir added: “The force of the testimonies of death
at the trial, against the background of our dolce vita have caused me,
more than anything else, to face the catastrophe for the first time as a per-
sonal problem of my own.”4 The appearance of a great number of witness-
es, the physical collapse of survivors,5 and the large amount of recorded
testimony directed attention to the survivors and contributed to a process
of individuation and to an appreciation of the ambiguity of issues that had
hitherto been allocated to ideologically facile categories. As Haim Gouri,
a native-born Israeli poet who reported on the trial for the Ahdut Ha-
avodah newspaper, Lamerhav, wrote:
The truth [of the trial] lays in the uniqueness of each testimony. No witness dupli-
cated the words of those who preceded him. Each of the prosecution witnesses
was, therefore, the hero of an act of rescue. I refer to the rescue of the testimonies
of these unfortunate people from the danger of being perceived as all alike, all
shrouded in the same immense anonymity.6
Needless to say, the Eichmann trial was also a powerful catharsis for
the witnesses themselves and, collectively, for the population of survivors
in Israel. For the first time, they were given the chance to present them-
selves in their own voices, in a public forum, over and over again, for
months. Indeed, survivors who were silent for years after the war began,
in the mid-1960s, to speak of their experiences. It presumably took that
long until the rest of society was ready to hear, at least in part, what it had
not wanted to know. Thus, for example, in 1963, the World Federation of
the Bergen-Belsen Survivors Association began publishing a series of doc-
uments and articles aimed “to discredit the myth of Jewish cowardice and
make the truth known: that many, if not most, of those six million went
to their death, not like sheep to the slaughter, but with a genuine heroism,
a determined awareness of their fate, and a loyalty to one another which
made them the unsung heroes of the greatest atrocity that man has com-
mitted against man.”7
THE TURNING POINT: 1961 TO THE PRESENT ) 79

Members of the World Federation made it clear that these publications
were not written in the hitherto apologetic manner but as an over-due cor-
rection of the prevailing myth regarding Jewish behavior during the war:
“Our martyrs do not owe anybody an answer as to why and how they died,
nor does their agony require any defense...The defamation of the memo-
ry of the six million martyrs whose voices have been silenced forever is the
gravest moral wrong and an unparalleled falsification of history.”8
The growing sensitivity to the plight of the European Jews on the part
of native and veteran Israelis can be illustrated by the reaction in Israel to
three books which appeared in the early 1960s: Bruno Bettelheim, The
Informed Heart (1960), Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews
(1961) and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In these books,
despite their different styles and approaches, attempts were made to
explain and interpret the passivity of the Jewish victims. Hilberg and
Arendt, in particular, pointed an accusatory finger at the Nazis’ appoint-
ed Jewish organizations within Germany and occupied Europe, especial-
ly, the Judenräte (the Jewish Councils)—“whose role in the destruction of
their own people,” according to Arendt, “is undoubtedly the darkest chap-
ter of the whole dark story.”9 For his part, Hilberg charged the Jews under
Nazi domination for maintaining the traditional Jewish pattern of behav-
ior under persecution, that of passive compliance—which meant, in other
words, participation in the Nazi destruction process.10 As Bettelheim was
a psychoanalyst, his theory was taken as the psychological equivalent of
Hilberg’s and Arendt’s arguments. According to the author, a necessary
requisite for survival in the camp was the preservation of sense of self. But
it was not only the overbearing power of the Nazis’ totalitarian structures
that stripped their victims’ of their individuality, destroyed their self
respect, and “made it impossible to see themselves as fully adult persons
any more;” the Nazis’ success was furthered by their victims’ traditional
compliance and passive reaction to persecutions.11 As for part of the Nazi
appointed Kapos, they increasingly “identified with the aggressor.”
The reaction in Israel and abroad to these accusations was one of furi-
ous outrage. The main thrust of their violent criticism was directed against
the authors’ shift of guilt from the perpetrators to the victims themselves.
Arendt’s most vocal critic in Israel was the historian Gershom Scholem. In
an exchange of letters between the two, the Israeli scholar denounced
Arendt for her “self-hatred” and lack of love for the Jewish people. Among
her critics was also the philosopher Martin Buber and his circle, who were
upset by, among other things, her pointed attacks on the leaders of the
Jewish community in Germany. Others stated that her method and con-
clusions were giving further “ammunition” to neo-Nazis.12
In the United States, Jacob Robinson’s book, And the Crooked Shall Be
Made Straight (1965), provided the most compelling and methodical attack
on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. “Dissecting” her facts and conclusions,
paragraph by paragraph, Robinson charged Arendt’s work to be factual-
ly inaccurate and misleading:13 Members of the Judenräte, he argued, did
not “offer” their services to the Nazis. When Jews did accept appointment
to the Council, they generally did so “out of feeling of responsibility to those
in their community.” Unaware, at first of the real goal of the Nazis, many
of them did their best to help and save Jews, through bribery and procras-
tination. Moreover, there were wide areas under Nazi rule, such as in part
of Russia, Italy and Romania, where the Jewish Councils were not involved
in compiling lists of potential deportees, or where no Jewish Councils
existed.14
Hilberg’s position was largely assailed for being based almost exclu-
sively on German documentation and for completely misunderstanding the
nature of Jewish Diaspora life, especially during the Holocaust period.15
Certainly, the argument went, one detects in much of the German docu-
mentation a tendency to portray Jews according to the Nazi stereotype—
cowering, submissive and easily manipulated by crude appeal to individual
interest. Undoubtedly, this is how the Judenräte appeared from the Nazis’
point of view. However, Israeli historians argued, the Jewish reaction and
especially that of the Judenräte was diverse and certainly did not derive from
any “Jewish tradition” of compliance. What is termed collaboration
between Jewish institutions and the Nazis was “only too often similar to
the ‘collaboration’ between a robber, armed with a revolver, and his vic-
tim who has no possibility of self-defense.” Moreover, many members of
the Judenräte were intimidated into joining and some committed suicide or
resigned and went into hiding, or joined the transports to the death camps
when they became aware of the Nazis’ true plans. As to the reaction of the
Jews, this was not much different than that of deportees or victims of other
groups or nations who went passively to their deaths (the Soviet POWs for
example). But if there was any body of civilians which did take up a stand
in relatively large numbers, it was the Jewish fighters in ghettos and
camps, “who embarked upon their struggle, conscious of being true to their
people’s tradition, to the heroic legacy of the Maccabees.”16
Bettelheim’s critics contended that his psychological models derived
from his own experiences as an internee in Dachau and Buchenwald in the
late 1930s and did not apply to the much more brutal conditions the vic-
tims faced a few years later. Moreover, they challenged the principal
sources used in his work—the testimony of the unrepresentative few who
did manage to survive.17

In retrospect, the furious reaction of Israeli scholars to what were
seen as Arendt’s and Hilberg’s simplified and un-researched generaliza-
tions seems paradoxical. Had these books been published ten years ear-
lier, the reaction toward them would have been totally different—a
favorable one which would have reinforced existing notions. In 1953, for
example, Nahman Blumental argued that “...without the Judenrats’ help, the
German policy of extermination would not have succeeded, at least not in
the scope it did, and certainly not without great casualties to the Germans
themselves.”18
From the Eichmann trial onward, however, empathy with the extend-
ed suffering and torment of Jewish communities and of Jewish reactions
deepened. A growing number of studies and articles on particular Jewish
communities suggested that the victims had no knowledge of, and no way
of knowing, the final outcome.19 Furthermore, ghetto diaries and other first-
hand accounts, some of which had appeared earlier in limited editions,
were henceforth much more widely published. And, in addition, some sur-
vivors began to publically reflect on Jewish behavior during the Holocaust.
K. Shabbetai, for example, a survivor who served as an editor of Undzer
Weg and Nizoz in Munich’s DP camp and, upon his immigration to Israel,
as a journalist at Davar, dedicated two booklets to this issue. In As Sheep
to the Slaughter? The Myth of Cowardice (1963), Shabbetai argues that, his-
torically, revolts do not occur by chance. There are precise laws, which are
applicable to all peoples and nations throughout the world, in all periods
of history. Hence, it would be futile to seek in history books for examples
of a successful uprising by a minority against a majority with power. The
German minority in Poland and Czechoslovakia, for instance, rose up
only after Hitler gained substantial power; there are no uprisings against
a victorious enemy and, indeed, only after the Germans’ defeat in
Stalingrad did the war against them gain momentum and the Warsaw ghet-
to uprising took place. There are no rebellions against a despot that uses
terror to subdue a population. Indeed, during Stalin’s reign-of-terror there
were no uprisings—not in Hungary, nor in Poland, nor in Eastern Germany.
Not only were there no revolts, but people did not even allow themselves
to think of countering the wishes of their oppressor. Only with Stalin’s
death did isolate revolts suddenly occur. Back-up and arms are further pre-
requisites for revolt. The Polish underground, which came into being the
day after the collapse of Poland, had at its disposal, from its very incep-
tion, high-ranking army officers, trained soldiers, weapons which they still
had in their possession, and ample financial resources.20
The Jews, on the other hand, were not merely a minority among a sin-
gle, hostile majority. “We were a small, weak, impoverished minority
between two powerful majorities, both terrifyingly hostile. For the indige-
nous local majority always allied itself with the new foreign majority, and
both waged wars to destroy us.”21 Furthermore, Jews had no arms and no
secure place for aid and retreat. Undoubtedly, there were a few righteous
people in Europe at the time, but they were powerless to change the over-
all picture in any significant way.22
The question, therefore, should not be why did the Jews go like sheep
to the slaughter but “how did it happen that our people, in spite of every-
thing, retained sufficient strength, faith, and will power to stand up to the
enemy the way we did? How did it happen that against all reasonable
expectation, underground resistance movements were organized in the
ghettos, and acts of revolt did occur there? From what rock was this
nation hewn?”23
In his second booklet, Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust (1965),
Shabbetai explains that although subjectively the few who revolted against
the Nazis should be revered, objectively their role should not be exagger-
ated. “We should indeed be proud of our handful of fighters. In van-
quished Europe, theirs was the only resistance movement which initiated
open warfare with no hope of victory nor any chance of receiving outside
help. The only thing they could hope to achieve was to demand a high price
for their lives. Yet, with that in mind, we have to remember that the
Warsaw ghetto revolt took place in the “final hour” after the majority of
Warsaw Jewry was exterminated. By exaggerating the role of the Jews who
fought we defile the honor of the millions who perished as they did, dis-
appeared without a trace, with not even a grave. All that is left is their
memory. It would be base of us to slander that sole vestige.”24
Following the Eichmann trial, discussion of the Jewish leadership dur-
ing the war years also moved to a new plane. While in the 1950s, the
Jewish Councils and their executive arm, the Jewish Police, were por-
trayed, collectively, in the harshest terms, following the trial, the role of
individual Jewish leaders was increasingly investigated, revealing many dif-
ferent patterns of behavior, from involuntary compliance, through suicide
and resistance.25 This new historiographical trend was first acknowledged
in a colloquium convened in December 1967 in New York by the Yiddish
Scientific Institute for Jewish Research (Yivo) to discuss the question of
“The Judenräte during the Nazi Period.” By and large, Nathan Eck’s paper
reiterated the general theme expressed by the other participants. Eck
maintained that unequivocal condemnation of the Judenrat is incorrect
and misleading. In many places the Judenrat was mainly a continuation of
the pre-war Jewish community council (Kehila). Furthermore, the idea
that beyond a certain date the Jews of Eastern Europe were aware of their

fate has no basis in fact.26 Nahman Blumental’s harsh criticism of the
Jewish Councils from the 1950s was greatly modified. Analyzing the rela-
tions between the Judenrat and the Jewish Police, Blumental argued that,
with notable exceptions, the two bodies worked in full cooperation with
each other. Yet the Jews’ hatred and resentment was mainly directed at the
Police, whose members had to round up Jewish inmates and escort them
to the trains. If extenuating circumstances are found in the conduct of the
Judenrat, he argued, the same should also be applied to the Jewish Police.27
Based on these and other studies we can conclude that in general the
historical sense of the Holocaust period, following the Eichmann trial and
its aftermath, deepened. Israeli historians continued to be critical of Jewish
behavior, but some of their statements on Jewish passivity and collabora-
tion during the war were greatly modified.
Following the Eichmann trial there were also discussions concerning
the lack of Holocaust teaching in Israeli schools. A joint committee of rep-
resentatives from the Ministry of Culture and Education and from Yad
Vashem, which first met in mid-January, 1961, issued, for the first time, a
circular on the teaching of the period, containing a proposed curriculum
for elementary schools. In the spring of 1964, the Ministry announced cer-
tain changes in the national matriculation examinations, including a stip-
ulation that one of the Jewish history subjects would deal with the “Ghetto
during the Period of the Holocaust,” and the chapter on “Modern Jewish
History” would include the story of the Holocaust and of Jewish resis-
tance.28 Although the actual changes that were introduced in the teaching
of the Holocaust during the 1960s were relatively minor, they did indicate
a gradual change in the process of repression, which had hitherto been
predominant in the field of education. The titles of articles written on the
subject, such as, “What Has Been Done To Teach the Lesson of the
Holocaust?”29 “The Mystery Concerning the Ignorance of Holocaust
History,”30 or “The Youth Have Been Reared On a Negative Attitude Toward
the Diaspora”31—all attest to this fact.
The emphasis in these and other articles on the need to stress the les-
son of victimhood rather than heroism did also bring about a change in
the approach to “Exile.” Indeed, during the 1960s, more than a few voic-
es were raised among educators criticizing the “negation of Exile” and its
place in Zionist education. A moderate expression of that line of criticism,
which became a platform for an alternative programmatic view of Israeli
education, was voiced by Barukh Ben-Yehudah, the Director General of the
Ministry of Education. In a booklet published in 1966, Ben-Yehudah
argued that although the “negation of Exile” ideology was justified in its
day, with the establishment of the state of Israel, education based on that
ideology had achieved its goal and was no longer necessary. We must now
be concerned with the identification of the younger generation of Israelis
with the Jewish people at large, and not with rejection of the Diaspora,
“which has already been destroyed” [my emphasis]. For that purpose one
must show the bright and positive side of the Diaspora too.32
In should be pointed out that these ideas were expressed by Ben-
Yehudah as background for the presentation of an educational program in
“Jewish Identity.” While his program was not adopted, the tendency to
neutralize the “rejection of Exile” as a central ideological message had its
effect. In the long run, and especially following the Six Day and Yom
Kippur wars, the emphasis in history textbooks shifted to a more positive
attitude toward the continuous heritage of Jewish history.33
The fundamental change that occurred as a result of the Eichmann trial
became evident in the fact that antisemitism became the subject of seri-
ous historical research. Until that time, despite it being one of the central
arguments in favor of the Zionist solution, most historians in the Yishuv
and in Israel saw no need to study the history of antisemitism and its caus-
es, although, as noted in chapter three, debates on the importance of the
topic as a background to a better understanding of the Nazi era did take
place already during the 1950s. The lack of any serious research projects
in this domain may have derived from the perception of antisemitism as
a mere reflection of a specific historical situation: Jewish life in exile.34 The
depth and intensity of antisemitism exposed in the Eichmann trial shat-
tered the Zionist belief in the gradual disappearance of antisemitism and
the development of normal relations between Jews and non-Jews once a
Jewish state was established. For the first time, laymen and scholars began
to realize that the roots of antisemitism ran deeper than was imagined
before.
Although henceforth hatred of the Jews, in its various forms, became
an object of inquiry, it would be inaccurate to speak of a major change in
the perception and representation of the Holocaust in Israeli historiogra-
phy before 1967. Israeli scholars who began to uncover the historical
roots of antisemitism, such as Shmuel Ettinger, Jacob L. Talmon, and
Jacob Katz, still did not confront the Holocaust period directly. The works
of Ettinger and Katz, in particular, led to an interpretation of the Holocaust
as the result of cumulative antisemitism, yet they chose to approach the
Holocaust itself obliquely, focusing on periods prior to the rise of Nazism.
Furthermore, the sense of self-evidence, which characterized previous
presentations of the link between pre-Nazi antisemitism and the extermi-
nation of European Jewry remained prevalent among Zionist historians
throughout the 1960s.35

