Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust

Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust in Palestine and Israel, 1942-53Author(s): Dalia OferSource: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1996), pp. 567-595Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/261021 .

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Dalia Ofer

Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust in Palestine and Israel, 1942-53

The term Shoah - usually translated into English as Holocaust - did not become the standard term describing the catastrophe that befell the Jews of Europe during the second world war until some years after the war ended. In this article I propose to illus- trate that linguistic conceptualization of the fate of European Jewry under the nazis reveals the process of internalization of the Holocaust among the Jews of Palestine - the Yishuv -and Israel. The period in question begins in 1942, when the first public announcement on the Final Solution - or the decision by the nazis to annihilate European Jewry - was made, until August 1953,1 when the Israeli Knesset (parliament) ratified the Yad Vashem Law (YV Law)2 - The Law of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism.

In this article I employ content analysis to examine the meaning and frequency of words used. I then analyse the connection between the content and the terms used to express similar or different meanings. The nuances of words and expressions are studied within the framework of events and occasions that led to their being uttered or written, and the general style of contemporary written and oral discourse. Hebrew, the language spoken daily by more than one third of the population - whether native born or veteran immigrants - was used at all formal public events. Others, like the founding fathers of the Yishuv, adopted Hebrew as their major means of literary and oral expression.3

I have chosen to examine the texts that mainly address the issues connected with commemorating the Holocaust, since they portray interpretations of the events and suggest how the Holocaust was instilled in the collective memory. These texts reveal the connection between the reality of the speaker or writer, their vision in relation to Zionism and the society of the Yishuv. As such, they reflect the understanding of the role of remembrance in shaping the social and cultural life of society.

Because it is difficult, and sometimes impossible to transmit

Journal of Contemporary History Copyright ? 1996 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 31 (3), 567-595.



Journal of Contemporary History

the exact meaning of a word or expression in translation, trans- literation of the Hebrew will often appear next to the English.

The term Shoah, which became the standard word associated with the destruction of European Jewry, was used infrequently until 1946. The word that was often used by Jews in Palestine and in the Diaspora, both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, was hurban destruction. Hurban was the traditional Hebrew term to describe the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the exile from Eretz Israel. Jews extended the concept to include their sufferings as a result of pogroms in medieval and modern times, as well as their loss of national independence in ancient times.4

It was not until the summer of 1947 that Yad Vashem, an institution established in Palestine in 1946 to commemorate those Jews annihilated by the nazis, used the word Shoah in the title of a conference dedicated to research into Shoah and gevurah (Holocaust and heroism).5 For a number of years both hurban and Shoah were words used in public discourse until Shoah became the dominant term. This was the outcome of a process which reflected the internalization and conceptualization of the events of the second world war and their impact on the Jews.

In the Bible, Shoah denotes a terrible and unforeseen individual or collective disaster. In the books of Zephaniah and Isaiah, it is connected with the wrath of God and the punishment he inflicted through defeat by a great enemy. In the books of Proverbs and Psalms, Shoah is used in connection with a disaster that befalls an individual as punishment for his evil deeds. The biblical subtext hints that when a Shoah occurred it was sudden and unforeseen, and that the event in question came as a shock to the individual or group. In the book of Job, Shoah appears in the context of a terrible famine that connotes a cosmic disaster, but here too, the issue of sin and punishment is central. The elements of sin and punishment on the one hand and surprise on the other may seem to contradict each other since it would seem that the sinful deserve punishment. However, it was the scope of the calamity that was the source of astonishment.6

Scholars who have examined the use of Shoah to describe the destruction of European Jewry7 have found that it was used in

political and intellectual discourse. It related to both the fate of Germany's Jews prior to 1939 and the situation of the Jews in

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Ofer: Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust

nazi-occupied Europe. The use of Shoah implies the search for a special vocabulary not commonly used when discussing past destruction in Jewish history such as pogroms. Its acceptance, in the late 1940s, as a standard term to describe the fate of Europe's Jews between 1933 and 1945, demonstrated a certain understanding that Jewish suffering during the war was unprecedented within the continuum of Jewish historical experience. It was another indication of the understanding that the Holocaust was not only a larger scale of death, humiliation and suffering, but something more. Beyond the suffering, the term Shoah pointed to both the racial antisemitic motivation of the nazis to annihilate all Jews, and the response of the Jews towards the policy of annihilation. This implies a more comprehensive meaning of the term Shoah, and chronologically it occurred after what I would define as the end of the first stage in the understanding of the information on the destruction process and its scope.

