Holocaust Commemoration

"Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) is a unique figure in Soviet music. A Jewish-Polish composer, he was born and raised in Warsaw, but fled to the Soviet Union following the outbreak of WWII. He left his family behind, never to see them again; they perished in the Holocaust. He found acceptance in the USSR and quickly made a name for himself as a composer, establishing a close friendship with none other than Dmitri Shostakovich. From 1942, Weinberg’s father-in-law was Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Mikhoels’ state-sanctioned assassination in 1948 signalled another dark time for Weinberg, as a period of official anti-semitism began in the USSR. Weinberg’s family links to the 1952-3 ‘Doctor’s Plot’ lead to him being arrested and imprisoned for several months in 1953. As a result of such hardships, much of Weinberg’s music was commemorative in nature, culminating in his 1967-8 opera The Passenger. The opera is unique for directly dealing with the Holocaust, having much of its on-stage action set in Auschwitz itself.
In this paper, I explore how Weinberg sought to come to terms with such hardships through his music; how he dealt with his own exile, imprisonment and with the effects of the Holocaust in general, and how he maintained a touching and humanistic idiom throughout all of his works. In particular, I will be examining The Passenger, and the obstacles it presents for modern-day audiences."

The scholarship on heritage has been preoccupied with discussions of conflict and discord. But might heritage not also be deployed for conciliatory functions after national trauma? Kazimierz, the historical Jewish district of Cracow, Poland is a unique urban space whose recent Jewish-themed development both reflects and extends grassroots Polish-Jewish relationship building in the post-Holocaust, post-Communist era. It is one of the few sites in the world today where (non-Polish) Jews and (non-Jewish) Poles regularly encounter one another. Based on the everyday interactions and understandings of local participants, rather than topdown memorial schemes or official proclamations of the achievement or expectation of reconciliation, this paper considers heritage spaces and landscapes as key sites for conciliatory civil society development through meaningful engagement with difficult histories.

This special issue addresses the possible connections and mutual benefits of examining together two analytic concepts – memory and periphery. These concepts receive much attention in various scholarly discussions, yet they have done so rather independently from each other. The potential applications and utilities of combining memory and periphery and the epistemic insights they provide for various disciplins are presented in the different contributions to this issue.

The Willed and the Unwilled Monument: Judenplatz Vienna and Riegl’s Denkmalpflege takes a new approach to the competition for the Monument and Memorial for the Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Austria. Noting the complication of the case by the discovery of medieval archaeological remains on Vienna’s Judenplatz, and the ambivalence of the jury in choosing a sculptural project that made no reference to these remains, Mechtild Widrich turns to a lucid source of thinking about memory and public building, Alois Riegl’s essay on the monument cult (Denkmalkultus) and the newspaper articles and government documents he produced on the same subject. Through Riegl’s distinction between “willed” and “unwilled” monuments, and the force the latter exert on the subjectivity of modern spectators, the choice and execution of Rachel Whiteread’s “Nameless Library” in Vienna becomes intelligible, as do wider trends in restoration and commemoration of the late 1980s and 1990s.

מוזיאון "יד לילד" בבית לוחמי הגטאות, שנחנך בשנת 1995, הגשים חזון ישן של מייסדי הבית להקים אתר הנצחה לילדים שנספו בשואה. יוזמי הפרוייקט - החל בהנהלה, עבור באדריכלים וכלה במעצבים ובאוצרים - התלבטו ביחס לרעיון הכללי של מוזיאון שכזה: מהו הצורך שאותו נדרש המוזיאון לספק – אתר הנצחה לילדים קורבנות השואה או מוסד חינוכי עבור הילדים של היום? לשאלה זו ניתנו תשובות שונות בשלבים שונים של הפרוייקט, והיא השפיעה במידה ניכרת על עיצוב המוזיאון ותפקודו עד היום. המוזיאון, שבתחילה תוכנן כמצבה קודרת לילדים שנרצחו, הפך למוסד חינוכי יצירתי ששואף להעביר את חווית השואה לקהל הצעיר. באמצעות מסמכים השמורים בארכיון בית לוחמי הגטאות העוסקים בהקמת "יד לילד", מאמר זה מתחקה אחר התהליך משלב הרעיון ועד לתצורתו הסופית.

Weinberg’s background is unique among Soviet composers; he fled eastwards from Poland in 1939 and was
accepted into the USSR. He established a successful career, working with the most prominent Jewish musicians
of his day and praised as ‘the leading Soviet-Jewish composer’. Having narrowly escaped Nazi Germany,
Weinberg fell victim to Stalinist anti-semitism and was imprisoned for several months in 1953. Upon his release,
he made it his life’s mission to commemorate those who had fallen victim to atrocities.
Jewish themes in Weinberg’s music serve a dual purpose; to commemorate victims of the Holocaust, including
his parents and sister, and to reassert his Jewish heritage, despite his diaspora to a less-than-hospitable climate.
An internal struggle can be traced across his music, to reconcile between the need to celebrate his heritage as
well as to celebrate the USSR as his ‘saviours’ from the Nazis. In this paper, I explore the experience of Jewish
composers in the Soviet Union through Weinberg’s case study. I also outline Weinberg’s commemorative works
including, most controversial of all, his opera The Passenger. The opera is provocative, not least because the onstage
action is set in Auschwitz itself. This provides fresh challenges for modern-day audiences and critics alike.
The Passenger also calls into question the appropriateness of commemoration through depiction, alongside
Weinberg’s struggle to represent his displacement through music.

In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory "memory work" has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski's I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement's Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana's Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in "repertoires" of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history-a "what if" proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.