For Shmuel Ettinger, for example, the persistence of antisemitism
through the ages derived from the existence of a Jewish stereotype as a per-
manent feature of Western culture. Reappearing in times of crisis, it trans-
formed a latent hatred into various forms of active persecution.36 The
particular hostility to Jews first appeared, as a fundamental and concep-
tual denial of their worth in the Hellenistic era, when a widespread dias-
pora came into being. Religious conflicts together with differences in life
styles and ethical values provided the basis for the rejection of the Jews.
According to Ettinger, in each historical period that followed, new features
were added to the existing stereotype. With the advent of Christianity, Jews
were portrayed as deicides, forsaken by God, while the Middle Ages added
usury, black magic, and ties with the devil.37 The decline of Christianity’s
influence in the early modern period did not diminish the fervor of anti-
semitic sentiments. On the contrary, modern antisemitism became espe-
cially virulent, using secular and even anti-Christian arguments.38
In his fundamental study “Jews and Judaism as Seen by the English
Deists of the 18th Century” (1964), Ettinger traces the roots of modern
anti-Semitism to English Deism of the late-seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth century. The Deists’ critic of Christianity, and more so of
Christianity’s historical origin—Judaism, led them to define “natural reli-
gion” as the antithesis of Judaism.39 In a series of articles that followed,
Ettinger trails the connections leading from the critic of Judaism by the
English Deists to modern anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.40 In the process, the rationalist ideal of “natural religion” had
been transformed into an irrational vision of saving the human race by rid-
ding it of its “Jewish spirit,” the source of all evil.
Viewing the Holocaust in this broad scholarly perspective is also
apparent in Jacob Talmon’s work from that period. Although his writings
deal mainly with the interaction between the myth of the nation and the
myth of a universal revolution, he approached the subject with the recent
Jewish catastrophe in mind.41 The myth of the nation, Talmon maintains,
took two forms: Rousseau saw the nation as an organic whole, a society
of free, equal, and participant citizens; Herder’s teaching was more provin-
cial, stressing the peculiar and unique traditions of the Volk. The former
version was embraced by the French and later the Russian Revolution, the
latter by Fascism/Nazism. Both forms of revolution, however, led to the
same disastrous result: The French and Russian Revolutions produced a
myth of human regeneration via universal revolution to justify doing what-
ever they thought necessary. And, expressing “the general will of the
nation” and capitalizing on popular resentment and discontent, Hitler
and Mussolini stressed the glory and power of superior peoples and races.42
“The tragic paradox of the Jews in modern times,” according to Talmon,

“has been the fact that their existence and success have been dependent
upon the triumph of the idea of universalism as represented by liberal
democracy and socialism, while the very phenomenon of Jewry is an
unparalleled demonstration of the element of uniqueness. The Jews did not
want and could not escape the fact of their uniqueness, the Gentiles
would not and could not be made oblivious of it.”43 In pre-modern times
the tension between the two was for the most part held in check by the
inequalities of a society based on status, on the one hand, and on belief,
tradition, and custom, on the other. “The new society, based on contract,
rendered the Jewish irritant ubiquitous, while the collapse of traditional
forms and spiritual certainties shook the balance of the modern world to
its foundations. In the struggle between universalism and nationalism,
between the tendency for unity and the stubborn fact of peculiarity, the
Jews became associated, indeed identified, with the general malaise of
modernity.”44
Interestingly, Jacob Katz’s socio-historical studies from that period
reach a similar conclusion. Katz, too, finds the roots of antisemitism in the
unsolvable problem of Jewish existence among the nations, characterized
by a permanent tension between particularism and universalism and, in
the modern world, between uniqueness and a rational world order. Thus,
even the Enlightenment, with its gospel of tolerance, was unable to erad-
icate the age-old antagonism because “the rationalists [whether Jews or
Christians] were not isolated from their original social spheres....In most
cases, the new framework embraced only part of their being. In a number
of walks of life, Christians remained Christians and Jews, Jews.”45 Katz’s
work on Gentile-Jewish relations in western and central Europe in the mod-
ern period led him to focus on the Masonic lodges, supposedly the embod-
iment of Enlightenment ideology, as a potential locus of institutionalized
neutrality. The results of this examination, the subject of his volume, Jews
and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939 (1970), indicate the constraints that
actually operated. Not only did Christian aspects of Masonic ritual discour-
age Jewish participation, but some lodges actually excluded Jews outright.46
The failure of Gentile-Jewish symbiosis in the new secular culture
brought about a new, secular focus for the anti-Jewish argument (although
Christian antisemitism remained very much at its base). But while in the
Middle Ages the Church remained open to individuals who converted to
Christianity, in the modern secular society this avenue of escape was
closed. To the modern antisemite, if Jews were inferior, alien, and unwor-
thy of assimilation, then they were an irredeemable problem. According to
Katz, it was the transmutation of this motif into modern political idiom in

the late 1870s that led, eventually, to the implementation of the “Final
Solution of the Jewish Question.”47
As we can see then, in all these historical studies of antisemitism, the
Holocaust, despite its scope, was presented as yet another chapter in the
history of anti-Jewish measures—the end result of a continuous and
lengthy cumulation. The explanation of Nazism through its so-called “ori-
gins,” sometimes in the very remote past, while conspicuously avoiding
any attempt at an explanation of its total present, may be the result of sev-
eral unconscious motivations, some of which were already alluded to in
reference to the overall refraining of most Jewish and Zionist historians
from confronting the Holocaust period, during the 1950s. It may be that
even in the 1960s the proximity of the event itself still prevented the his-
torians from confronting the Holocaust directly. As both individuals and
scholars, they preferred, for the sake of “sanity,” to concentrate on issues
which could be handled without despair.48 It may also be that, as Zionists,
their work stayed close to the patterns set by their predecessors who
were greatly concerned with the “big brush” of the historical picture and
approached it not merely as researchers but mostly as designers, looking
beyond the details for an ultimate historical justification of Zionism.
Whatever their motivations were, it is clear that their study of antisemitism
provided a crucial and necessary prerequisite to the next stage in the evo-
lution of Israeli historiography of the Holocaust.
It was the Six-Day War in 1967 which pushed the Holocaust into the
forefront of Israeli consciousness. The initial prospect of defeat, the fear
of a second Holocaust, and the surprising victory that followed enhanced
a sense of identity and shared destiny with Jews all over the world. In a
gathering of writers and soldiers at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh following the war
of 1967, soldiers and writers expressed the complex relations between their
“memory” of the Holocaust and their reasons for fighting, describing their
feelings prior to the beginning of the war as little more than another gen-
eration of Jews on the brink of a second catastrophe. “We tend to forget
those days before the war, said one of the soldiers, “and perhaps rightly
so—yet those were the days in which we came closest to that Jewish fate
from which we have run like haunted beings all these years. Suddenly,
everyone was talking about Munich, about the Holocaust, about the Jewish
people left to its own fate.” Another soldier reiterated the same feeling:
“...People believed that we would be exterminated if we lost the war. They
were afraid. We got this idea—or inherited it—from the concentration
camps.”49 The Yom-Kipur War in 1973 further strengthened this sentiment.
Historians too sensed that Israel had entered a new period of its his-
tory. Interestingly, two new diverging trends in Israeli historiography
appeared at that time. The first trend was represented by a group of his-
torians, most notably Yisrael Gutman and Yehuda Bauer, who attempted
to expand the Zionist paradigm to include also those Jews who had pre-
viously been perceived as having gone “like sheep to the slaughter.” Thus,
for example, the very term “Jewish resistance,” which until then implied
a conscious and organized armed uprising by Jews against their oppres-
sors, was greatly modified. The main feature of this new approach was an
emphasis on Jews making a stand; it implied that the Jewish response to
the perpetrators had been basically of an active rather than passive nature,
and that the ways in which Jews coped with the Nazi measures, either col-
lectively or individually, reflected both physical and spiritual resistance.50
In addressing the subject of the Judenräte, for example, Bauer argued that
the predicament of the Jews under Nazi rule was so extreme that the
standard categories of the resistance/collaboration dichotomy should not
be employed in this case.51
While Gutman and Bauer’s scholarly work still remained entirely
within the bounds of Zionist historiography, a second group of historians,
most notably Saul Friedländer and Uriel Tal attempted to face the catastro-
phe in the light of a more “neutral” (also German) historiography. Already
in the late 1960s, for example, Tal challenged the politicized academic
structure in Israeli universities. The existence of separate departments of
Jewish history, he argued, fosters a unique national narrative, indifferent
to new historiographical approaches and inaccessible to any genuine
interdisciplinary influence, let alone any comparative studies.52 Thus, in
their scholarly works, both Friedländer and Tal chose to concentrate on
issues related to the roots and nature of the Nazi mind and Nazi ideolo-
gy—issues which were considered outside the interest of Zionist histori-
ography, for they had no relevance to the identity claims of Zionism.53 And
yet, this current in the Israeli historical discourse, like those preceding and
following it, was very much anchored in its present. Their implicit distanc-
ing from the Zionist paradigm and their choice of narrative interpretations
reflected a well defined, if not always announced, “subject position.”
Their preoccupation with Nazi ideology, and particularly with the inter-
action between politics and myth—between the rational and sober polit-
ical objectives and the non-rational and mythical goals of the Nazi regime,
was to serve as a warning that “political messianism might bring moral and
political destruction to the Zionist enterprise.”54
During the decade between the late 1970s and 1980s, a new genera-
tion of historians came to the fore which tended to question the link
between pre-Nazi and Nazi antisemitism. The most compelling examples
of the new historiography are to be found in Shulamit Volkov’s work of that

period. Her articles, “On Antisemitism and Its Investigation” (1982) and
“The Written Matter and the Spoken Word” (1989),55 are an answer to and
a critic of the traditional historiography, represented by Katz, Ettinger
and, in a lesser measure, Talmon. The thrust of her argument is a rejec-
tion of the idea of continuous, linear growth of modern and particularly
German anti-Semitism; each stage has to be viewed independently or, in
other words, has to be historicized within its own context. Thus German
anti-Semitism of the Imperial period had, according to Volkov, more in
common with French antisemitism of the same period than it had with that
of the Weimar Republic or, with that of Nazism.56 Let it merely be added
that the shift represented by Volkov’s work has since been pushed to
extremes by historians, such as Moshe Zimmerman at the Hebrew univer-
sity, mainly in his publicistic interpretations of the history of the Holocaust.
Another aspect of the period extending from the second part of the
1980s to the present was the surfacing of a relatively new subject in
Israeli historiography of the Holocaust: the attitude of the Yishuv and
mainly of its leadership. Although the subject had on occasion flared up
in Israeli politics, it had never been studied methodically. This issue has
been dealt with along two contradictory paths. The first is represented by
a group of researchers of the “old ideological guard,” such as Dina Porat,
Anita Shapira, Yoav Gelber and Yechiam Weitz, who argue that the lead-
ership of the Yishuv did the best it could under the circumstances.57
According to Weitz, for example, although “negation of exile” was para-
mount in the leadership’s view of the Diaspora and its Jews, the Yishuv
leadership did not forsake or betray European Jewry during the war.58
Rather, confusion and conflict were at the core of their reaction. Yishuv
leaders did not believe the information about the extermination and felt that
they had other equally legitimate concerns that demanded their attention
and to which they allocated the majority of their meager resources.59 Yoav
Gelber contends, moreover, that with its limited resources and dependent
on the British for its own security, the Yishuv could hardly be expected to
rescue Jews from occupied Europe. Therefore, the leadership’s instru-
mental and pragmatic approach to European Jewry, expressed mainly in
preparing the Yishuv for a struggle for a Jewish state after the war and the
few symbolic rescue efforts, should be viewed in this context. “It would be
a grave mistake and anachronism to attribute to the Yishuv the potential-
ities and ambitions of its successor, the state of Israel, and to consider it
accordingly.”60
The second position is represented by a new and more radical group
of contenders in Israeli academia, who offer an interpretation of Jewish and
Israeli history different from the one based on the Zionist paradigm.61
Also know as “post-Zionists,” the new scholars (mainly historians and

sociologists, but also journalists and political scientists) argue that the
Zionist movement emerged as a direct by-product of European national-
ism. The post-Zionists contend that, like other European-nationalist
groups of the nineteenth century, the Zionists had aimed at constructing
a national consciousness based on romantic ideals. The core of romantic
nationalism is the assumption that the common denominator between
individuals of a particular society is based on shared geography, lan-
guage, historical roots and even ethnic origin. But national societies, con-
tended the “post-Zionists” (in agreement with recent European scholarly
research62), are “imagined communities” and their national narratives are
nothing but invented traditions. National ideals and national movements
emerged in order to serve different political groups who aspired to achieve
dominance in the framework of the process of modernization unfolded
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.63
As the other European nationalist movements, Zionism too claimed
Jewish unity and the existence of a Jewish peoplehood that did not exist
in reality. Jews were scattered throughout the world, spoke different lan-
guages and assimilated, to various degrees, the culture and habits of their
surrounding societies. In this context, Zionist historians fulfilled an impor-
tant role. They nurtured (in fact, invented) an idea about an imagined
“Jewish society” that kept, despite its geographical and cultural dispersion,
a shared destiny and a yearning to return to the ancient homeland.64
Moreover, the new researchers insist, Zionism emerged in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, at the apex of the European colonial
period and is a clear expression of it. The movement, therefore, should also
be analyzed in the framework of the European-colonial “model,” which
“perceived as self evident the right of Europeans to settle any available
non-European land.” Hence, the Zionist terms “Eretz Yisrael” rather than
Palestine), “Aliya” (literally ascent in Hebrew), not immigration, “redemp-
tion of the land,” rather than conquest, and “settlement,” not colonization,
have been used to hide the truth that the Zionist return to the land of Israel
was a clear act of brutal colonization whose obvious victims were (and are)
the Palestinians.65
The new scholars’ contentions soon had ramifications beyond the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Historians, such as Tom Segev, Idith Zertal, and
Hanna Yablonka blame the Yishuv’s leadership for inadequate rescue
efforts before and during the Second World War: Cold and calculated
political interests led them to avoid taking desperate rescue measures, even
after details of the extermination became well known. They were interest-
ed in rescue only if this could bring the survivors to Israel and not any-

where else and they refused to lent their resources to finance rescue oper-
ations if these were going to deflect anything from their primary goal: the
establishment of a Jewish state.66
The new researchers also blame the first Israelis for their insensitive
attitude towards Holocaust survivors in the first years of statehood.
According to Segev, “permeated with a deep, almost mystic faith of its
superiority,” the country fostered the sabra image which came to repre-
sent the national ideal, while the Holocaust survivor was its reverse; lit-
tle was done to advance the survivors’ social integration and, in fact,
disdain of the survivors and their exilic mentality often included the accu-
sation that European Jewry was to be blamed for its own extermination.67
In addition, the memory and knowledge of the Holocaust has been
exploited, particularly by the right, to justify its preferred solution to the
conflict with the Arab world and the Palestinians. According to Zertal, for
example, Begin’s proclamation to his cabinet on the eve of Israel’s inva-
sion of Lebanon in 1982 that the only alternative to going to war is anoth-
er Auschwitz and his equation of the demolition of Arafat’s headquarters
in Beirut with the destruction of Hitler in his bunker in Berlin are not only
a testimony to the mad illusions that led Begin to that war [against
Lebanon] but a clear illustration of how the Holocaust has turned into a
political commodity that can be exchanged to suit anyone and any occa-
sion, at a moment’s notice.68 Some prominent voices on the left, on their
part, described the war in Lebanon as a “Judeo-Nazi policy” and claim, in
general, that nationalist “neo-Zionists” in Israel may indeed be as crimi-
nal towards Arabs as Nazis were towards Jews.69 Moshe Zimmerman, for
example, who is identified with the extreme left, compared the Torah with
“Mein Kampf,” as a racist blueprint for the destruction of other peoples,
and the children of the Jewish community in Hebron to the Hitler Youth.70
As an indispensable ideological weapon, the Holocaust has also been
deployed to extort economic and political support from the western nations
who feel guilty for their indifference to the fate of European Jewry during
the war. In his book, Shoah in a Sealed Room (1993), for example, Moshe
Zuckerman contends that since the end of the Second World War, Zionist
activists and historiographers worked diligently at appropriating and
instrumentalizing the knowledge about and the memory of the Shoah.
Subsequently, instrumentalization of its memory and history was used to
equate the Nazi “Amalek” and the Arab “Amalek”: Be it Gamal Abdul
Nazer, Sadam Hussein or Yaser Arafat—all were equated to Adolf Hitler.
This moral synthesis was explicitly exposed in the Gulf War, when the
threat of the German gas was again real. Sadam Hussein was represent-
ed in the Israeli press as having the power and the will to annihilate the
surviving remnant of the holocaust who had started to build a life in an

