Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and
influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli
society. Through intensive participant observation, group
discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author
demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape
of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a
rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims,
victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By
viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains,
by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and
survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies
at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family
backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the
State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah.
These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and
fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented
society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice
to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms
of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further
questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the
demise of the last living witnesses.
Jackie Feldman lectures in Social Anthropology at Ben Gurion
University, Beersheba, Israel. His areas of interest are
anthropology of religion, collective memory, pilgrimage, and
tourism. He has published on Holocaust memory and pilgrimages to
the Second Temple and worked as a tour guide for Christian pilgrims
to the Holy Land.
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