The first stage in the conceptualization of the Holocaust that occurred in the Yishuv, while information about the Final Solution was still being gathered, verified and integrated, was not completed until a face-to-face encounter with survivors took place. For it was not until these survivors began giving their per- sonal accounts of what had befallen them and entire communities that a new and more complete realization of the meaning and scope of the destruction, and its impact on the Yishuv and the Jewish people, began to emerge.

While modem use of Shoah retained such traditional meanings as shock and catastrophe beyond understanding, the notion of sin and punishment implied in the biblical context disappeared. Not only did the non-religious leaders of the Yishuv reject it, but even religious Zionists were unable to relate the concept of sin and punishment to the event of the Holocaust.8

Shoah was introduced in a very general sense in the first call to the public by the Committee of Four, established in September 1939 by the Jewish Agency to aid Polish Jewish refugees in the Balkans. It referred to both Poland and the Jews. 'Poland, and the Jews who live there are suffering a Shoah the like of which has never happened before. Poland has been destroyed by Hitler's Germany and [the remains] divided with the Soviet Union.'9

In 1940, a book entitled The Shoah of Polish Jewry was

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published in Palestine. It included testimonies and articles by a number of people who were in Poland when the war broke out but left shortly after. Among the contributors was Appolinaire Hartglass, a Polish Jewish Zionist leader who participated in the first Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Warsaw and left Poland a few weeks later. In the introduction, Hartglass warned that if the war lasted for a number of years, Poland would become a graveyard of the Jewish people through the nazis' systematic annihilation of Poles and Jews.'? Hartglass's prediction, voiced after the first few weeks of the occupation, was based on observations and his short experience as a member of the Judenrat. His use of Shoah was expressive of his claim that the nazis planned systematically to murder both the Jews and the Poles a thesis that was not shared by most of those who were then describing events after Poland was occupied." Even in 1942 and 1943, when more people were beginning to accept that Hitler's intention was to exterminate Judaism and the Jews, there was still no clear notion of a nazi directive on the carrying-out of a destruction process. When the word Shoah was used, it indicated a search for an accurate term to describe an unbearable reality.12 In The Blue and Yellow Star of David, Dina Porat notes that even Hartglass did not believe -at the end of 1942 -the extent of the killings of Jews in Poland.3

The term Shoah was also used by several Jewish writers and

poets in Palestine in July 1942, at an emergency conference. The main issue of this conference was the response to the information gathered from Europe about the fate of the Jews under nazi occu-

pation. The speakers expressed their fears and anger concerning the fate of European Jewry and reflected the feeling of helplessness shared by many in Palestine who were cut off from their fellow Jews in their time of suffering. Their descriptions of the fate of European Jewry depict deportations, massacres, death. The use of words and images such as halalei herev milhamah (those who died by the sword of war); halalei ra'av vetzinah (those who died of hunger and cold); halalei edei ra'al begetaot hatzarim (those who died from the poisonous fumes in the cramped ghettos); bayam ubayabashah uvekhol makom (on land and on sea or in any other place)'4 demonstrate that the writers relied on information gathered from the press. Even so, they did not com-

prehend that a Shoah was really under way. The famous poet Saul Tchernichowsky used Shoah in a play on

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words in the phrase tzav hasha'ah tzav hashoah (the call of the hour, the call of the Shoah'5) demonstrating his limited understanding of the horrible reality. Shoah was used to express not only the very extreme and appalling situation but also to indicate that many aspects of the social and political fate of the Jews would change dramatically after the war. The experiences of the Jews in occupied Europe, and the fact that they were cut off from the Zionist movement and the Yishuv, as well as from the rest of the Diaspora at such a critical juncture in their lives (or deaths), were harbingers of problems for the reintegration of the survivors in future Jewish life. True, these important issues were connected with the war, and did demonstrate that the war was already being viewed as a watershed in Jewish history, after which the future would differ greatly from what had earlier been anticipated. But nowhere in all this was it ever apparent that anyone in the Yishuv understood Shoah in the sense of total annihilation or that anyone envisioned a Europe left almost without Jews as a result of the nazi murder machinery. Plans for the future were based on the image of a small Yishuv and a large, although weakened, Diaspora of European survivors.'6 Indeed, most writers reacted to the war in Europe by calling on young people to join Jewish units in the British armed forces, rather than organizing rescue missions.'7 This limited understanding of the events may help explain why the word hurban, which was used to describe calamities in the past, rather than Shoah, dominated public discourse during this period.