independent Israel. Zuckerman argues that the fear of a second Holocaust,
as expressed in the Israeli press during the Gulf War, was not authentic.
Rather, it was used to enhance an image of helplessness for ideological and
political gain. By casting itself as a “victim state” Israel was able to extort
financial, military and political support from Germany.71
As far as historical representation is concerned, the post-Zionists’
main innovation is in their use of comparative methods to explain events
that had previously been presented as unique to the Jewish and Israeli
experience.72 Thus, while most mainstream Israeli historians agree that the
Holocaust cannot be compared with other organized genocides, the post-
Zionists’ contention is that the Holocaust has not been a uniquely “Jewish”
experience in history, pointing to the Armenian genocide, as well as to
other groups, such as the Gypsies, who have suffered similarly during the
Holocaust. The use of comparative methods, the post-Zionists hope,
would free Israeli historiography from ideological approaches to history
and analysis, allow the development of healthy skepticism, legitimize
other “collective memories” and expose Israeli academia to new histori-
ography and sociology, to pluralism and multi-culturalism.
The Post-Zionist criticism of Zionist semi-mythical and deterministic
historical readings of Jewish history, and the often controversial statements
of its chief spokesmen, almost all academics, instigated a heated debate
among Israelis which continues to this day: Was the past, and particular-
ly the recent catastrophic past in Europe, misperceive and, hence, was it
in need of demystification?
In summary, the shifts in emphasis in Israeli historiography of the
Holocaust since 1967, from the centrality of heroism to that of the suffer-
ing of the Jews, from a Zionist to a more “neutral” and, at the present, to
a “non-conformist” historiography, clearly point to the disintegration of
Zionist ideology as a central element in the historians’ interpretive
accounts of the Jewish catastrophe. These shifts can be viewed as insep-
arable by-products of the transition from one generation to the next, in
accordance with the sensibilities, as well as the changed political agen-
das of the new generation of historians. They should also be viewed,
however, as “reflecting the remarkable maturity of Israeli society which,
a mere half-century after its creation, endorses and even encourages
challenging introspection.” For “to avoid such introspection is to live out-
side of the dynamic current of history.”73
()
&'
Notes
(When produced by the author, titles in Hebrew or Yiddish

are given in their English translation)
Introduction
1. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, New York 1980, esp.pp.50–87 (La Memoire
Collective, Paris 1950).
2. Pierre Nora (ed.), “Introduction,” Les Lieux de memoire, vol. I: La Republique, Paris
1984; Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle 1982.
3. Pierre Nora, “Entre memoire et histoire,” La Republique, vol.1, Paris 1984, p.xvii.
4. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, op. cit, p.21.
5. Yerushalmi, ibid, p.94.
6. Ibid, p.89.
7. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, p.3; Amos Funkenstein, “Historical
Consciousness,” History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past, vol.1, no.1,
Tel Aviv 1989, and idem, “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness” (Hebrew),
Perceptions of Jewish History from the Antiquity to the Present, Tel Aviv 1991; Saul
Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, “Introduction,”
Bloomington 1993. For a forceful answer to Funkenstein’s view, see David N. Myers,
“Remembering Zakhor: A Super Commentary,” in History and Memory, vol.4, no.2,
Fall/Winter 1992.
8. Hobsbawm, ibid.
9. Funkenstein, “Collective Memory,” op. cit., p.18.
10. Ibid, pp.27–28.
11. See Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Memory and Transference,” in idem, Memory, History,
and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, Bloomington 1993, p.259.
12. Felix Gilbert, Hitler Directs His War, New York 1950, and Makers of Modern Strategy:
Military thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, edited by Edward Mead Earle with the col-
laboration of Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert. see also Lewis Namier, In the Nazi Era,
London 1952.
13. Dinur and Baer, for example, founded and edited Zion, the major journal of Jewish his-
torical studies, whose declared aim was embracing the history of the Jews in Eretz
Yisrael and in all the lands of the Diaspora, in all periods. However, during the war and
for some years later, the majority of articles dealt with messianic and mystical move-
ments, such as Sabbatianism and Hassidism. Only from the late 1960s onwards did
the scope of the topics published begin to widen.
14. In recent years, David N. Myers has raised doubts about the existence of a homoge-
neous “Jerusalem School.” See idem, “Was there a ‘Jerusalem School’: An Inquiry into
the First Generation of Historical Research at the Hebrew University,”in Jonathan
Frankel, ed., Studies in Contemporary Jewry, New York and Oxford 1994, pp.10:66–93;
idem, “History as Ideology: The case of Ben-Zion Dinur: Zionist historian par excel-
lence,” Modern Judaism, vol.8, 1988, pp.167–193; idem, Re-inventing the Jewish Past:
European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, New York 1995. Other schol-
ars maintain that there is a strong enough common denominator in this group’s writ-
ings and ideology that justifies calling them a school; see, for example, Shmuel
Almog’s eulogy of Shmuel Ettinger in his Nationalism, Zionism and Antisemitism: Essays
and Research (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1992, pp.13–21.
15. J. Kermisz, “The State of Holocaust Research,” Yediot Yad Vashem, no.1, April 30,
1954, pp.8–10.
16. Salo W. Baron, “Foreword,” in Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman, Guide to Jewish
History Under Nazi Impact, Bibliographical Series, no.1, New York 1960, pp.xix-xx.
17. Gershom Scholem, “Judaic Studies” (Hebrew), Od Davar (Explications and
Implications), Tel Aviv 1989, p.140 (first published in De’ot, no.4, May 1961, pp.8–9).
18. Along with his colleague, Ben-Zion Dinur, Baer clearly announced in the statement
of objectives of the Journal Zion that the fundamental assumption of Zionist histori-
ography “...is the history of the Israelite nation, which was never interrupted and whose
significance never waned. Jewish history is consolidated by a homogenous unity
which encompasses all periods and all places.” And yet, Baer’s work was marked by
an uneasy tension between his Zionist historiography and his declared commitment
to the Rankean demand for objectivity, for seeing each epoch “as immediate to God.”
See, “Our Tendency” (Hebrew), Zion, vol.1, no.1, 1935; Baer, “Ikarim be-hakirat toldot
Yisra’el” (Hebrew), in idem, Studies in the History of the Jewish People, vol.2, Jerusalem
1985 (c.1931), pp.9–19.
19. Shmuel Almog, “The Impact of the Holocaust on the Study of Antisemitism,”in Yehuda
Bauer et al (eds.). Remembering for the Future: The Impact of the Holocaust and Genocide
on Jews and Christians, Vol.3, New York,1989, p.2278.
20. Almog, Nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism, op. cit., pp.18–19.
21. Joseph Klausner, The History of the Second Temple (Hebrew), vol.5: The Great Jewish
Rebellion and the Destruction of the Second Temple, Jerusalem 1952, Introduction, p.v.
22. Klausner, ibid, vol.3: The History of the House of Hasmonean, Jerusalem 1950,
Introduction.
23. Joseph Klausner, “The War of the Hashmonaean” (Hebrew), Herut, 12.12.45, Joseph
Klausner Archive, Jewish National and University Library Archives, the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, 401086/125 a-d.
24. Joseph Klausner, The History of Israel (Hebrew), 4 vols., Odessa, 1909–1924/5.
NOTES ) 95
25. Joseph Klausner, “The Balance of Accounts.” Address delivered on July 1942, Tel Aviv,
to the National Conference of Palestinian Authors, Joseph Klausner Archive,
4o1086/48; see also, idem, “The Solution to the Jewish Question According to Ze’ev
Zabotinsky” (Hebrew), Hamashkif, 21.7.44, Joseph Klausner Archive, 4o1086/125 a-
d.
26. Shmuel Ettinger, “In Memory of Yitzhak Baer” (Hebrew), in S. Ettinger, S. Baron, B.
Dinur, Y. Halperin (eds.), Yitzhak F. Baer Memorial Volume, Jerusalem 1980.
27. Yitzhak Fritz Baer, Galut, (Hebrew). Translated by Yisrael Eldad. Jerusalem 1980,
Introduction.
28. Yitzhak Fritz Baer, Galut (English edition), New York 1947, p.117.
29. Ibid, p.118
30. Ibid, pp.117–118.
31. Ibid, pp.118–119.
32. Almog, Nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism, op. cit., p.19.
33. Ibid.
34. Shmuel Ettinger, Modern Antisemitism. Studies and Essays (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1978,
p.9.
35. See Ben-Zion Dinur, “Diaspora Communities and their Destruction” (Hebrew), Knesset,
no.8, 1944, pp.46–60. Now also in his collected studies, Dorot u-reshumot: mehkarim
ve-’iyunim ba-historiografyah ha-Yisre’elit (Hebrew), vol.4, Jerusalem 1978.
36. Ibid, pp.175–192.
37. Ben-Zion Dinur, “Our Fate and Our War: Five Openings from the Day of Mourning
and Outcry,” (Hebrew), Zakhor: Writings on the Holocaust and Its Lesson, Jerusalem 1958,
p.19. Quoted, and translated into English, in Yisrael Gutman, “On the Character of
Nazi Antisemitism, in “ Shmuel Almog (ed.), Antisemitism Through the Ages, Oxford
1988, p.353.
According to Dina Porat, Dinur’s “sketch” is in fact a summary of the opinions
of five members of the Al Domi group (discussed here on pp.23–25). See idem, “Martin
Buber in Eretz-Israel During the Holocaust Years, 1942–1944,” Yad Vashem Studies,
vol.17, Jerusalem 1986, p.116.
38. “Memorial Meeting in the Martyrs’ Forest” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad Vashem, nos.4–5, June
1955, p.2.
39. Gershom Scholem, “Israel and the Diaspora,” in Werner J. Dannhauser (ed.), On Jews
and Judaism in Crisis, New York 1976.
40. Gershom Scholem, “Judaic Scholarship: Then and Now” (Hebrew), Od Davar, Tel Aviv
1992, p.140.
41. See, for example, Anita Shapira, “Holocaust Survivors and the Yishuv,” Studies in
Zionism, vol.7, no.2, Autumn 1986.
42. On the history and activities of Al Domi, see Dina Porat,”Al Domi: Palestinian
Intellectuals and the Holocaust, 1943–1945,” Studies in Zionism, vol.5, no.1, 1984,
pp.97–124.
Earlier attempts to forewarn the intellectual and political leaders in the Yishuv and
abroad to the danger posed by Nazism to the Jewish people received little attention.
The “Association of Israel Among Peoples,” for example, was founded in 1938, imme-
diately after Kristallnacht, by a small group of Yishuv scholars associated with the
Writers’ Association in Tel Aviv. Its members included Martin Buber, Fischel
Schneersohn, Dov Levin, Saul Tchernikhowsky, Nathan Feinberg, Samuel Hugo

Bergman, and Yehuda Kaufman. Their activities centered mainly on sending written
appeals to world figures, such as the Indian leader Gandhi and the Indian poet
Rabindranath Tagore. On the activities of this group, see Dina Porat, “Martin Buber
in Eretz-Israel During the Holocaust Years, 1942–1944,” op. cit., pp.94–98.
43. Fischel Schneerson, Writers’ Convention at Ma’aleh Hahamisha, 25 Elul 1945,
Moznayim (Hebrew), no.21, Tishrei-Adar 1945–1946, pp.77–78. Quoted in Anita
Shapira, “The Holocaust and World War II as Elements of the Yishuv Psych until 1948,”
in Alvin H. Rosenfeld (ed.), Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century,
Bloomington 1997, p.67.
44. Dinur served as member of the first and second Knesset (Israeli parliament) as rep-
resentative of the Mapai party from 1949 to 1955, and as Minister of Culture and
Education from 1951 to 1955.
45. See, in particular, Ben-Zion Dinur, “Jerusalem’s Alarm”; idem,”Our Fate and Our War:
Five Openings from the Day of Mourning and Outcry”; idem, “Our Fate and Our War
in These Times”; idem,”Fate and Destiny in Our Generation’s Education”; idem, “What
Must We Remember on the Memorial Day of Holocaust and Heroism?”; These were
later gathered and published in his book Zakhor: Writings on the Holocaust and Its Lesson
(Hebrew), Jerusalem 1958.
46. Dinur, “Fate and Destiny in Our Generation’s Education,” op. cit., pp.59–60.
47. On the matter of the intellectuals’ “protective numbing” following the Holocaust, see
Friedländer, “Trauma, Memory and Transference,” op. cit, Bloomington 1993.
48. Dinur, “Fate and Destiny in Our Generation’s Education,” op. cit., pp.59–60.
49. For a more elaborate description of their background, see Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish
Past, op. cit., esp. chapters 5 and 6.
50. On the ambivalence in the attitude of Jews of German origin in Israel following the
Holocaust to German culture and to the German people see, Neima Barzel, “The
Attitude of Jews of German Origin in Israel to Germany and Germans after the
Holocaust,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol.39, 1994, pp.271–301.
51. Joseph Klausner, “In the Absence of God” (Hebrew), Haboker, 17.9.44, Joseph Klausner
Archive, op. cit., 401086/125 a-d.
52. Ibid; see also, idem, My Way Toward Rebirth and Redemption: an Autobiography (Hebrew),
Tel Aviv 1946, p.296.
53. Gershom Scholem, “Jews and Germans,” in Werner J. Dannhauser (ed.), On Jews and
Judaism in Crisis, New York 1976, p.89.
54. Ibid, p.90.
55. Ibid.
56. With the exception of Raul Hilberg, a Viennese Jew, who was the first to write a com-
prehensive analysis of the Holocaust. See idem, The Destruction of European Jewry,
New York 1961.
57. Philip Friedman, “Problems of Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe” (Hebrew)
Yad Vashem Studies, 3, Jerusalem 1959, p.27.
58. M. Feigenbaum, “The Activities of the Central Historical Committee in Munich”
(Hebrew), Dapim le-Heker ha-Shoah ve-Hamered, vol.1, January-April 1951, Beit Lohamei
ha-Getaot, p.107.
59. Ibid, p.110.
NOTES ) 97
60. Siegfried Moses, “Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany,” Publications of the Leo
Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany: Yearbook, vol.1, London 1956, p.xiii.
61. On “the thinly veiled antipathy” between Eastern and German Jewry “which has
remained noticeable up to the present day,” see Robert Weltsch, “Introduction,”
Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute, op. cit., p.xx.
62. Most notable is the case of the organized effort of the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum
in Warsaw who managed to accumulate a significant collection of documents and
other materials, the gathered material was buried in tin boxes underground and was
uncovered shortly after the war’s end.
63. For more on the Dubnowian-Anskian tradition, see chapter 2, pp.26–27, chapter 3,
pp.27–28. On the complex relation between Yad Vashem’s researchers and the
national Institute’s Executive Board who attempted, unsuccessfully, during the 1950s
to impose a more scholarly methods of collection and analysis, see chapter 3.
64. At the same time, Dinur remained steadfast in his view that scholarly writing can only
be enhanced by the writer’s ideological objective. Hence, in the preface to this col-
lection of pre-Zionist sources, Dinur clearly states that “the starting point of all work
of collection in our generation is Zionist ideology”; and Zionist ideology, as he
defined it, is closely linked to historical interpretation, for it “directs the vision of his-
torians to areas of historical reality that earlier were not paid attention to.” Dinur,
“be’ayat halukatan shel toldot Yisra’el li-tekufot ba-historiografyah ha-Yehudit”
(Hebrew) in idem, Dorot u-reshumot, op. cit., vol.4, p.49. See also “Members of the World
Council of Yad Vashem” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad Vashem, nos. 8–9, March 1956, p.23.
65. See,”Discussion of the World Council of Yad Vashem at Har Hazikaron” (Hebrew),
Yediot Yad Vashem, nos. 10–11, August 1956, pp.9–10. Years earlier, during the First
International Conference of historical commissions on the Shoah, held in Jerusalem
in July of 1947, under the auspices of Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University,
Scholem already commented that scientific historical accuracy and not sentimental-
ity and emotionalism should be the hallmark of the historian’s work on the Shoah.
“World Conference for the Study of the Shoah and Heroism,” July 13–14, 1947, Yad
Vashem Archives (henceforth, YVA), AM.1/237
66. With the exception of the poet Uri Zvi Grinberg, neither were there any significant
works of Hebrew literature that directly engaged the Holocaust. See Alan Mintz,
Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, New York 1984, pp.159 ff.
Part One: Different Perceptions of the Holocaust: The Yishuv, the Survivors
and the Jewish Fighters—during and following the War Years
1. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, “Ha-Yehudim veha-Pe’ula ha-Medinit,” Ha-Ahdut, nos.11–12, 1913,
quoted in Josef Gorni, “Yakhasa shel Mifleget Po’alei Tsiyon be-Eretz Yisrael la-Gola
bi-Tekufat ha-Aliya ha-Sheniya” (Hebrew), in Ha-Tsiyonut, 2, 1971, p.76.
2. Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness, New York
1987, pp.45–51, 308.
3. Dan Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust, pp.15–44; Hanna
Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War, New York 1999, ch.3.
4. It is not surprising, therefore, that the national educational discourse emphasized this
view of the Holocaust, implying a critic of the victims for failing to understand that
historical lesson in time and to join the Zionist effort. Ruth Firer, Sokhnim shel ha-
Hinukh ha-Tsyioni (The Agents of Zionist Education), Tel Aviv 1985, pp.96–102; Charles
S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel, Berkeley 1983, pp.100–104.
5. See George Lipschitz’s discussion of the use of this term, in Time Passages: Collective
Memory and American Popular Culture, Minneapolis 1989, p.213; see also, Michel
Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. and
ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca 1977.
6. Negative remarks about the Jews’ behavior under Nazism began to be heard already
at the end of 1942 when the first news of the Jewish situation in Europe reached the
Yishuv. For example, when it was feared that the Germans might invade Palestine,
Yitzhak Gruenbaum, member of the Executive Jewish Agency stated: “The problem of
the Jews in exile is that they prefer a ‘beaten dog’s life’ to dying with honor...God for-
bid that we should look like the Jews of Germany and Poland.” In the Face of a Threat
of German Invasion to Eretz Yisrael (Hebrew), a collection of essays and speeches gath-
ered by Uri Brener, Ef’al 1984, pp.28–29.
7. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, Hanover 1987, pp.108–109.
Chapter One: In the Yishuv

