Volume 40, Number 16 · October 7, 1993
The Politics of Memory
By Amos Elon
Among Israelis at the end of World War II there was, at first, a stunned silence about the revelations of the Holocaust: a mixture of awe and shame. Older people suffered from pangs of conscience and guilt at not having been able to do something to prevent the disaster or at least reduce its dimensions. There was also an inability, frequently noted, on the part of younger, native-born Israelis to deal sympathetically with Holocaust survivors. This was, at least partly, a result of standard Zionist education and propaganda. Generations of youngsters had been brought up to believe that the existence of the Diaspora was not only a catastrophe but a disgrace. Jewish victims of Nazism were often thought to have gone 'like sheep' to the slaughter. I remember a Hebrew textbook, widely used in Israeli high schools until at least the late Fifties, which included the following analysis of the Hebrew poet Bíalik's great lament on the Kishinev pogrom of 1903: 'This poem depicts the mean brutality of the assailants and the disgraceful shame and cowardice of the Jews of the Diaspora shtetl.'
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