During 1943, in reaction to information about the Final Solution and news of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the use of the word Shoah became more common.'8 At that stage, it was clear that the events in Europe were part of a calculated and systematic nazi policy to annihilate all European Jews and this introduced a different dimension to people's understanding of the killing. In an effort to integrate this knowledge, the term Shoah was being perceived within the continuum of Jewish history. People talked of it in terms of the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the persecution of Jews during medieval times."9 The phrase hashoah hagedolah shebasho'ot (the Shoah, the greatest of all Holocausts) utilizes the plural (sho'ot), which implies that there were other similar events in Jewish history.20 But those who viewed the Shoah as a worldwide catastrophe in which Polish intellectuals were murdered and Czech villages like Lidice were

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wiped out along with its inhabitants in retribution for the murder of Reinhardt Heydrich in June 1942, recognized it as a break from civilized human behaviour. Fishel Shneurson, a psycho- logist and member of Al Domi (Don't Keep Silent), a group formed to mobilize the world to pressure the nazis into stopping the murders, resented the use of the word since he felt its introduction only paralysed people; against a Shoah such as was being depicted, all action was futile.21

Toward the end of the war, as an increasing number of Jews in Palestine and elsewhere realized that the nazis had almost succeeded in their goal of obliterating European Jewry, the difference in scope between nazi actions and all previous anti- Jewish brutality became more evident than ever.22 For now more detailed information on how the nazis had utilized technology to improve the efficiency of their killing-machine distanced the Shoah even further from previous antisemitic acts. The loneliness of the Jews during the war due to the willingness with which governments and local populations collaborated with the nazis in rounding up and brutalizing the Jews added yet another element to the concept of Shoah toward the end of the war and in its aftermath. The effect of the shocking loss of human life began to be seen as having an impact on the future of the entire Jewish people.23

Once interest focused on issues concerning the future of the Jewish people and the Yishuv, the impact of the Shoah became central. Efforts to reconstruct Jewish life were placed at the heart of Jewish concerns. The changing demography of the Jews called upon American Jews to play a major role in relief projects devoted to ensuring that Jewish life would survive. That Zionism and Palestine were central to helping Holocaust survivors rebuild their lives, as well as to the future of the Jewish people, was accepted - or at least considered - by even such hard-line oppo- nents of the Zionist idea and movement as the American Jewish Committee, which devoted its efforts to ensure civil and political rights of Jews in the United States and the world over. Aliyah, or emigration to Palestine, therefore became more than a means to advance Zionist aspirations. It was now considered crucial to the future of the Jewish people as a whole.24

In July 1947, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem hosted the first World Congress for Jewish Studies (WCJS). The two-day conference was entitled, 'Research on the Shoah and Heroism in

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Our Time'. This title contained an additional aspect to the concept of Shoah: the element of heroism, which gained a new meaning in the discussions.25

The term Shoah uGevurah represented a new concept, combining as it did two contested terms. This combination set the stage for integrating the catastrophe that was the Holocaust into public awareness. The integration of Holocaust and heroism was a further step in extending the concept Shoah to include not only the appalling acts of the nazis but also the entire period of the Holocaust, with all its implications and after-effects. In this discussion of Shoah uGevurah, I shall also clarify other linguistic elements in the period 1943-7 and then link these with the second stage of conceptualization, the years 1948-53.

Scholars viewed the association of the Shoah (Holocaust) uGevurah (and heroism) as a means of evading a true confronta- tion with the tragedy. Evil was perpetrated and manifested not only in the wholesale slaughter and destruction of European Jewish life, but also - in the words of Yitzchak Greenboim, a prominent leader of Polish Jewry until 1934, and later a member of the Jewish Agency Executive - in helplessness, in loss of human dignity and in the humiliation of the powerless.26 Shoah represented the predicament and tragedy itself, while gevurah expressed one reaction to this crisis. In other words, it denoted the resistance, or more precisely, what was perceived as the opposition to the lack of Jewish resistance.