1. It was in the early 1940s that Hayyim Hazaz’s short story, “Ha-derashah” (“The
Sermon”) was written, reflecting, in fact, the disparaging attitude of many in the
Yishuv toward the Diaspora. Luah ha-aretz, 1942, pp.82–96. Reprinted in idem, Avanim
Rothot, Tel Aviv 1968, pp.221–224.
2. Quoted in Dina Porat, “The Role of European Jewry in the Plans of the Zionist
Movement during World War II and Its Aftermath,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf
(eds.), She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem Historical
Conference, Jerusalem, October 1985, Jerusalem 1990, p.300.
3. In their first published “manifesto” in 1944 the “Young Hebrews” stated: “No one is
a Hebrew except a native of the land of the Hebrews; and whoever is not a native of
this land, the land of the Hebrews, cannot be a Hebrew and never was a Hebrew.
Whoever comes from the Jewish diaspora...is a Jew and not a Hebrew...The Jew and
the Hebrew can never be identical. He who is a Hebrew cannot be a Jew, and he who
is a Jew cannot be a Hebrew.” Quoted in Council for the Shaping of Hebrew Youth. Opening
Address at the Council’s Session with the Delegates of the Cells (First Session),1944
(Hebrew), p.4. On the history of the Canaanite movement, see James E. Diamond,
Homeland or Holy Land? The Canaanite Critique of Israel, Bloomington 1986.
4. Barukh Kurzweil, “Nature and Sources of the Movement of ‘the Young Hebrews’”
(Hebrew), Luah Ha-Aretz, vol.12, 1952–53, pp.107–129; also in idem, Our Modern
Literature: Continuation or Revolution? (Hebrew), Jerusalem-Tel Aviv 1965, pp.270–300;
Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, New York 1986, pp.291–292. On the prevalence of
“negation of Exile” in Israeli culture, see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile in the Midst
of Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture” (Hebrew),
Theory and Criticism, fall 1993.
5. Hazaz, “Ha-drashah,” op. cit. .
6. For more on this, see Anita Shapira, “Native Sons” (Hebrew), Alpayim, no.2, 1990,
pp.178–203.
7. For further discussion of the complicated relations between Holocaust memory and
Israeli identity, see Liebman and Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion, op. cit., pp.100–107; Saul
NOTES ) 99
Friedländer and Adam, B. Seligman, “The Israeli Memory of the Shoah: On Symbols,
Rituals and Ideological Polarization,” in Roger Friedland and Deidre Boden (eds.),
NowHere: Space Time and Modernity, Berkeley 1994; James E. Young, The Texture of
Memory, New Haven 1993, pp.209 ff.; Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, op. cit., p.97.
8. Evyatar Friesel, “The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel,” The Wiener Library Bulletin,
vol.32, New Series Nos.49/50, 1979, p.58.
9. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, op. cit., p.xx. Shmuel Almog, “The Historical Dimension of Jewish
Nationalism” (Hebrew), Zion, LIII,4, 1988, pp.421 ff; Saul Friedländer, “The Shoah
Between Memory and History,” The Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 53, winter 1990, p.117.
10. See, for example, Friedländer and Seligman, “The Israeli Memory of the Shoah,” op.
cit., pp.356–371. On the intricate links between traditional Judaism and Israel’s civil
religion, defined by Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya as “the ceremonial,
myths and creeds which legitimate the social order, unite the population, and mobi-
lize the society’s members in pursuit of its dominant political goals,” see , idem, Civil
Religion in Israel, op. cit. . Israel, the authors argue, “needs a civil religion rooted in the
religious tradition but not synonymous with it.” Thus, in a search for an effective syn-
thesis, a series of such civil religions has reinterpreted traditional Jewish values and
symbols.
11. Young, The Texture of Memory, op. cit., p.212.
12. On the mythologization of Yosef Trumpeldor and of Tel Hai in Israel’s collective
memory, see Liebman and Don-Yehiya Civil Religion in Israel, op. cit., pp.44 ff; H.H. Ben-
Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People, Cambridge (Mass.) 1976, p.993; Yael
Zrubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition,
Chicago and London 1995.
13. David Ben-Gurion, “The Tel Hai Order” (Hebrew), Bama’aracha, vol.3, Tel Aviv 1957,
pp.120–121. See also Anita Shapira, “Holocaust and Might”(Hebrew), Massuah, April
1992, no.20, pp.42–64.
14. On 12 April 1951 a law established a formal Holocaust commemoration day whose
first appellation was “The Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Memorial Day.” The day
was chosen for its proximity to the Warsaw ghetto revolt which started on Passover
night, fourteenth of Nissan, 1943 (as close as religious laws prohibiting mourning dur-
ing the days of Passover would allow). This date is closely followed by the Memorial
Day for the Fallen in Israel’s Wars and, at sunset on that day, by Israel’s Independence
Day. See Nathan Eck, “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem
1971, vol.8, pp.916–917; Friedländer, “The Shoah Between Memory and History,” op.
cit, p.117.
15. For a further discussion of the Yishuv’s attitude toward European Jewry see Idith Zartal,
From Catastrophe to Power. Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine, 1945–48, Berkeley 1998.
See also, Yechiam Weitz, “The Yishuv’s Self-Image and the Reality of the Holocaust,”
The Jerusalem Quarterly, no.48, Fall 1988, pp.74–75; Yoav Gelber, “Some Reflections
on the Yishuv during the Shoah,” in Gelber et al (eds.), The Shoah and the War, New
York 1992.
16. Quoted in Hava Wagman Eshkoli, “Three Attitudes toward the Holocaust within
Mapai, 1933–1945,” Studies in Zionism, vol.14, no.1, 1993, p.89.
17. Weitz, “The Yishuv’s Self-Image and the Reality of the Holocaust,” op. cit., pp.79–80.
18. Moshe Braslavsky, “When the Curtain Was Lifted” (Hebrew), Mibifnim, June 1945,
pp.45 ff. Quoted in Anita Shapira, “Holocaust Survivors and the Yishuv,” in Yisrael
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 100
Gutman and Avital Saf (eds.), Sh’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Proceedings of the Sixth Yad
Vashem Historical Conference, Jerusalem, October 1985, Jerusalem 1990, p.277.
19. Shapira, ibid, p.278.
20. The Revisionist party was established in 1925 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who had resigned
from the Zionist Executive in 1923. The Revisionists received much of their support
from Eastern European middle-class Zionists who did not endorse the socialist ide-
ology of the labor parties but were more militant than the liberal General Zionists. On
the Revisionist party and its leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, see Yaacov Shavit, Jabotinsky and
the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948, London 1988, pp.337–338
21. Ibid.
22. The implementation of the evacuation plan presupposed not only the willingness of
the Polish authorities to participate in the mass evacuation of its Jews but also a recog-
nition by the British government that the Jewish plight did not clash with its political
interests in the Middle East. Apart from this, American Jewry and the Zionist move-
ment had to be able to raise, on the very eve of the outbreak of the second World War,
the tremendous resources necessary for such an operation. For further details on the
Revisionists’ Evacuation Plan, see Shavit, Jabotinski and the Revisionist Movement, op. cit.,
chapter 7.
23. Ibid, p.338.
24. Nahum Benari in Record of the 14th Conference of Hakibbutz Hameuhad (Hebrew), Ein
Harod n.d., p.216; see also Moshe Braslavsky, The XIV Conference of Hakibbutz
Hameuchad (Hebrew), Giv’at Brenner 1944, p.219.
25. Shapira, “Holocaust Survivors and the Yishuv,” op. cit., p.279.
26. Enzo Sereni, The Holy Spring (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1969, p.315.
27. Quoted in Dinur, “Our Fate and Our War in These Times” op. cit., p.63 [first published
by Mapai Publishers, March 1943.]
28. S. Dobromil, “On Immigration and Absorption” (Hebrew), Tzror Michtavim, Ein Harod,
April 12, 1944.
29. Eliahu Dobkin at a Mapai Central Committee meeting, May 2, 1942—quoted in Porat,
“The Role of European Jewry in the Plans of the Zionist Movement during World War
II and Its Aftermath,” op. cit, p.286.
30. In the spring of 1945, following the defeat of Nazi Germany, as many as 100,000 Jewish
survivors found themselves wandering through Germany and Central Europe. Known
as displaced persons (DPs), they would later be joined by close to 200,000 other Jews
from Poland and Russia. Together these survivors formed the remnant who were set
up in DP camps in the American, British, and French zones of occupied Germany as
well as in Austria and Italy. For a more in-depth look at the Jewish situation in the DP
camps see, Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah, New York 1970, esp. pp.261 ff.
31. See, for example, Dina Porat, “The Role of European Jewry in the Plans of the Zionist
Movement during World War II and Its Aftermath,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf
op. cit., pp.292–293.
32. Letter from the soldier Yosef Bentwich to his family in Nahalal, June 24, 1945, pub-
lished in the Nahalal Memorial Book for Those Who Fell in the War of Independence
(Hebrew), Bracha Habas (ed.), “Those for Whom We Mourn,” pp.180–181—quoted
in Yoav Gelber, History of Volunteerism, vol.3, The Standard Bearers (Hebrew), Jerusalem
1983 , p.405.
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 101
NOTES ) 101
To the survivors, however, the lack of motivation to engage in productive work,
at least at the outset, was fueled by their awareness that, as slave laborers in the con-
centration camps, the only reason they remained alive was because they continued
to be of some use to the Germans. After liberation they had no desire to help rebuild
the German economy. Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope:
Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany, Evanston (ILL) 2001 (c. 1994 in
German), p.116.
33. Haim Yahil, “The Actions of the Mission to the Survivors, 1945–1949” (Hebrew), Yalkut
Moreshet, no.31, April 1981, pp.135 ff.
34. Ibid, no.31, April 1981, p.175.
35. Abba Kovner, “The Mission of the Survivors,” The Catastrophe of European Jewry, Yad
Vashem 1976, pp.671–683.
36. Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust op. cit, pp.49–55; Nili Keren, “The Impact of
She’erit Hapletah On Israeli Society,” in Yisrael Gutman et al (eds.), Sh’erit Hapletah,
1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle. Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem
International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, October 1985, Jerusalem 1990. On the
encounter between the Jewish soldiers from Eretz Yisrael and She’erit Hapletah, see
Gelber, History of Volunteerism vol.3, The Standard Bearers, op. cit., p.435.
37. A letter sent by the soldier T. Gruenthal on July 17, 1945; quoted in Gelber, History of
Volunteerism vol.3, The Standard Bearers, op. cit, p.434. See also, Abba Kovner, On the
Narrow Bridge, Tel Aviv 1981, pp.30–37.
38. Davar, August 29, 1945.
39. Kovner, On the Narrow Bridge, op. cit., p.38.
40. The bulk of the surviving remnants began to arrive in Israel at the height of the
Independence War. In the three and a half years following the establishment of the
state (May, 1948 to the end of 1951) approximately 300,000 displaced persons set-
tled in Israel—half as many as the total Jewish population of Israel at the time. Dvora
Hacohen, “Mass Immigration and the Israeli Political System, 1948–1953,” Studies in
Zionism, vol.8, no.1, 1987, p.101; Weitz, “The Yishuv’s Self-Image and the Reality of
the Holocaust,” op. cit., p.84. On the image of the survivors in the emissaries reports,
see Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, op. cit., pp.44–61.
41. See Weitz, “The Yishuv’s Self-Image,” op. cit., pp.78–79; for examples of such refer-
ences in Hebrew textbooks, see Firer, The Agents of Zionist Education (Hebrew) op. cit,
p.81.
42. Dan Horowitz, Blue and Dust: the Generation of 1948: A Self-Portrait (Hebrew), Jerusalem
1993, pp.37 ff. Quoted in Shapira, “The Holocaust and World War II as Elements of
the Yishuv Psych until 1948,” op. cit., p.70.
43. Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, op. cit., pp.48–49.
44. Ibid. See also Ruzka Korczak, Flames in the Ashes (Hebrew), Merhavia 1965 (c.1946),
pp.49–56.
45. See, for example, Book of the Jewish Partisans (Hebrew), Merhavia, 1958; The Fighting
Ghettos (Hebrew), Ha-Kibbutz ha-Me’uhad, 1954.
46. K. Tzetnik, Salamandra: Khronikah shel mishpahah Yehudit ba-me’ah ha-’esrim (Hebrew),
Tel Aviv 1946.
47. During the following decade or so, K. Tzetnik also published House of Dolls, Piepel, and
Phoenix over the Galilee.
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 102
48. Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, op. cit., p.49.

