The History and Challenge at Yad V’Shem, by Aliyah Donsky, Princeton University ’14
For more photos, click here.
Today, like each of our days, was incredibly challenging. We began the morning in the spirit of our trip; seeking to achieve a greater understanding of the unending complications of Israeli society, today, with a focus on our collective memory of the Shoah, the Holocaust, and its implications. To do so, we first traveled to Yad V’Shem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.
The name of the museum comes from the biblical verse, “And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial (yad) and a name (v’shem) that shall not be cut off,” and with its dual function as a museum and a memorial, Yad V’Shem is true to the name. Through images, artifacts, and testimonies, the museum becomes a memorial to the victims and survivors of the horrors of the Holocaust. The museum itself is designed to transport the visitor through this narrative. Through a one-way path, one wanders from room to room, utterly overwhelmed by everything portrayed within, unable to turn and go back, each space physically descending as the exhibits demonstrate the progressively lower points of our darkest period. The path only begins to ascend toward the very end of the sequence, as the war comes to a close and liberation finally arrives.
The experience of visiting Yad V’Shem is undeniably powerful. Although my fourth visit, it felt as if it was my first, indeed, the reactions of our group members were immeasurably strong, regardless of a range of familiarity with either the Shoah or Israel itself. So yes, this was a challenging experience emotionally. Grappling with the pure pain we saw confers upon us a heavy weight. Made even more difficult by the way the museum ends. At the final point, the walls that have served to pin the visitor in give way to an absolutely stunning view of Jerusalem. Described by a member of our group as a pair of arms thrown wide, the memorial, and so our history, seems to offer us the solution in the State of Israel. Yet, as we drink in the view and accept its promise, we are unwittingly accepting its conflicts and complexities; the breathtaking view includes the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Thus, the relationship between the Holocaust and the State of Israel is a tricky one, in that we often tiptoe around the subject, knowing that the state is justified by so much more, but easily brought into the mentality that the relationship is entirely causal. In trying to wrestle with this muddy subject, we met with famous Holocaust scholar and historian Amos Goldberg later that afternoon. Yes, Goldberg spoke with us about the horrors of the Holocaust, but our discussion was much more about what we do with the collective memory of those horrors. He talked about that weight. He suggested that, though the fears made prominent in our thinking by the Shoah are not at all unfounded, we are privy, by witness, to the powerfully positive combination of understanding and responsibility that accompanies the burden. Rather than use those memories to sow more fear, he suggested, our victory over oppression now gives us the opportunity to motivate positive change.
This discussion certainly began to clarify the muddiness, but I still felt at a bit of a loss. Throughout my life, I have indeed seen this mentality put into practice; I have always been proud to belong to a people who have been at the forefront at every civil and human rights movement, who use the countless stories of our own oppression to push for the release of others from theirs. Yet, something stops us in our own backyard. All day it baffled me; in every other situation, our survival of the Shoah has been our motivation for real reform, but when issues of subjugation come up in regard to the Palestinian population, we cling instead to the flip side of that weight, to the terminology and imagery of fear.
I was not alone in faltering at this point in the process of understanding; perhaps it’s the reason for all the tiptoeing. Yet, through the discussion and debates of our powerhouse group, I have come as close to comprehension as I think I can.
The day was not just challenging in that it was difficult, it actively issued us a challenge. This responsibility seems to be framed by Hillel’s famous three questions, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” Our challenge seems to be to appreciate the need to be for ourselves, the element of justification that legitimately links Israel and the Holocaust; to fulfill the responsibility to those beyond ourselves, using our sense of righteousness to move from fear to motivation when dealing with Israel’s very real and serious flaws; and to know that the window is closing and our time is now.
Aliyah
Aliyah Donsky
Princeton University ’14
June 17, 2011