The phrase portraying the Jews as going 'like sheep to slaughter' was written in December 1942, by the poet Abba Kovner in the Vilna Ghetto. Those same words were also expressed in the discussions of the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem on 18 January 1943 on the establishment of the Rescue Com- mittee to Save European Jews.27 The notion of Jewish passivity in the face of nazi plans of extermination began to be viewed with some reluctance, as reports came in describing large numbers of Jewish dead as a result of deportations and the mass killings in the Soviet territories. The testimonies of a group of Palestinian Jews who returned to Palestine from Eastern Europe in October 1942 were one of the sources from which such judgments were drawn.28

Porat demonstrates the complexity and ambivalence of the criticism implied by this concept.29 She rightfully claims that

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the political and intellectual elite, most of whom had emigrated to Eretz Israel from Eastern Europe, found it difficult to charac- terize Jewish behaviour under the nazis so harshly. For they could not differentiate between the quality of people in the Yishuv and those in the Diaspora and, moreover, felt that it was illogical to expect heroism from people living under the yoke of nazi terror. But even this justification of the alleged lack of resistance on the part of European Jews was eschewed by those who

pointed out that the Yishuv might have found itself in the same situation as European Jewry if the Allies had not won the Battle of El Alamein (Egypt) in autumn 1942.30

The first ideas about commemorating the Shoah included

gevurah as central to the notion of remembrance. The initial proposal, presented to the Jewish National Fund by kibbutz member Mordechai Shenhabi in September 1942 and published in the

press, with some modifications, in May 1945, was entitled 'Yad Vashem, A Memorial to the Destroyed Diaspora'. Shenhabi's proposal called for the commemoration of those who died in the Holocaust, whom he called halalim, the same word used for fallen soldiers. 'The number of our people who have fallen in the war and in pogroms', he wrote, 'has reached millions.' Shenhabi went on to explain his motivation for commemorating these victims: their relatives, who might have said kaddish for the fallen, had also been exterminated. Thus, it was the responsibility of the Yishuv to establish a proper way of remembering them. Shenhabi's proposal contained two more words that eventually entered the public lexicon in reference to Jews murdered by the nazis: korbanot (victims) and kedoshim (the holy ones or martyrs). He included the institutions of Jewish learning and the whole world of culture and values that disappeared in the Holocaust, along with the murdered individuals and obliterated communities that he characterized as halalim, korbanot and kedoshim. The manifestations of gevurah in Shenhabi's proposal referred to the heroism displayed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, by Jews who

joined the partisans and in the 'heroism of individuals- the old and the young, men and women'.3" His broad interpretation of heroism, then, included those who actually engaged in battle

against the enemy, as well as all Jews in nazi hands who under- took other, undefined actions. Gevurah was closely tied to destruction (hurban), and was not then viewed as a separate phenomenon.

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Shenhabi's proposal labelled two other groups as heroic: Jewish soldiers who were fighting in Allied armies, and members of the Yishuv who volunteered to serve in the British army. He presented their heroism in the context of Jewish activism, in contrast to the majority of Jews, who were not able to rise above passivity in the face of adversity.32 Thus, Shenhabi's proposal for commemoration did not limit such remembrance to the dead; it included Jews murdered by the nazis and every Jew who fought against the enemy, both dead and alive.

Another remembrance proposal presented in February 1946 to the Executive of the Jewish Agency was offered under the title 'Yad Vashem: To Those Who Fell in the Destruction; to the Ghetto Fighters; to Eradicated Jewish Communities; to the Fighters and the Fallen in the Field of Battle and to the Nation's Volunteers'.33 The term Shoah did not appear in these proposals. Adjectives used to describe the Diaspora were such as shesufah (torn apart), harevah (destroyed), and 'akudah (sacrificed). The images for people included 'the fallen', 'victims' (in Shenhabi's proposal), 'martyrs', 'soldiers' and 'heroes'.

Nine months later, in November 1946, a dichotomy appeared between Shoah and gevurah in the agreement to establish a commemorative institution, Yad Vashem, among the main bodies involved - the Va'ad Leumi (the National Committee - the body responsible for the Yishuv's internal affairs), the Jewish National Fund and the World Jewish Congress. The explanation of the name Yad Vashem was yad lahayalim shem lahallalim, or a 'monument (yad) to the soldiers (hayalim) and a memorial (shem) to the fallen (halalim)'.34 Here gevurah related to the Jewish soldiers in Allied armies and the volunteers from the Yishuv, including both those who joined the British army and the Yishuv emissaries who organized illegal emigration to Palestine. Partisans and ghetto fighters were not given a central role. A comparison between the texts of this proposal and that of May 1945 reveals that it was not until the latter proposal that the tragedy of those murdered and the heroism of those who engaged in battle against the nazi terror were connected. It is not clear whether this was a consequence of the encounter with survivors who were ghetto fighters and partisans, or whether it represented a wish to establish the importance of the Yishuv's efforts to reach and help save European Jewry.