49. Minutes of the Histadrut Executive, July 18–19, 1945; Neima Barzel, Sacrificed
Unredeemed: The Encounter between the Leaders of the Ghetto Fighters and the Israeli
Society (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1998, pp.81–82.
50. Quoted in Porat, “The Role of European Jewry in the Plans of the Zionist Movement
during World War II and Its Aftermath,” op. cit, p.302.
51. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, op. cit., p.81.
52. Shapira, “The Yishuv’s Encounter with the Survivors of the Holocaust,” op. cit., pp.96
ff.
53. Ibid, p.105.
54. In 1948, Achdut Ha’avodah and Hashomer Hatsair united and established Mapam
(United Workers Party). The kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatsair and Hakibbutz
Hameuchad movements came to be affiliated with this new oppositional left-wing
party. Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel. From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, New
York 1996, pp.362–364.
55. Meir Yaari to Yehudah Tubin, July 24, 1945, Meir Yaari Collection, Hashomer Hatsair
Archives, Givat Havivah (HZA) (5), B-2, 7.95.
56. Shapira, “Holocaust Survivors and the Yishuv,” op. cit., pp.285–289.
57. Ibid, pp.297–299.
58. Shapira, “The Yishuv’s Encounter with the Survivors of the Holocaust,” op. cit., p.103.
59. Yahil, “Actions of the Mission,” op. cit.
60. For the debate in the Knesset over the implementation of the Law, see Divre ha-
Knesset (Hebrew), vols.21, 22, 35, Jerusalem 1953, pp.1310–1314, pp.1332–1342,
pp.2402–2408.
61. Ha’aretz, April 21, 1946; Hamishmar, April 19, 1946; Ha’aretz, April 20, 1947; Ha’aretz,
April 19, 1948.
62. .Divre ha-Knesset (Hebrew), vol.14, Jerusalem 1953, p.1345.
63. Protocols of the Meetings of the Founding Committee for “The Commemoration of the
Diaspora’s Martyrs” (Hebrew), National Archives, Jerusalem, Files of the Chief
Rabbinate, gimel lamed/85553/30 III.
64. Proclamation of the Chief Rabbinate in Eretz Yisrael, National Archives, Jerusalem, Files
of the Chief Rabbinate, gimel lamed/85553/30 III.
65. On the central theme of destruction, exile and redemption in Jewish collective mem-
ory, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor, op. cit, pp.43–44, 65–66; Alan Mintz, Hurban, New York
1984, pp.102–103; Saul Friedländer, “The Holocaust as Element in the Construction
of Israeli Memory” (German), Babylon, vol.2, 1987, pp.10–12.
66. Hazofeh, April 19, 1948.
67. See n.62.
68. The Knesset Archive, First Session of the “Sub-Committee for the Selection of Ghettos
Uprising Day” (Hebrew), February 2, 1951, Protocol gimel/1.
69. Ibid.
70. The Knesset Archive, Second Session of the “Sub-Committee for the Selection of
Ghettos Uprising Day” (Hebrew), March 21, 1951, Protocol gimel/2.
71. Ibid; see also Friedländer and Seligman, “The Israeli Memory of the Shoah,” op. cit.,
p.360.
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 103
NOTES ) 103
72. Divre ha-Knesset (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1958, vol.31, pp.2118 ff.
73. Divre ha-Knesset (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1961, vol.31, pp. 1264 ff., 1300 ff., 1504 ff., p.
1590.
Chapter Two: The Survivors and the Jewish Fighters in the DP Camps, 1945–1948
1. She’erit hHapletah is a biblical term which appears in Chronicles 5, referring to the
Jewish remnant that survived the Assyrian conquest. The term first appeared in ref-
erence to those who survived the Holocaust in the list of survivors that was published
in July of 1945. See Yehuda Bauer, “The Initial Organization of the Holocaust Survivors
in Bavaria,” in Yad Vashem Studies, vol.8, 1970, p.127.
2. Yisrael Gutman, “Discussion” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (eds.), She’erit Hapletah,
op. cit., pp.509–510.
3. Tsemah Tsamrion, Chapters on the Holocaust and Jewish Survivors (Hebrew), Tel Aviv
1975, p.10
4. Ze’ev Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the Holocaust in the
American Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” doctoral dissertation, Hebrew
University, Jerusalem 1987, p.7; Bauer, “The Initial Organization of the Holocaust
Survivors in Bavaria,” op. cit. .
5. Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents, Henry
Friedlander and Sybil Milton (eds.), vol.9, New York 1990, p.xii.
6. Tkhies-hameysim: A Newspaper for Liberated Jews in the Camps (Yiddish), Buchenwald,
4.5.1945.
7. Tsamrion, Chapters on the Holocaust and Jewish Survivors, op. cit., p.53.
8. For a complete list, see ibid, p.55.
9. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, op. cit., pp.122–123.
10. Kapos were Jewish concentration-camp inmates to whom the Nazis had assigned var-
ious supervisory positions in the camps and workplaces.
11. Ibid, p.22; Koppel S. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany: A Study of the Jewish
DPs,” Jewish Social Science, vol.9, no.2, April 1947, pp.121–123; Königseder and
Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, op. cit., pp.103–122, 134–141.
12. Speech given by Zalman Grinberg at the liberation concert at St. Ottilien on May 27,
1945. “We are Living Corpses” (German) Aufbau, August 24, 1945—quoted in
Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the Holocaust in the American
Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” op. cit., p.276.
14. Leo Srole, “Why the DPs Can’t Wait. Proposing an International Plan of Rescue,”
Commentary, vol.3, no.1, January 1947, pp.21–23. See also, Jean Amery, At the Mind’s
Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz, Bloomington 1980, p.68.
15. Srole, ibid, p.23.
16. See, for example, Ethel Ostry After the Holocaust: My Work with UNRA, private edition,
1978, Yad Vashem (Library) 1978.
17. Leyvik Halpern, Mit der Sheyres hapleyte (Yiddish), Toronto, 1947, p.7.
18. Srole, “Why the Dps Can’t Wait,” op. cit., p.15.
19. Leo W. Schwarz, “Memorial in Munich,” Congress Weekly, vol.22,no.15, April 18,
1955, p.6.
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 104
20. The Central Committee of the Liberated Jews, Protocol no.42, 5.5.1946, YVA.
21. Israel Efrat, “Nesi’a le-makhanot Yisrael be-Germania” (Hebrew), Hadoar, November
22, 1946, p.94.
22. Schwarz, “Memorial in Munich,” op. cit., p.7.
23. Ibid; Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the Holocaust in the
American Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” op. cit., p.36.
24. Samuel Gringauz, “Zum yar-tog fun nizahon” (Yiddish), Landsberger Lager cajtung,
no.16 (28), 10.5.1946, p.3; Efrat, “Nesi’a le-makhanot Yisrael be-Germania,” op. cit.
25. Efrat, ibid; see also, Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the Holocaust
in the American Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” op. cit., p.36.
26. Israel Efrat, “Nesi’a le-makhanot Yisrael be-Germania” (Hebrew), Hadoar, January 17,
1947, p.286.
27. Ibid, pp.286, 291.
28. Schwarz, “Memorial in Munich,” op. cit., p.7.
29. Gelber, “The Meeting between the Jewish Soldiers from Palestine Serving in the British
Army and Sh’erit Hapletah,” op. cit., p.72; Bauer, Flight and Rescue, op. cit., pp.178 ff.
30. Ze’ev Mankowitz, “Zionism and She’erit Hapletah,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf
(eds.), She’erit Hapletah, op. cit., p.213; Koppel S. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated
Germany,” op. cit., pp.113–114.
32. Samuel Gringauz, “Jewish Destiny as the DPs See It,” Commentary, December 1947,
p.503.
33. Quoted in Undzer veg, 17, Munich, January 25, 1946, p.2.
34. Srole, “Why the Dps Can’t Wait,” op. cit., p.21.
35. P. Pikatsch, in Undzer veg, December 28, 1950, p.2.
36. Ibid.
37. Ch. D. “Inwardly,” Nizoz, no.7 (52), December 31, 1945, p.3. Quoted in Ze’ev
Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the Holocaust in the American
Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” op. cit. .
38. Gringauz, “Jewish Destiny as the DPs See It,” op. cit., p.506.
39. Amery, At the Minds Limits, op. cit., p.65.
40. Gringauz, “Jewish Destiny,” op. cit., p.505.
41. Ibid, p.507
42. Ibid, pp.503–505.
43. See, for example, Jacob Robinson (ed.), “Reflections, Interpretations, Responsibilities—
Commemoration and Teaching of the Holocaust,” The Holocaust and After: Sources and
Literature in English, Yad Vashem-Yivo, Entries 6413–6457, Jerusalem 1973. In this and
other bibliographical lists there is no mention of the Fourteenth of Iyar.
44. B. Evalski, “Kapes un blek-elteste farn yidishn gericht in Landsberg”
(Yiddish),Landsberger Lager cajtung, no.13 (25), 15.4.1946, p.2; H. Sohalizki, “Tsvey
problemen” (Yiddish), Undzer veg, no.4, 5.4.1946, pp.1–2. See also Isaiah Trunk,
Judenrat. The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, New York 1977,
chapter 10.
45. Jews who were found guilty by the Courts of Honor were turned over to the US mili-
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 105
NOTES ) 105
tary authorities and retried in American military courts. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat, ibid;
Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, op. cit., p.139–141.
46. Königseder and Wetzel,ibid, pp.139–140.
47. H. Leyvik, “Mir torn nit farshvakhn undzere kedoshim” (Yiddish), Undzer veg, no.25,
22.3.1946, p.10—quoted in Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the
Holocaust in the American Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” op. cit., p.294.
48. A. Akselrad, “Mir torn nit farshvakhn undzere Kedoshim: entfaar H. Leyvik” (Yiddish),
A heym, no.6, 28.3.1946, p.4. Yosef Sperling, “Die mezuraim mikhutz lamachane”
(Yiddish), A heym, no.8, 11.4.1946, p.10 . For a detailed account of the exchanges
between Leyvik and the survivors, see Mankovich, ibid, pp.294 ff.
49. On the history of the concept of Kiddush ha-Shem, see Itamar Grunwald, “Kiddush ha-
Shem: Beruro shel Musag” (Hebrew), Molad 1, 1967, pp.476–484. On the development
of the laws of martyrdom, see Shlomo Goren, “Mitsvat Kiddush ha-Shem le-Or ha-
Halakha” (Hebrew), Mahanayim 41, 1960, pp.7–15.
50. Reflecting on his own German-Jewish past, George L. Mosse suggests that there was
a particular humanitarian ethos shared by German Jewry, defined by a commitment
to culture, self-cultivation and tolerance. Yet such ideals, according to Sidney M.
Bolkovsky, often rendered German Jewry incapable of assessing the dangers that faced
them. See Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, Bloomington 1985; Bolkovsky, The
Distorted Image: German Jewish Perceptions of Germans and Germany, 1918–1935, New
York 1975, p.184.
51. Gringauz, “Jewish Destiny,” op. cit., p.506.
52. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, op. cit., p.193.
53. Samuel Gringauz, “Varshaver oyfstand” (Yiddish), Yiddishe Cajtung, no.29 (97),
8.4.1947, p.4.
54. Ya’akov Aliasky, “Grandizer troyer akademi lekhoved dem 3tn yartog fun yidn oyfs-
tand in varshe” (Yiddish), Landsberger Lager cajtung, no.15 (27), 3.5.1946, p.8. See also,
K. Shabbetai, Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust, New York & Tel Aviv, 1965.
55. Mankovich, “The Politics and Ideology of Survivors of the Holocaust in the American
Zone of Occupied Germany, 1945–1946,” op. cit., p.293.
56. See, Moshe Frager, “Hasidic Underground in Poland’s Ghettos” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad
Vashem, 21–22, December 1959, pp.7–10. Gideon Hausner, “Foreword,” in K.
Shabbetai, As Sheep to the Slaughter?, Bet Dagan 1962; F. Wiederman, “The Cult of
Heroism” (Yiddish), Dos fraye vort, nos.45–50, 29.9.46, p.7—quoted in Mankovich, ibid,
pp.322–303.
57. The Yiddish Scientific Institute, known as YIVO, was founded in 1925 with the aim
of studying the history of East European Jewry.
58. Philip Friedman,”Problems of Research on the Holocaust,” in idem, Roads to Extinction:
Essays on the Holocaust, New York and Philadelphia 1980, pp.556.
59. Ibid, pp.556, 559. However, during the first convention of the various branches of the
Central Historical Commission in the American zone of occupation in Germany,
which took place in Munich on May 11 and 12, 1947, Friedman himself stated: “By
looking into our martyrology, we are fulfilling our duty to the victims and erect in,
thereby, an eternal monument in their honor.” “Report—from the First Conference of
Delegates from the Historical Commissions in the American Zone in Germany, which
took place in Munich on the 11th and 12th May, 1947,” p.2, YVA, File 12, M-1/B.
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 106
60. Samuel Gringauz, “Some Mythological Problems in the Study of the Ghetto,” Jewish
Social Studies, 12, January 1950, pp.65–72.
61. For more on the “Dubnowian tradition,” see chapter 2.
62. See p. 67, n.62.
63. Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in
Extremis, New York 1982, p.ix.
ha-Getaot, p.107.
The first Jewish Historical Institute for the research and study of the Holocaust
was established in Poland in 1944 (Zydowski Instytut Historyczny). Among its found-
ing members were Philip Friedman, Nahman Blumental, Joseph Kermisz and Isaiah
Trunk. See Abraham Wein, “The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Yad Vashem
Studies, vol.8, 1970, pp.203–213.
65. See the Historical Commission Stuttgart to the Central Historical Commission,
10.2.1947, YVA, MI/B, File no. 11. According to Philip Friedman, these eyewitness
accounts, which mainly cover the East European areas, were drawn up by poorly
instructed interviewers and, therefore, have limited scientific value. Friedman,
“European Jewish Research on the Holocaust,” in idem, Roads to Extinction: Essays on
the Holocaust, New York and Philadelphia 1980, p.513 (the essay is based on a lecture
given by Friedman at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Jewish
Research, held on December 26, 1948).
66. YVA, MI/B, File no.11.
67. The branch in Landsberg published a booklet about Vilna under Nazi rule; the
Stuttgart branch a book about Nazi persecutions of Jews in Radom. Friedman,
“European Jewish Research on the Holocaust,” op. cit., pp.513, 523n.
ha-Getaot, pp.107–108.
69. J. Kermisz, “The Central Archive of the History of the Shoah and Heroism” (Hebrew),
Yediot Yad Vashem, no.2, July 29, 1954, p.5; Feigenbaum, “The Activities of the Central
Committee,” op. cit., pp.108–110.
71. Feigenbaum, “Bericht fun ershtn tsuzamenfar” (Yiddish), op. cit., p.9; idem, “The
Activities of the Central Committee,” op. cit., p.108.
72. “Report—from the First Conference of Delegates from the Historical Commissions in
the American Zone in Germany, which took place in Munich on the 11th and 12th May,
1947,” p.9, YVA, File 12, M-1/B.
73. Feigenbaum, “The Activities of the Central Committee,” op. cit., p.110.
74. Friedman, “European Jewish Research on the Holocaust,” op. cit., p.514.
75. Ten issues of Fun letstn khurbn were published between 1946 and 1948 (at which time
the paper ceased to exit).
76. Leo W. Schwarz, The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People, New York 1949.
77. Barzel, Sacrificed Unredeemed, op. cit., p.137.
78. Central Historical Commission: M.I. Feigenbaum, Report on the Work of Delegates of
the Historical Commission in the American Zone in Germany, 11–12.5.1047, YVA, MI/B,
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NOTES ) 107
File no.11, p.7; see also Feigenbaum, “The Activities of the Central Committee,” op.
cit., p.110.
79. Ibid, p.230.
80. For a detailed account of the survivors’ alternatives following the war, see Gelber,
History of Volunteerism vol.3, op. cit., pp.367–368. See also Bauer, “The Initial
Organization of the Holocaust Survivors in Bavaria,” op. cit., p.145.
81. Sholem Hirschkopf, “Reflections on the Warsaw Uprising,” Dos fraye vort, no.28,
April 26, 1946, p.2.
82. See, for example, Samuel Gringauz, “Varshaver oyfshtand” (Yiddish), Yidishe Cajtung,
no.29 (97), 8.4.1947, p.4. See also, Friedman, “Problems of Research on the
Holocaust,” op. cit., p.560.
83. Ruth Zariz, Letters from Jewish Pioneers in Occupied Poland, 1940–1944 (Hebrew), Beit
Lohamei Ha-Getaot 1994, p.51.
84. Zivia Lubetkin, In the Days of Destruction and Revolt (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, 1979, p.194.
85. This letter was sent to the Ichud Olami by Dr. Moshe Schweiger, formerly an inmate
of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, from a DP camp in Germany.
Quoted in Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents,
vol.9, New York 1990, p.106.
86. The Brichah was an organized illegal mass movement that brought Jews after the war
from Soviet-held territories to American and British-held territories and from there,
the hope was, eventually to Palestine.
87. Yehuda Bauer, “The Brichah,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (eds.), She’erit Hapletah,
op. cit., pp.52–53; see also, idem, Flight and Rescue: Brichah, New York 1970.
88. Anita Shapira, Walking on the Horizon (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1988 pp.328 ff. See also,
Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., p.182; Irit Keynan, Holocaust Survivors and the
Emmissaries from Eretz- Yisrael: Germany 1945–1948 (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1996, p.105.
89. Partizanim, Hayalim, Haluzim—in Hebrew.
90. Shalom Holevski,”Partisans and Ghetto Fighters” (Hebrew), in Yisrael Gutman et al
(eds.), Sh’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948, op cit., p.227.
91. Ibid, p.229.
92. Ibid, pp.229–230.
93. On the activities of the Central Historical Commission of Pahah in Italy, see the
report by M. Kaganovitch in Im Gang (journal of the Jewish writers’ union in Italy),
nos.13–14, July-August 1948.
94. “In the Movement: Conference of the Pahah Historical Commission,” Pahah, no.5/6
Munich, December 1947, pp.18–19.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid; M. Kaganovitch, Der yidisher ontayl in der partizaner-bavegung fun Soviet-Rusland
(Yiddish), Rome and New York 1948.
97. Friedman, “Problem of Research on the Holocaust,” op. cit., p.560
99. Report from a meeting with Dr. Hoffman (Yahil)—head of the Jewish Agency delega-
tion to the DPs in Germany, YVA, January 14, 1948, AM.1/189; Tsamrion, Chapters
on the Holocaust and Jewish Survivors, op. cit., pp.127–128; Kermisz,”The Central
Archive,” op. cit.
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The boxed documents of the Central Historical Commission were transferred first
to Switzerland, to a temporary office of Yad Vashem adjacent to the Office of the World
Jewish Congress in Geneva, until it was safe to ship the gathered material to Eretz
Yisrael. “Proceedings of the Working Committee of Yad Vashem,” YVA, July 4, 1948,
AM.1/290.
Part Two: Politics of Memory and Historiography