Conducting oral history interviews or using them as research and educational resources requires the (mostly tacit) background knowledge necessary for understanding an interview or its excerpts. Taking the topic of commemoration and remembrance as a case in point, and analyzing fifteen interviews in the Czech and Slovak languages from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, this article aims to consider the oral history interview as an interactional accomplishment. I argue that in producing oral histories, the interviewer and the interviewee draw on linguistically universal and topically specific knowledge, which are also the resources audiences use to grasp what the interview addresses. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationships between these notions and their connection to different temporalities of oral history interviews and levels of understanding. Finally, I outline future research directions and questions inspired by this framework. By studying the linguistic and interactional constitution of oral history interviews, we can arrive at a better understanding of the very nature of oral history that can inform the use of archived interviews in research and education.

In this fascinating book, the planning and building of Yad Vashem, Israel's central and most important institution for commemorating the Holocaust, merits an outstanding in-depth account. Following the development of Yad Vashem since 1942, when the idea to commemorate the Holocaust in Eretz-Israel was raised for the first time, the narrative continues until the inauguration of Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial in 1976. The prolonged and complicated planning process of Yad Vashem's various monuments reveals the debates, failures and achievements involved in commemorating the Holocaust. In reading this thought-provoking description, one learns how Israel's leaders aspired both to fulfill a moral debt towards the victims of the Holocaust a well as to make Yad Vashem an exclusive center of Holocaust commemoration both in the Jewish world and beyond.

Książka Marty Kubiszyn to dobrze przemyślana i precyzyjnie skonstruowana monografia podsumowująca wieloletnie zainteresowania naukowe autorki. Wpisuje się ona w kulturoznawczy nurt badań nad pamięcią zbiorową Zagłady, wnosząc istotny wkład w tę dziedzinę zarówno na poziomie teoretycznym, jak i opisowym. Do badań pamięciologicznych autorka wprowadza kategorię „współpamięć”, którą definiuje jako […] poszerzenie pamięci wspólnoty rozumianej geograficznie o świadomość obecności innego w danym miejscu. Proces poszerzania pamięci jest tu przedstawiony jako przedmiot działalności animatorów kultury, którzy odkrywają i dokumentują zapomniane lub wymazane ślady przeszłości, by tworzyć nowe, postpamięciowe narracje, przyjmując kształt projektów artystycznych i edukacyjnych.

Fragment recenzji wydawniczej dr hab. Małgorzaty Fabiszak, prof. UAM

"לספר לכם? קשה לעשות זאת, וגם לא נחוץ. אתם כבר יודעים לא מעט. ומה שאתם יודעים כבר מסוגל לזעזע. אינני רוצה לחזור. אני רק רוצה להוסיף מה שכמדומני אינכם יודעים: על נשי ישראל".
פסיה שרשבסקי, ניצולת אושוויץ, נאום בעצרת עם, תל-אביב, עשרים בדצמבר 1945.

מה בין נשים לגברים שחוו את השואה? מי הן גיבורות השואה בחברה הישראלית? מה מחדש הדיון המגדרי בנושא החברה הישראלית והשואה, ומה הקשר למעמד האשה בישראל? הספר אל האחות הלא ידועה מציע תשובות לשאלות אלה, כפי שהן מתבררות מחקר השיח הציבורי בישראל בעשור הראשון למדינה ובימי משפט אייכמן (1961). במרכזו נוכחותן המסיבית והאינטנסיבית של נשים בשואה בשיח זה בתקופה זו, על סיפוריהן האישיים ודימוייהן כגיבורות בתקופת השואה: מצביה לובטקין, מבכירי האוחזים בנשק במרד גטו ורשה, ורבקה יוסלבסקה שעלתה מבור מתים ובו בתה שנרצחה, דרך לנה קיכלר-זילברמן עם מאה הילדים שלה, גיבורת התרבות אנה פראנק, גיזי פליישמן מסלובקיה והאנזי בראנד מהונגריה, שפעלו להצלה המונית באמצעות משא ומתן עם נושאי משרות בשלטון הגרמני, ועד ורה אלכסנדר, שהיתה קאפו באושוויץ. נוכחותן זו מלמדת בין היתר כי לטענה הישנה בדבר שתיקת הניצולים והשתקתם בשנות המדינה הראשונות נדרשת חשיבה מחודשת, שכן החברה הישראלית שמעה והשמיעה סיפורים על השואה, ולא פעם גם גילתה אוזן קשבת ולב פתוח.

with Israel Rozenson
in Hebrew
in: Michal Ben Ya'akov, Gershon Greenberg & Sigalit Rozmarin (eds.), That Terrible Summer..., Lithuania 1941, Jerusalem: Efrata College of Education, 2013, pp. 169-181

"בתוך: מ' בן יעקב, ג' גרינברג, ס' רוזמרין (עורכים), הקיץ הנורא ההוא... 70 שנה להשמדת הקהילות היהודיות בערי השדה בליטא, מכללת אפרתה, ירושלים, תשע"ג, עמ'  181-169.

The relevance of nostalgia and memory in the constitution of identity narratives of individuals and nation states is a well-documented phenomenon. Yet little is known about the function of nostalgia in the context of Israeli and Polish relations. The Holocaust experience has changed in dramatic ways how Jews and Poles relate to the category of nostalgia. In this essay Swetlana Boym's distinction between 'reflective nostalgia' and 'restorative nostalgia' will serve as a starting point for a discussion about the function of nostalgia in the works of Israeli artist Yael Bartana and Polish artist Rafał Betlejewski, and about its role in facilitating the formation of new perceptions of the self and of the other and of new understandings of homelands.