The inclusion of the concept of gevurah was opposed by a

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number of people. Yoseph Sprinzak, a member of the ruling Va'ad Leumi and a leading member of Mapai (Ben-Gurion's workers' party) demanded that the separation of Jewish soldiers who lost their lives during the war and Jews who were annihilated by the nazis be maintained. The fallen soldiers, he said, were not a tragedy but an unfortunate result of war.3 Sprinzak's subtext was that the death of these soldiers had meaning and was not worthless. David Remez, head of the Va'ad Leumi and a prominent member of Mapai, pointed out that if their memory was not

specifically included in the commemoration project, they would not be remembered as Jews, but would be merged together with the soldiers in the army of the nation they fought with. If this

wrong were condoned, Remez said, the collective memory of the Shoah would be darkened even further.36

At the research conference held in 1947,37 Abba Kovner

challenged the view of gevurah as presented in the proposed pro- gramme of Yad Vashem, which called for a 'hill of remembrance' that would house two buildings: the house of the Shoah and the tent of gevurah. Visitors would pass from the house to the tent

through a map of Europe on which the destroyed communities were engraved. In Remez's presentation, this passage was intended to ease the spirit of the visitor by commemorating the

light of gevurah as well as the darkness of the Shoah.38 While Kovner was not opposed to the concept of darkness and light, he doubted that the youth of the Yishuv would grasp the meaning of the passage from the house to the tent, as they were to be placed in the general architecture of the hill of remembrance.39 To his

mind, this demanded an awareness of what he felt were the con- nections and the gap between the Shoah and gevurah.

Kovner then explained that, to him, the central issue in Shoah was the Jews' reaction to nazism and to Hitler's extermination

policy. Agreeing that passivity had been the response of the

majority, he repeated his claim that Jewish victims had gone to their deaths like 'sheep to slaughter'. And he blamed this reaction on the weak collective Jewish identity that had resulted from the

process of emancipation that had characterized Jewish life over the past generations. This had left Jews unprepared to confront nazi ideology and that questioned their individual self-identity. In contrast to other times of persecution, Kovner continued, Jews no longer shared a common Jewish vision. They were therefore

incapable, spiritually, of challenging a persecutor whose policies

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were based on racial ideology. It was only in this context, he maintained, that the real gevurah of those who stood up and fought could truly be appreciated. For, unlike other national groups whose resistance to the nazis could be counted in large numbers of actions and enemies killed, Jewish heroism or gevurah did not result from mass actions or account for many dead nazis. Gevurah could only be understood vis-a-vis the despair and the broken spirits of Jews awaiting their death. The few who struck out at their persecutors in a last desperate measure were heroes.

Kovner's words changed the meaning of gevurah, from the simplistic definition that correlated the number of soldiers, actions and casualties caused to the nazis, to embrace the state of mind that led to these actions. Gevurah described the actions of those who were able to grasp the reality of what was being perpetrated against the Jewish people as a whole. In Kovner's interpretation, it stood in contrast to the misconception of reality that led so many in the ghettos and camps to hope for rescue until the very end when they finally threw up their hands in despair while members of the Judenrat co-operated with their persecutors in the hope of saving the Jews.

The [true] catastrophe was not our defeat, but the fact that we were defeated without putting up any resistance. We were vanquished easily, and this was simple for our enemy because our resistance came so late. It was a most beautiful and shattering heroism that produced wonders, but it was lonely (gevurah meyutemet) from within.40

Kovner's interpretation of gevurah imbued Shoah with an additional internal meaning. For the tragedy of the Shoah was enhanced by the positive acts of gevurah that implied great criticism of the Diaspora and the mind-set that allowed the victims of nazi terror to go to their deaths 'as sheep to slaughter'. His dialectic interpretation produced a strong reaction both at the conference and in the press.4'

An interesting expression that appeared in the press, 'active and passive heroism', revealed the ambivalence of this writer and his difficulty in establishing a clear attitude toward the issue.42 After July 1947, the twin term Shoah uGevurah became more noticeable in both the press and public pronouncements, reveal- ing the desire of the youth movements, the ghetto fighters and the partisans to enhance their views on the necessity to fight the nazis

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and to resist going like 'sheep to slaughter'. The appearance of both words was an indication of the ongoing debate on the role of the resistance during the Holocaust and the activism and passivism in connection with heroism. The debate started within the ghettos between the members of the resistance and the Jewish councils and the public. The ghetto fighters, the partisans and members of youth movements, who in general identified with the resistance, hoped to persuade the rest of the survivors, and in particular the people in the Yishuv, that their views on the appropriate reaction to the nazis were right.