1. On the political manipulation of the memory of the Shoah in Israel public discourse
during the 1950s, with a special emphasis on the debates over “Shoah vs. heroism,”
see Roni Stauber, “The ‘Jewish Response’ during the Holocaust as Reflected in Israeli
Public Thought in the 1950s” (Hebrew), Ph.D. Diss., Tel Aviv University 1997; idem,
Lesson for This Generation: Holocaust and Heroism in Israeli Public Discourse in the 1950s
(Hebrew), Jerusalem 2000.
2. Dapim le-Heker ha-Shoah ve-Hamered, vol.1, January-April 1951, Beit Lohamei ha-
Getaot, p.5.
3. Yitzhak Katzenelson, Ketavim Ahronim (Hebrew), Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers,
1953.
4. “A Decade to The Ghetto Fighters’ House” (Hebrew), Yediot Beit Lohamei Hagettaot,
no.22, April 1960, pp.1–4. Gad Rosenblatt, Esh ahaza ba-ya’ar: im pelugat partisanim
Yehudit uve-hativat Kubepak (Hebrew), 2nd edition, Tel Aviv 1976 (c.1957).
5. Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamrof, Dapim min ha-delekah: pirke-yoman, mikhtavim ve-
reshimot (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1947.
6. Tuvia Bozikovski, Ben kirot noflim (translated from the Yiddish to Hebrew by Moshe
Basok), Tel Aviv 1950.
7. Sefer Milchamot Hagetaot (Hebrew), edited by Izhak Zuckerman and Moshe Basak, Tel
Aviv 1954; in 1962 the book was translated in New York to English and edited by Meyer
Barkai under the title The Fighting Ghettos.
8. Ruzka Korczak, Flames in the Ashes (Hebrew) Merhavia 1946.
9. Chaika Grossman, Anshei Hamahteret, Merhavia 1950.
10. Levi Dror and Yisrael Rosentsvayg (eds.), Sefer Hashomer Hatsair (Hebrew), Merhavia
1956.
11. For a broad interpretation of the term, see Liebman and Don Yehiya, Civil Religion in
Israel, op. cit. .
12. David Ben-Gurion, The Eternity of Israel (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1964, p.307.
13. Divrei Hakneset (Hebrew), 1953, pp.1313, 1331, 1336, 1350.
Chapter Three: The Israeli Representation of the Holocaust in the 1950s

1. M. Shenhabi, “‘Yad Vashem’ after the Confirmation of the Law in the Knesset”
(Hebrew), Yediot Yad Vashem, no.1, April 30, 1954.
2. See Shmuel Spector, “Yad Vashem,” Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York 1990, vol.4,
pp.1681–1686; Mooli Brog, “In Blessed Memory of a Dream: Mordechai Shenhavi and
Initial Holocaust Commemoration Ideas in Palestine, 1942–1945,” Yad Vashem Studies,
vol.30, Jerusalem 2002, 297 ff.
3. Because they were not granted visas to enter Palestine, no representatives of histor-
ical commissions from the DP camps attended the World Conference. Participated in
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NOTES ) 109
the Conference representatives of Jewish historical institutes and centers from France,
Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. “World Conference for the Study of the Shoah and
Heroism,” July 13–14, 1947, YVA, AM.1/237.
4. Ibid.
5. Divre ha-Knesset (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1953, vol.35, p.2409.
6. The law was fully reprinted in “Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Law, Yad Vashem,
1953,” Yediot Yad Vashem, no.1, April 30, 1954, p.2; parts of this law’s articles are
reprinted and discussed as well in Ben-Zion Dinur, “Problems Confronting ‘Yad
Vashem in Its Work of Research,” Yad Vashem Studies, no.1, 1957, pp.7–30.
7. Nathan Eck, “The Aims of Yad Vashem’s Historical Research” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad
Vashem, 4–5, June 1955, p.10.
8. Ben-Zion Dinur, “From the Knesset Debate over the ‘Holocaust and Heroism Memorial
Act—Yad Vashem’” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad Vashem, no.1, April 30, 1954, pp.2–3.
9. See Segev’s interpretation of Dinur’s speech in Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., p.434.
10. “Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Law, Yad Vashem, 1953,” op. cit., p.2.
11. Dinur, “From the Knesset Debate over the ‘Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Act—
Yad Vashem’” op. cit., pp.2–3.
12. “World Conference for the Study of the Shoah and Heroism,” July 13–14, 1947, YVA,
AM.1/237.
13. See Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World, London 1987 pp.133
ff.; Friedman, “Problems of Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe,” op. cit.,
1959; Léon Poliakov, “The Activities of the Center for Contemporary Jewish
Documentation in Paris,” an address delivered at the conference World War II in the
West, Amsterdam 1950.
14. A letter sent by Ben-Zion Dinur to David Ben-Gurion on 3 April, 1953. Quoted in
Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit.,p.431.
15. Yad Vashem to Foreign Ministry public relations department (Hebrew), 6 January,
1954, National Archives, Jerusalem, Files of the Foreign Ministry, 2388/15/A.
On August 18, 1953 “the memorial to the unknown Jewish martyr” was unveiled
in Paris. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory, op. cit., p.72.
16. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, July 10, 1956, p.4.
17. Ibid.
18. Mark (Meir) Dworzecki, Avraham Granot, and Yitzhak Gruenbaum at a Yad Vashem
Executive Board meeting, 16 July, 1954, National Archives, Jerusalem, Files of the
Foreign Ministry, 2388/15/A.
19. “Bulletin to a Meeting with Journalists” (Hebrew), Dec.2, 1953, p.2, YVA.
20. S.Z. Kahana, “In the Chamber of the Shoah” (Hebrew), National Archives, Jerusalem,
Files of the Ministry of Religion, undated, gimel/lamed/6261/9–12.See also, Frieländer
and Seligman, “The Israeli Memory of the Shoah,” op. cit., pp.358–359; Young, The
Texture of Memory, op. cit., pp.247–249; Stauber, “The ‘Jewish Response’ during the
Holocaust,” op. cit., p.204; idem, Lesson for This Generation, op. cit., pp.136–142.
21. Kahana, ibid.
22. “Basic Assumptions for the Planning of the Memorial Mountain” (Hebrew), 8–9 April,
1956, National Archives, Jerusalem, Files of the Foreign Ministry, 2388/16.
23. Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., p.427.
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 110
24. Ibid; see also, Yosef Gorni, The Quest for Collective Identity (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1986, p.106.
25. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, April 29, 1958, pp.5–6.
26. Ibid, p.6.
27. “Historical Survey and Ceremonies” (Hebrew), Ministry of Religion Files, National
Archives, Jerusalem, gimel/lamed/6315/8/24.
28. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, February 1, 1955 and April 29,
1958; see also Stauber, “The ‘Jewish Response’ during the Holocaust,” op. cit.,
pp.203–213.
29. Pages for the Study of the Catastrophe and the Revolt (Hebrew), no.1, January-April 1951,
p.5.
30. Yediot Be’it Lohamei ha-Getatot, no.3, October 1953.
31. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, July 17, 1954.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, November 15, 1955.
35. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, March 2, 1958, p.7.
36. Ibid., p.8.
37. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, March 13, 1956, p.6.
38. Dawidowicz, “Toward a History of the Holocaust,” op. cit, p.52.
39. Nachum Goldmann, President of the world Jewish Congress, remembered asking
Ben-Zion Dinur, then Chairman of Yad Vashem, why the relatively large sums of money
that he had received from the Claims Conference to finance research projects on the
Holocaust had not been used: “I asked him for the reasons. He replied that he could
not find scholars to deal with the topic, as the youth studying at the universities
showed a greater readiness to do research concerning the period of the Inquisition or
the pogroms in Russia than that of the Holocaust.” Goldman, “The Influence of the
Holocaust on the Change in the Attitude of World Jewry to Zionism and the State of
Israel,” in Holocaust and Rebirth: A Symposium, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1974, pp.79–80.
40. Rachel Auerbach, “What the Struggle within Yad Vashem is All About,” Davar, October
6, 1958.
41. Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge (MA) 1981, p.125.
42. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish
Culture, Cambridge (MA) 1984, p.135.
43. David G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe,
Philadelphia 1988, p.6.
44. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinsion. Essays on the Holocaust, New York 1980,
pp.554–557.
45. Dawidowicz, “Toward a History of the Holocaust,” op. cit., pp.51–52.
46. Rachel Auerbach, for example, was one of only two survivors of Emmanuel Ringelbaum
circle in the Warsaw ghetto who were involved in establishing the “Oneg Shabat”
archive. HaShoah ve-ha-Meri (Hebrew), Ministry of Culture and Education, p.41.
47. Following the Stalinization of Poland and the liquidation of Jewish communal life there,
many of its members, including the founders of the Institute, Philip Friedman, Nahman
Blumental and Joseph Kermisz chose to immigrate to Israel (Philip Friedman spent the
years 1951–53 at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot and then emigrated to the US, where he
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:29 AM Page 111
NOTES ) 111
joined the Yivo staff in New York; shortly thereafter, he was appointed its chief
archivist.
On the activities of the Jewish Institute in Poland, see the articles by N. M.
Gelber, “In Memory of the Late Philip Friedman” (Hebrew); J. Kermisz, “The Founder
of the Historical Institute in Poland After the War” (Hebrew); and Nathan Eck, “In
Memory of a Friend” (Hebrew)—all in Yediot Yad Vashem, nos. 23/24, May 1960, pp.3
ff.
48. Yehuda Bauer, “Trends in Holocaust Research,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol.12, January
1977, p.8.
49. The first Holocaust researchers from among the survivors included Joseph Kermisz,
Nahman Blumental, Natan Eck, Rachel Auerbach, Shmuel Krakowski, and others.
50. Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, op. cit., p.ix.
51. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, March 11, 1958. See also Ben-
Zion Dinur (ed.), Sefer ha-Tsiyonut: mevasre ha-Tsiyonut (Hebrew), vol.1, Tel Aviv 1938,
p.19
52. Jacob Robinson, “The Claims Conference and Yad Vashem: Report,” p.37, Claims
Conference Papers, Central Archives of the Jewish People, Jerusalem (CA). On the
report and the relations between Yad Vashem and the Claims Conference, see also
Ronald A. Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World, op. cit., pp.133 ff.
53. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, March 11, 1959.
54. Ben-Zion Dinur, “The Historical Consciousness of the People and Problems of Its
Study” (Hebrew), Dorot u-reshumot, op. cit., vol.4, p.160. See also “Introduction,”
n.64.
55. On Dinur’s interpretation of Jewish history, see Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and
the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur” History and
Memory, vol.7, no.1, Spring/Summer 1995, pp.91–118.
56. Dinur, “The Historical Consciousness of the People and Problems of Its Study,” op. cit.,
pp.175–192.
57. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, May 29, 1956 and May 22,
1958.
58. Goldmann, “The Influence of the Holocaust on the Change in the Attitude of World
Jewry to Zionism and the State of Israel,” op. cit., pp.79–80.
59. Stauber, Lesson for This Generation, op. cit., pp.172 ff.
61. Ben-Zion Dinur, “The Difficulties Facing Yad Vashem in the Study of the Holocaust
and Heroism (Hebrew), “ Zakhor, op. cit., pp.109–110; Protocols of the Executive
Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, February 1, 1956 and March 11, 1959.
62. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, May 1, 1956 and May 13, 1956.
63. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, May 1, 1956.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, April 24, 1956; November 6,
1956 and July 22, 1957.
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70. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, April 24, 1956; November 6,
1956 and July 22, 1957.
71. Testimony given by Nathan Eck before the Committee of the Fourth World Council of
Yad Vashem, July 1958. Quoted in Stauber, “The ‘Jewish Response’ during the
Holocaust,” op. cit., pp.266–267.
72. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, September 28, 1958.
74. Jacob Robinson, “The Claims Conference and Yad Vashem: Report,” p.37, Claims
Conference Papers, Central Archives of the Jewish People, Jerusalem. See also, Zweig,
German Reparations and the Jewish World, op. cit., pp.133 ff.
75. On Yad Vashem’s contention with the four survivors, see also in Stauber, Lesson for This
Generation, op. cit., pp.173 ff.
76. Wein, “The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw,” op. cit., p.204.
77. “The Contributors,” Yad Vashem Studies, II, Jerusalem 1958, p.331.
78. A special memo prepared by this group of survivors and sent on October 1958 to the
members of the Fourth World Council of Yad Vashem, Personal Archive of Rachel
Auerbach at YVA, P16/24. Quoted in Stauber, “The ‘Jewish Response’ during the
Holocaust,” op. cit., pp.258 ff.
79. David Lazar, Maariv, June 18, 1958. See also Boaz Evron, Haaretz, 21.6.60, pp.10, 14,
16.
80. See, letters and memos in the Personal Archive of Rachel Auerbach at YVA, P16/24;
Yosef Lapid, “Go Home. Let the People Do the Work!” (Hebrew) Ma’ariv, June 18, 1958;
Rachel Auerbach, “What the Struggle within Yad Vashem is All About” (Hebrew)
Davar, October 6, 1958.
81. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, May 22, 1958, p.10.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid, p.6.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid, p.5.
86. Yediot Yad Vashem, no.14, 1957, p.19.
87. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, May 29, 1956, and December
11, 1956.
88. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, May 22, 1958, p.7.
89. Ibid.
90. Auerbach, “What the Struggle within Yad Vashem is All About” op. Cit.
91. Ibid. See also Ben-Zion Dinur’s answer to Rachel Auerbach, published, under the same
title in Davar, October 9 1958, as well as Auerbach’s response to Dinur’s letter, in late
October. Auerbach, “What the Struggle within Yad Vashem is All About: A Response
To Professor B.Z. Dinur’s Answer” (a draft letter, possibly unpublished) Personal
Archive of Rachel Auerbach, YVA, P16/24.
92. Quoted in Keren, “The Influence of Opinion Leaders and of Holocaust Research on the
Development of the Educational Discussions and Curriculum on the Holocaust in
Secondary Schools and in Informal Education in Israel, 1948–1981” op. cit, p.69.
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NOTES ) 113
93. “The Fourth World Council of Yad Vashem and Its Conclusions” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad
Vashem, nos.17/18, December 1958, p.30.
94. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, September 26, 1958 and
November 11, 1958, p.8.
95. See Rachel Auerbach’s letter to Dr. Melkman, (undated), Personal Archive of Rachel
Auerbach, YVA, P16/24; Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA,
January 20, 1959.
96. Protocols of the Executive Board of Yad Vashem, YVA, March 11, 1959.
97. Yediot Yad Vashem, nos.21/22, December 1959, p.2.
Chapter Four: Israel’s “Pantheon” and

the “Silence” of the Survivors during the 1950s
1. The sociologists, Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, describe the historical
museum at Yad Vashem as “the major Holocaust shrine..., second only to the Western
Wall in its sacredness as a shrine of the Israeli civil religion. It is the place to which
foreign dignitaries are taken and where they celebrate and solemnize their relation-
ship to Israel by sharing its identification with the victims of the Holocaust . . .”
Liebman, “Myth, Tradition, and Values in Israel Society,” Midstream, January 1978,
p.50. See also Young, The Texture of Memory, op. cit. .
2. “World Conference for the Study of the Shoah and Heroism,” July 13–14, 1947, YVA,
AM.1/237.
3. Ibid.
4. Arik Carmon, “Education in Israel—Issues and Problems” (Hebrew), in Arik Carmon,
W. Ackerman and David Zucker (eds.),Education in an Evolving Society: Schooling in
Israel, Tel Aviv 1985, p.132.
5. At a conference of teachers in 1948, Dinur explained that, to him, absorption of the
new immigrants meant a process by which “the newcomer changes in spirit and grad-
ually begins to resemble the settlers, adopting their ways of reacting, thinking, relat-
ing to each other, dressing and their values.” Quoted in Michael Keren, Ben-Gurion and
the Intellectuals: Power, Knowledge, and Charisma, DeKalb (Ill) 1983, pp.125–126; in a
conference of writers in 1953, Dinur reemphasized this position: “Our problem is...to
what extent all our being is permeated by the volition for togetherness, by a connec-
tion of sympathy, of identification, attachment.” idem, Values and Ways: Problems of
Education and Culture in Israel (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1958, p.61. Indeed, by the end of 1953,
the enactment of the State Education Law, abolished the independent educational
“trends” and established a unified, state educational system in which the importance
of national values became central. On the concept of the ‘negation of Exile’ in Israeli
education, see Firer, The Agents of Zionist Education, op. cit., pp.92 ff.
6. Keren, Ben-Gurion and the Intellectuals, op. cit., pp.100–117; Dinur, Values and Ways, op.
cit., pp.98–116; J. Schoneveld, The Bible in Israeli Education: A Study of Approaches to the
Hebrew Bible and Its Teaching in Israeli Educational Literature, Assen 1976, pp.24–38;
Yitzhak Etzion, “The Bible, Its Instruction” (Hebrew), in Educational Encyclopedia,
vol.2, Ways of Education, Jerusalem 1959, pp.1186–1250.
7. Quoted in Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish
Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur,” op. cit., pp.111–112.
8. This trend in history studies has been labeled by Ruth Firer as the Law of Zionist
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Redemption. In her research on the content of history textbooks used in the educa-
tional system of the Jewish community in Palestine and of the State between 1900 to
1984, Firer found that in the late period of the Yishuv, between 1930 and 1948, this
“Law” was much more emphasized compared with the previous period when its
usage was still non-inclusive; in the first two decades of the state, between 1948 and
1968, its application became comprehensive. See Ruth Firer, “Formation and
Information: The Influence of Zionist Values on the History-Textbooks of the Jewish
People, Written in Hebrew and Used in Israel Between the Years 1900–1980” (Hebrew),
Ph.D. diss.—Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1980; The Agents of Zionist Education, op.
cit.; Agents of the Lesson (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1989.
9. Carmon, “Education in Israel,” op. cit., pp.154–158. Quoted in Uri Ram, “Zionist
Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood,” op. cit., p.112.
10. Firer, “Formation and Information,” op. cit., p.viii.
11. Dinur, “Fundamental Problems in Today’s Jewish Historical Research” (Hebrew),
Davar Supplement Tel Aviv 1955; also in idem, Dorot u-reshumot, op. cit., vol.4, p159.
12. Only in April 1979, the Holocaust became a mandatory subject by the Ministry of
Education. And, in March of 1980, the 1953 State Education Law was amended to
include compulsory teaching of the Holocaust in all Israeli high schools. See Carmon,
“Holocaust Teaching in Israel,” Shoa, Fall/Winter, 1982–83, pp.22–25; “Amendment
to the State Education Law, 1953” (Hebrew), Divre ha-Knesset (Hebrew), Jerusalem
1980, vol.89, pp.2137, 2416–2417, 2677.
13. Nili Keren “Ideologies; Attitudes and Holocaust Teaching in the State of Israel—
History and Recent Development” in Yehuda Bauer et al (eds.), Remembering for the
Future: op. cit., p.1031.
14. Firer, Agents of the Lesson, op. cit., pp.97 ff; idem, The Agents of Zionist Education, op. cit.,
p.70.
15. Firer, The Agents of Zionist Education, op. cit., pp.53–55.
16. Ibid, pp.50–61.
17. According to Ruth Firer grade and high school textbooks during this period devoted
only a third or less in space to the description of human suffering during the Holocaust
compared to two thirds or more to Jewish resistance; see Firer “Formation and
Information,” op. cit., p.141; idem, The Agents of Zionist Education, op. cit., pp.79–82.
18. S. L. Kirshenbaum, Toldot Am Yisrael Bedorenu (Hebrew), vol.2, Tel Aviv 1965, p.278.
19. Y. Riger, Toldot Yisrael Ba-zman Ha-hadash (Hebrew), vol.2, Jerusalem 1963, p.249.
20. M.Katan, Toldot Ha-yehudim me-milhemet Ha-olam Ha-rishona Ve-ad yamenu (Hebrew),
Jerusalem 1958, p.176.
21. Firer, “Formation and Information,” op. cit., p.146. For the direct quotations, see M.
Ziv & S. Ettinger, Divrey Ha-yamim (Hebrew), vol.2, Haifa 1966; M. Katan, Toldot ha-
yehudim, op. cit., p.176; I. Spivak, M. Avidor, Am Yisrael Be-arzo U-va-nehar (Hebrew),
vol.4, Tel Aviv 1949, p.186.
22. Firer, ibid.
23. Dinur, Zakhor: Writings on the Holocaust and Its Lesson (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1958, p.59.
24. M. Ziv and Y. Tori, Divre Ha-yamim, Ha-zman He-hadash (Hebrew), vol.2, Tel Aviv 1961,
p.192. See also Dinur, “Fate and Destiny in Our Generation’s Education,” op. cit., p.64.
25. Ruth Bondi, Lefetah Be-lev Ha-mizrah (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1975, p.20.
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NOTES ) 115
26. Quoted in Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, op. cit., p.60.
27. Hagith Lavsky, “‘She’erit Hapletah’ From Object to Subject: Trends in Research”
(Hebrew), Yahadut Zmanenu, vol.6, 1990, p.33. See also, Keynan, Holocaust Survivors
and the Emissaries from Eretz-Yisrael, op. cit., pp.194–196.
28. On the overwhelming inability of Israelis to comprehend the survivors’ sense of iso-
lation and alienation, see A. B. Yehoshua’s article in Yedi’ot aharonot, November 2,
1979. Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., pp.153 ff.
29. Mark Dworzecki, “She’erit Hapletah in Israel” (Hebrew), Gesher, no.1, 1956,
pp.102–104. Dworzecki began teaching the Holocaust at Bar-Ilan University in 1959,
highlighting not the Jewish armed resistance but rather the spiritual resistance of many
survivors and the unique problems and dilemmas which they faced.
30. Moshe Sandberg, My Longest Year (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1968, p.2.
31. The Herut Movement was founded in 1948 with the creation of Israel. It presented
itself as the successor of Revisionist ideology in general and Jabotinsky’s world view
in particular. On the historical roots of the movement, see in particular Shavit,
Jabotinski and the Revisionist Movement, op. cit. .
32. Yohanan Bader, Knesset and I, Tel Aviv, 1979, pp. 54 ff; Yechiam Weitz, “The Herut
Movement and the Kastner Trial,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 8, no.3, winter
1994, p.352.
33. The haavara, or “transfer agreement,” was signed in 1933 between the Zionist
Organization and Nazi Germany. Its aim was to enable German Jews, emigrating to
Palestine, to take some of their possessions with them to Palestine. The Revisionists
strongly opposed the agreement, which they viewed as treachery and as defiling
Jewish national pride. Weitz, “The Herut Movement and the Kastner Trial,”op. cit.,
p.365; Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., p.213.
34. The most notorious case was that of Dov Shilansky, a survivor of Dachau, who
brought a time bomb to the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv in an attempt to protest and
halt the negotiations with Germany. He was arrested and served close to two years
in prison. After his release, Shilansky studied law and later entered politics and
became speaker of the Knesset. Segev, ibid, pp.236–239.
35. Ibid, p.226.
36. The “trucks-for-Jews deal” was an offer made by Adolf Eichmann to Zionist leaders
to save the lives of a million Jews in exchange for ten thousand Allied trucks and raw
materials
37. Shalom Rosenfeld, Criminal Case 124: The Gruenwald- Kastner Trial (Hebrew), Tel Aviv
1955, pp.28–31, 109–110, 266–267.
38. Ibid, pp.455 ff.
39. Weitz, “The Herut Movement and the Kastner Trial,” op. cit., pp.352 ff. See also Roni
Stauber, “The Political Debate over the Kastner Trial in the Parties’ Newspapers”
(Hebrew), ha-Tsiyonut, 13, 1988.
40. “The Verdict in the Gruenwald-Kastner Trial” (Hebrew), Haaretz, 27 June 1955, p.4.
41. Ibid; Weitz, “The Herut Movement and the Kastner Trial,” op. cit., p.355; Rosenfeld,
Criminal Case 124, op. cit., pp.331 ff.
42. Rosenfeld, ibid, pp.10–11, 30–31.
43. Ibid, pp.319 ff.
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44. Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., pp.93–96.

45. Quoted in Stauber, “The Political Debate over the Kastner Trial in the Parties’
Newspapers,” op. cit., p.230.
46. Rosenfeld, Criminal Case 124, op. cit., pp.319 ff.
47. Bader, Knesset and I, op. cit., pp.84–85.
48. Ibid. Quoted in Weitz, “The Herut Movement and the Kastner Trial,” op. cit., p.359.
49. Quoted in Rosenfeld, Criminal Case 124, op. cit., p.36; see also “The Verdict in the
Gruenwald-Kastner Trial” op. cit., p.4; Yechiam Weitz, “Changing Conceptions of the
Holocaust: The Kastner Case,”in Jonathan Frankel (ed.), Reshaping the Past: Jewish
History and the Historians. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol.10, New York 1994. pp.211–-
227.
50. Tamar Zemach, “Coverage of the Holocaust in the Israeli Press During the Nuremberg,
Kastner, Eichmann, Auschwitz and Demjanjuk Trials” (Hebrew), Ph.D. diss.—Hebrew
University of Jerusalem 1995, pp.20–21, 154–155.
51. Ibid; Stauber, “The Political Debate over the Kastner Trial in the Parties’ Newspapers,”
op. cit., pp.231 ff; see also, Weitz, “The Herut Movement and the Kastner Trial,” op.
cit., pp.353 ff.
52. In March 1957, Kastner was assassinated. Less than a year after his death, the
Supreme Court overturned his conviction, clearing Kastner of most of the accusations
against him. Weitz, “The Herut Movement and the Kastner Trial,” op. cit., pp.351.
53. In fact the Landsmanschaftn (as well as the Jewish Councils) were modeled after the self-
governing medieval Jewish communal institution: the Kehila.
54. Tsamrion, Chapters on the Holocaust and Jewish Survivors, op. cit., pp.76 ff; Jack Kugelmass
and Jonathan Boyarin (eds.), From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry,
Bloomington and Indianapolis 1998, “Introduction.”
55. Tsamrion, Chapters on the Holocaust and Jewish Survivors, op. cit., p.77.
56. Ibid, pp.82–85.
57. Ibid, pp.78–79
58. Ibid, p.79.
59. Ibid, pp.85 ff.
60. Ibid, pp.79–80. On the history of the Belgen Bergen survivors following their libera-
tion, see Sam E. Bloch (ed.), Holocaust and Rebirth. Bergen-Belsen, 1945–1965, New
York—Tel Aviv 1965.
61. Rachel Auerbach, “Men of the Forests” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad Vashem, December 1954,
p.9.
62. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, op. cit., p.260.
63. “From the Literature on the Holocaust” (Hebrew), Yediot Yad Vashem, no.1, April 30,
1954, pp.12, 15; Friedman, “Problem of Research,” op. cit., pp.30–31; Kugelmass and
Boyarin (eds.), From a Ruined Garden, op. cit., p.2.
64. Avraham Wine, “Memorial Books as a Source for the Study of the History of Jewish
Communities in Europe” (Hebrew), Yad Vashem Studies, vol.9, 1973, pp.209, 212–213.
65. Quoted in Young The Texture of Memory, op. cit., p.7. See also Kugelmass and Boyarin
(eds.), From a Ruined Garden, op. cit., p.43.
66. Wine, “Memorial Books as a Source for the Study of the History of Jewish Communities
in Europe,” op. cit., pp.209.
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NOTES ) 117
67. Avraham Wine, “Memorial Books as a Source for the Study of the History of Jewish
Communities in Europe,” Yad Vashem Studies (English edition, see n.58), vol.9, 1973,
pp.209 ff (Quotation from p.263); see also, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin
(eds.), From a Ruined Garden, op. cit.
68. Kugelmass and Boyarin (eds.), From a Ruined Garden, op. cit. Wine, “Memorial Books
as a Source for the Study of the History of Jewish Communities in Europe” (Hebrew),
op. cit., pp.218–219.
69. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, op. cit., p.46.
70. Kugelmass and Boyarin (eds.), From a Ruined Garden, op. cit, p.42.
71. Ibid.
Chapter Five: The Turning Point, 1961 to the Present

1. Dalia Ofer, “The Strength of Remembrance: Commemorating the Holocaust During the
First Decade of Israel,” Jewish Social Studies, vol.6, no.2, September 2000, pp.24–55.
2. Translation taken from Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege, New York 1986, p.405.
3. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons, London 1971, p.215.
4. Quoted in Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial,
the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative, Philadelphia 1965, pp.138–139.
5. For example, the survivor-writer, Yehiel Dinur, whose nom de plume “Katzetnik” is a
Yiddish abbreviation for “concentration-camp inmate,” gave a powerful testimony
about life and death in Auschwitz.” His collapse on the witness’ stand, was one of
the most emotionally charged moments of trial.
6. Haim Gouri, “Facing the Glass Booth,” translated in Alan Mintz, Hurban, op. cit., p.243.
7. Shabbetai, As Sheep to the Slaughter?, op. cit., p.6.
8. Ibid, p.5.
9. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York 1965.
10. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol.3, revised edition, New York 1985,
pp.1030–1031, 1038–1039.
11. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, second edition, New
York 1971 (c. 1961), chapters 4 and 5, quotation p.134.
12. For the reaction in Israel to Arendt’s book see, for example, Aryeh Leon Kubovy, “A
Criminal Country versus a Moral Society”; M. Mushkat, “Eichmann in New York”; and
Nathan Eck, “Hannah Arendt’s Hateful Articles”, all in Yediot Yad Vashem 31, December
1963, pp.1 ff.; Scholem, Significant Acts (Hebrew), Tel-Aviv 1982, p.91.
13. Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, op. cit., pp.vii-ix.
14. Ibid, pp.223–226.
15. For the reaction to Hilberg’s book see, for example, Nathan Eck, “Historical Research
or Slander?” Yad Vashem Studies, vol.6, 1967, pp.385–430.
16. Mushkat, “Eichmann in New York,” op. cit., pp.5–6.
17. For more thorough criticism of Bettelheim by Israeli scholars, see Arieh Kubovy, “A
Criminal Country versus a Moral Society,” op. cit.; Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An
Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, New York 1976, pp.56–57, 79–80, 103, 116–117,
155–156, 157–163; Elli Pfefferkorn, “The Case of Bruno Bettelheim and Lina
Wertmueller’s Seven Beauties,” in Gutman and Saf (eds.), Nazi Concentration Camps:
Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference—January 1980,
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Jerusalem 1984, pp.663–681. See also George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The
Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior, New York 1980, ch.4.
18. Nahman Blumental, “The Warsaw Ghetto and Its Destruction” (Hebrew), in
Encyclopedia of Exiles—Warsaw, vol.1, Jerusalem-Tel Aviv, 1953, p.605.
19. On the different experiences of Jewish communities during the Holocaust, see, for
example, Molcho, Michael, & Nehama, Joseph, The Destruction of Greek Jewry, 1941–44,
Jerusalem 1965; Meir Teich, Rumanian Jews in World War II (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1965;
Dr. Mozes Weinberger-Carmilly, “The Tragedy of Transylvanian Jewry,” Yad Vashem
Bulletin, no.15, August 1964, pp.12–27.
20. Shabbetai, As Sheep to the Slaughter?, op. cit., pp.5–24.
21. Ibid, p.25.
22. Ibid, pp.23–28.
23. Ibid, p.54.
24. K. Shabbetai, Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust, New York & Tel Aviv, 1965.
25. See, for examples, Nahman Blumental, Conduct and Actions of a Judenrat—Documents
from the Bialystok Ghetto (Hebrew and Yiddish), Jerusalem 1962. A. Hartglass, “How did
Czerniakov Become Head of the Warsaw Judenrat?” Yad Vashem Bulletin, no.15, August
1964; Israel Taubes, “The Jewish Council of Amsterdam,” and Hartog Beem, “The
Jewish Council of the Province of Vriesland (Holland)”—both in Yad Vashem Bulletin,
no.17, December 1965; Aryeh Tartakower, “Adam Czerniakow: The Man and His
Supreme Sacrifice,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol.6, 1967, pp.55–67; Michael Zylberg, “The
Trial of Alfred Nossig: Traitor or Victim,” Wiener Library Bulletin, vol.23, nos.2,3, 1969,
pp.41–45.
26. Nathan Eck, “General Statement on the Judenrat and on the Jews’ Awareness of Their
Fate,” News of the Yivo, no.104, December 1967.
27. Nahman Blumental, “The Role of the Jewish Police and Its Relation to the Judenrat,”
News of the Yivo, no.104, December 1967.
28. See Nathan Eck’s article on the activities of Yad Vashem under the chairmanship of
Aryeh L. Kubovy, “Seven Years as Chairman of Yad Vashem,” Yad Vashem Bulletin, no.1,
October 1966, p.15.
29. A. Dushkin, “Hora’at Hashoa B’veit Sefer,” in Hora’at Hashoa B’veit Sefer. Diyunim
VeIyunim, Ministry of Education and Culture, 1961.
30. M. Dworzecki, in ibid.
31. S. Nehamit, ibid.
32. Barukh Ben-Yehudah, Toward the Essence of Jewish Consciousness (Hebrew), Tel Aviv
1966.
33. Noting that the process of composing and publishing textbooks is a long one, Ruth
Firer, maintains that changes in the authors’ presentations reflect an approach that
had been formulated at least five years earlier. Idem, “Formation and Information,” op.
cit., p.25.
34. Shmuel Almog, “The Impact of the Holocaust on the Study of Antisemitism,” op. cit.,
vol.2, p.2278.
35. Ibid.
36. See Shmuel Ettinger’s collected essays: Modern Anti-Semitism. Studies and Essays,
(Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1978.
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NOTES ) 119
37. Shmuel Ettinger, “Jew Hatred in its Historical Context,” in Shmuel Almog (ed.),
Antisemitism through the Ages, op. cit., pp.9–10.
38. Ibid, pp.10 ff; idem, Modern Anti-Semitism, op. cit., pp.223–240.
39. Shmuel Ettinger, “Jews and Judaism as Seen by the English Deists of the 18th Century”
(Hebrew), Zion, vol.29, 1964, pp.1–2.
40. See, for example, Shmuel Ettinger, “The Young Hegelians—A Source of Modern Anti-
Semitism,” The Jerusalem Quarterly, vol.28, 1983, pp.73–82.
41. Jacob .L. Talmon, “Preface,” The Unique and the Universal, London 1965, p.9.
42. See, especially, the first two books in Talmon’s trilogy, The Origins of Totalitarian
Democracy (1952), and Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, London 1960; see also
idem, The Unique and the Universal, op. cit.; and Ideology and Power in Modern Times,
London 1967.
43. Jacob L. Talmon, “Mission and Testimony: The Universal Significance of Modern
Anti-Semitism,” The Unique and the Universal, op. cit., p.123.
44. Ibid, p.122–164.
45. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, London 1961,
p.255.
46. Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939, Cambridge (MA) 1970.
47. Jacob Katz, Ha-Antishemiyut Ke-Gorem Hevrati U-Politi Ba-Hevrah Hamodernit (Hebrew),
Jerusalem 1964, pp.135–141.
48. On the silence of the historians, see Saul Friedländer, “Trauma Memory, and
Transference,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of
Memory, Cambridge (MA) 1994, esp. p.259.
49. The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, recorded and edited by a group
of young Kibbutz members, Middlesex 1971, pp.38, 217.
50. Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt,
Bloomington 1983; Yehuda Bauer, They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust,
New York 1973; idem, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, Toronto 1979.
51. Ibid; Bauer, “Trends in Holocaust Research,” op. cit., p.32.
52. Uriel Tal, “Reciprocity between General and Jewish History” (Hebrew), Yahadut
Zmanenu, 3, 1986, pp.13–19.
53. See for example, Saul Friedländer, L’Antisemitisme nazi. Histoire d’une psychose collec-
tive, Paris, 1971.
54. Saul Friedländer, “Preface,” to Uriel Tal’s Te’ologyah politit veha-Raikh ha-Shelishi
55. Shulamit Volkov, “On Antisemitism and Its Investigation” (Hebrew), Zemanim, no.7,
winter 1982, pp.76–81; idem, “The Written Matter and the Spoken Word,” in François
Furet (ed.), Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, New York
1989.
56. Volkov, “The Written Matter and the Spoken Word,” op. cit., pp.33 ff.
57. Dina Porat, “The Role of European Jewry in the Plans of the Zionist Movement dur-
ing World War II and Its Aftermath,” in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (eds.), She’erit
Hapletah, 1944–1948, op. cit; idem, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist
Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939–1945, 1990; idem, “Ben-Gurion and the
Holocaust” (Hebrew), Ha-Tzionut, 12, 1987, pp.293–314; Anita Shapira, Land and
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:30 AM Page 120
power: the Zionist resort to force, 1881–1948, Stanford 1999 (c.1992); idem, “Native Sons”
(Hebrew), Alpayim, op. cit.; idem, “Holocaust and Might” op. cit.; Gelber, “Some
Reflections on the Yishuv during the Shoah,” op. cit. . Weitz, “Yishuv, Holocaust and
Diaspora: Myth and Reality” (Hebrew), Yahadut Zemanenu, 6, 1990, pp.135–150; idem,
Aware but Helpless—Mapai and the Holocaust, 1943—1945 (Hebrew), Jerusalem 1994.
58. Weitz, “Yishuv, Holocaust and Diaspora: Myth and Reality” op. cit.; see also Dina Porat,
“The Question of Rescue During the Holocaust in light of the Yishuv’s ‘Negation of
Exile’” (Hebrew) in Ha-Tzionut, 23, 2001, pp.175–192.
59. Weitz, ibid.
60. Gelber, “Some Reflections on the Yishuv during the Shoah,” op. cit., p.338.
61. The earliest critic of the Yishuv leaders’ behavior during and following the Holocaust
was advanced as early as the late 1970s by Shabtai Beit-Zvi in his book, Post-Ugandan
Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1977.
62. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London 1983; Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London 1990;
and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality,
Cambridge 1990.
63. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimenssion of Zionist
Politics, Berkeley 1983. See also idem, “Academic History Caught in the Cross Fire”; Ilan
Pappe, “Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Scholars in Israel,” Uri Ram, “Zionist
Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion
Dinur”—all in History and Memory, vol.7, no.1, Spring/Summer 1995.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid. See also, Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict, 1882–1914, Cambridge 1989.
66. Segev, The Seventh Milliom, op.cit.; Idith Zertal, “The Poisoned Heart: The Jews of
Palestine and the Holocaust,” Tikkun, vol.2, no.1, p.80; idem, From Catastrophe to
Power, op. cit.; Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, op. cit. .
67. Segev, ibid.
68. Idith Zertal, “Supermarket in Auschwitz,” Haaretz, March 15, 1996.
69. Segev, The Seventh Million, op. cit., pp.401–403.
70. Moshe Zimmerman, The Jerusalem Post, April 30, 1995.
71. Moshe Zuckerman, Shoah in the Sealed Room: The Holocaust in Israeli Press During the
Gulf War (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1993, pp. 77 ff, 199 ff, 111 ff. See also, idem, “If the
Holocaust Had Not Happened...On ‘The Jews and Europe’ by Max Horkheimer”
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72. Hence, for example, the post-Zionists paradigm of colonialism which views Israel as
an immigrant-settler society, similar to many others.
73. David Myers, “Hazony and Zionism,” The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, June 2,
2000.
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()
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Yalkut Moreshet
Teoriya u-Vikoret
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Massuah
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Molad
Alpayim
Moznayim
Midstream
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
History & Memory
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Tikkun
Newspapers published in Israel

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Dos Fraye Vort (Yiddish)
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Juedische Rundschau (Yiddish)
Yiddishe Cajtung (Yiddish)
Hapoel Hatza’ir (Yiddish & Hebrew)
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()
&'
Index
A Bialik, Chaim Nachman, 5

Bialer, Yehudah Leib, 59
Adler, H. G., 52
Blumental, Nahman, 39, 48, 56–58, 61,
Agnon, Shmuel-Yosef, xxi
81, 83, 106 n.64, 110 n.47, 111 n.49
Altman, Tosia, 12
Bolkovsky, Sidney M., 105 n.50
Amery, Jean, 25
Bondi, Ruth, 67
Anielewicz, Mordecai, 33
Boyarin, Jonathan, 75
Anski, S., xxv, 29, 51
Bozikovski, Tuvia, 40
Arafat, Yaser, 91
Braslavsky, Moshe, 8
Arendt, Hannah, 79, 80, 81,
Buber, Martin, xxi, 79, 95 n.42
Auerbach, Rachel, 56–57, 59, 60, 61, 73,
110 n.46, 111 n.49
C
B Carmon, Aryeh (Arik), 65
Bader, Yohanan, 70
D
Baer, Yitzhak, xv, xviii, xix, xxiii, 94 n.13,
n.18 Dessau, Hermann, xviii
Baron, Salo W., xv Dinur, Ben-Zion, xv, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii,
Bauer, Yehuda, xxvi, 51, 88 xxv, xxvi, 9, 41, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50,
Begin, Menahem, 68 52–56, 58, 59, 62, 64–66, 94 n.13
Beit-Zvi, Shabtai, 120 n.61 n.18, 95 n.37, 96 n.44, 97 n.64, 110
Benari, Nahum, 8 n.39, 113 n.5
Ben-Gurion, David, 7, 40, 41, 64, 68, 69, Dinur, Yehiel, 117 n.5
77 Dobkin, Eliahu, 9
Bentwich, Yosef, 100 n.32 Dubnow, Simon, 29, 51
Ben-Yehudah, Barukh, 83, 84 Dobroszycki, Lucjan, 52
Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak, 3, 46 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 99 n.10, 113 n.1
Bergman, Samuel Hugo, 96 n.42 Dworzecki, Mark (Meir), 50, 60, 67, 115
Bettelheim, Bruno, 79, 80, 117 n.17 n.29
Bezalel, Judah Liwa ben, xix
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:30 AM Page 138
E Herzog, Yitzhak, 16
Hilberg, Raul, 79–81, 96 n.56
Eck, Natan, 56, 57, 59–61, 82, 111 n.49,
Hitler, Adolf, 20, 54, 55, 81, 85, 91
112 n.71
Hobsbawm, Eric, xiv
Efrat, Israel, 22
Eichmann, Adolf, xi, xii, xxvii, 50, 69,
J
77–78, 81–84, 115 n.36
Esh, Shaul, 53 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir), 8, 100 n.20,
Ettinger, Shmuel, xix, xxvi, 84, 85, 89 115 n.31
F K
Feigenbaum, Moshe Joseph, xxiv, 30, 57 Kaganovitch, Moshe, 34
Feinberg, Nathan, 96 n.42 Kahana, S.Z., 46–48
Firer, Ruth, 113–114 n.8, 114 n.17, 118 Kaplan, Israel, 30, 31, 57
n.33 Kaplan, Moshe, 48
Frank, Ernest, 22 Kasan, Shalom, 49
Friedländer, Saul, xi-xii, xxvi, 88 Kastner, Rudolph (Israel), 68–71, 116 n.52
Friedman, Philip, 29, 31, 34, 105 n.59, Katz, Jacob, xxvi, 84, 86, 89
106 n.64 n.65, 110 n.47 Ka-Tzetnik, 12
Friesel, Evyatar, 6 Katzenelson, Yitzhak, 39, 49
Funkenstein, Amos, xiv Kaufman, Yehuda, 96 n.42
Kempner, Vitka, 12
G Kermisz, Joseph, 48, 56–59, 61, 106 n.64,
110 n.47, 111 n.49
Gandhi, Mahatma, 96 n.42
Klausner, Joseph, xv, xvii, xxi, xxiii
Gar, Yosef, 28
Klinger, Chaika, 33
Gelber, Yoav, 89
Kol, Moshe, 49, 57, 58
Gilbert, Felix, xv
Kook, Abraham Hacohen, 65
Gluber, S., 30
Korczak, Ruzka, 11, 40
Goldmann, Nachum, 46, 73, 110 n.39
Kovner, Abba, 10–12, 33, 64
Gouri, Haim, 78
Krakowski, Shmuel, 111 n.49
Grinberg, Uri Zvi, 97 n.66
Kubovy, Aryeh Leon, 62
Grinberg, Zalman, 21–24
Kugelmass, Jack, 75
Gringauz, Samuel, 24–25, 29
Kulka, Dov, xxvi
Grossman, Chaika, 11, 40
Gruenbaum, Yitzhak, 5, 49, 98 n.6
L
Gruenthal, T., 101 n.37
Gruenwald, Malkiel, 69, 70 Levin, Dov, 96 n.42
Gutman, Yisrael, xxvi, 88 Lidovsky, Eliezer, 33
Liebman, Charles S., 99 n.10, 113 n.1
H Lubetkin, Zivia, 7, 11, 14, 32, 49, 50
Lurye, Zvi, 16
Halbwachs, Maurice, xiii
Ha-Levi, Yehudah, xviii
M
Halevy, Benyamin, 69
Halperin, Israel, 53, 55 Magnes, Judah Leib, xxvi
Halpern, Leyvik, 22, 26 Mazar, Benjamin, 55
Harman, Avraham, 55, 58 Melkman, Joseph, 53, 54, 57–60
Hazaz, Hayyim, 6, 98 n.1 Mendez, David (Franco), 53
Herder, Johann Gottgried, 85 Moses, Siegfried, xxiv, 60
kenan.qxd 5/16/2003 9:30 AM Page 139
INDEX ) 139
Mosse, George L., 105 n.50 T
Mussolini, Benito, 85
Tabenkin, Yitzhak, 7
Myers, David N., ix, 94 n.14
Taeubler, Eugen, xv
Tagore, Rabindranath, 96 n.42
N
Tal, Uriel, xxvi, 88
Namier, Lewis, xv Talmon, Jacob, xxvi, 53, 59, 84–86, 89
Nebuchadnezzar, 6, 15 Tamir, Shmuel, 70, 71
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxiii Tchernikhowsky, Saul, 96 n.42
Nora, Pierre, xiii Temkin-Berman, Batia, 40
Nurok, Mordecai, 16, 17 Tenenbaum-Tamrof, Mordechai, 40
Nussbaum, Y., 12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiv
Trumpeldor, Yosef, 7, 99 n.12
P Trunk, Isaiah, 106 n.64
Plotnicka, Frumke, 7 U
Porat, Dina, 89 n.37, 95
Urbach, Efraim, 53, 55
R Uveeler, Mark, 52
Uziel, Ben Zion, 16
Reisman, Abraham, 23
Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 50, 51, 97 n.62 V
Robinson, Jacob, 52, 56, 80
Rosenberg, Hans, xv Volkov, Shulamit, 88, 89
Rosenblatt, Gad, 39
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 85 W
Warhaftig, Zerah, 15
S
Wein, Abraham, 74
Schneerson, Fischel, xxi-xxii Weinberg, Sylvia, 22
Scholem, Gershom, xv, xxi, xxiii-xxv, 53, Weitz, Yechiam, 89
79, 97 n.65 Weitz, Yosef, 46–47, 55, 56
Schwarz, Leo, 22, 31 Wtthoiser, Simhah, 67
Schweiger, Moshe, 33, 107 n.85
Segev, Tom, 44, 90, 91 Y
Sereni, Enzo, 9
Ya’ari, Meir 12
Shabbetai, K., 81, 82
Yablonka, Hanna, 90
Shalitan, Levi, 22
Yahil (Hoffman), Haim, 10, 14, 54
Shamir, Moshe, 78
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, xiii, xiv
Shapira, Anita, 13, 89
Yosiphon, xiii
Shaver, Emma, 22
Young, James E., 7
Shazar, Zalman, 49
Shenhabi, Mordechai, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50
Shilansky, Dov, 115 n.34 Z
Shner, Zvi, 39 Zertal, Idith, 90, 91
Shneurson, Yitzhak, 45, 46 Zimmerman, Moshe, 89, 91
Spinoza, Baruch, xviii Zuckerman, Yitzhak (Antek), 11, 14, 33,
Srole, Leo, 21 48, 91, 92
Zur, Yaakov, 46

The Evolution of Israeli Historiography

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The Evolution of Israeli Historiography

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Between Memory and

Between Memory and History

The Evolution of Israeli Historiography

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek.

© 2003 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

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Part One: Different Perceptions of the Holocaust:

Part Two: Politics of Memory and Historiography

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I owe a great intellectual debt to my mentor and dear friend, Saul

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Orna Kenan’s study investigates a new domain in the historiography of the

The main emphasis of Orna Kenan’s study is upon the evolution of

Between History and Memory: The “Twilight Zone”

of the Holocaust, a related move in its historiography also took place.

The Silence of Post-War Historiography

Jerusalem scholar of Jewish mysticism, concurred:

In addition to the proximity of the trauma, it may be possible to claim

For example, like his colleagues at the Hebrew University, Joseph

convinced us of the truth of the Biblical statement: ‘But amongst these

ally unite in a march of death.” 38

Despite their rhetoric and outcry, however, the Jerusalem scholars

If there is no God, Klausner contended, all is permissible because all is rel-

assimilation and accommodation was influenced by his own experiences

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DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST ) 3

idated the Zionist contention in favor of a Jewish national life in Eretz

The Yishuv’s approach to the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was affected,

This negative image, expressed in insensitivity and indifference

Indeed, the arguments in Hayyim Hazaz’s well-known short story, “The

Yudke’s dismissive depiction of exilic Jewish history reflected the

decades. Soldiers and emissaries’ reports described the survivors as

names of Abba Kovner, Chaika Grossman, Vitka Kempner, Tosia Altman

The “distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’“ was conspicuously expressed

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The Survivors and the Jewish

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 21

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 23

and murders that swept over liberated Poland, Romania, Hungary,

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 25

the fourteenth of Iyar, was rejected by Zionist organizations in Palestine

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 27

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 29

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 31

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 33

SURVIVORS AND JEWISH FIGHTERS IN DP CAMPS ) 35

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POLITICS OF MEMORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ) 39

POLITICS OF MEMORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ) 41

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The Israeli Representation

The proposal to establish a national institution to commemorate the

ism; the establishment of a monument to the six million victims, to the

ISRAELI REPRESENTATION OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE 1950 S ) 45

ISRAELI REPRESENTATION OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE 1950 S ) 47

Yad Vashem also opposed Kahana’s attempts during the 1950s, to

ISRAELI REPRESENTATION OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE 1950 S ) 49

ISRAELI REPRESENTATION OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE 1950 S ) 51

raphy,”48 on collecting raw data, functioning, in fact, as chroniclers rather