The political struggle for Jewish independence rendered these views more relevant, since the concept of Jewish heroism would be extended to include resistance against the British mandate and later the Arabs.43

'Reconstruction' (shikum) was an expression that entered public discourse in the aftermath of the second world war. Since it was clear that the Yishuv, the Diaspora and the world had failed to prevent the obliteration of Jewish life, the main goal of Zionism now became the reconstruction of the lives of the remnants of the Jewish people who had survived the Holocaust.44 Both 'reconstruction' and 'remnants' (sheerit) became part of the Zionist discourse, meant to convey the positive tasks of the Zionist movement after the destruction of European Jewry. These terms were connected with another concept central to Zionism: geulah (redemption). Geulah was used during the 1930s and the war years to describe the nature and goals of the building of Palestine. But in the aftermath of the war, during which the masses of Jews who were supposed to be redeemed had perished, it seemed almost absurd to use the term redemption. (I am not speaking here of religious Zionism, which, of course, continued to view redemption in the traditional manner.) Nonetheless, the element of redemption did not disappear altogether from the Zionist lexicon. It was connected with hatzalah (rescue), and the meaning of both words was broadened. Thus, rescue was seen not only as the direct and real act of saving lives, as it had been perceived during the Holocaust, but included all actions that would ensure the future of the Jews as a people - first and foremost, emigration to Palestine or the hope of a Jewish state. Rescue now included reconstruction - the reconstruction of individual and communal Jewish life - in Palestine.45 Thus, rescue and redemption, together, emerged as the new-old message of Zionism.46

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The expression Shoah utekumah ([and] rebirth) became very popular in Israeli educational discourse during the 1970s. A curriculum entitled 'From Shoah to Rebirth' reflected a causal relationship between the two.47 The origin of the concept, however, though not the term, stemmed from the late 1940s. Indeed, the events of the three years between the end of the war and the establishment of the State of Israel established a link between these phenomena. And public discourse reflected this link, albeit in a rather complex and ambivalent manner. The Zionist discourse on this issue can also be viewed in the context of Jewish reactions to catastrophes in general. Both Alan Mintz in his book Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, and David Roskies in his work, Against the Apocalypse. Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, relate to a predominant response of survivalism (or constructive survival) that is typical to Jewish culture in an effort to deal with the devastating experiences resulting from calamities. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi takes issue with their theories. She claims that the messianic reactions such as Sabbateanism were another response to disaster and may have led to a different result, as Gershon Scholem illus- trated.48 Zionist ideology and rhetoric reflected a more pragmatic survivalist approach towards the future of the Jewish people, which was the prevailing attitude after the Holocaust. The expressions konstruktivi (constructive), and shikum (reconstruction), or the term designating the survivors, Seherit hapletah (surviving remnants), within the context of building Palestine and Israel, manifested this basic perspective. In the following discussion on tekumah, I will further elaborate this issue.

In April 1945, in one of the early commemoration proposals by Liebele Goldberg, a member of Kibbutz Yagur, he explained his motivation as follows: 'It is of the utmost importance for us, the bereaved brothers and sisters, to turn the Shoah into a great political force that will be appropriate to our heroic tragedy.'49 In a May 1945 letter to the president of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, in which he endeavoured to convince the Zionist leadership to accept his commemoration proposal, Mordechai Shenhabi wrote: 'Mimilionim hahrugim movil hakesher lemilionim hahayim' - a bond directs the millions of dead to the millions who are still alive. [Therefore] it is important that the Zionist movement retain the right to establish the main commemoration site in Jerusalem.'50 While neither Goldberg nor

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Shenhabi had thoughts of turning the Shoah into a means of advancing Zionist goals, their references to the Shoah in connection with the commemoration contained a hidden subtext that sustained a functional message: it reinforced the responsibility of the Yishuv to bring the surviving remnant of European Jewry to Palestine.

As the proposals for a memorial to remember and honour Holocaust victims and heroes all called for the allocation of huge sums of money - at least ten million dollars - the issue of where these resources were to come from occupied a central role in their discussions. Those opposed to such a large-scale design contrasted it with the need for more 'constructive projects' (mifalim konstructiviim); but this Hebrew expression had long been associated with Zionism. It meant the building of Palestine, encompassing nothing less than the purchase of land to establish new settlements (and naming them after Diaspora communities that had disappeared during the war); the planting of trees in memory of the dead; establishing orphanages and schools for young survivors; and increasing illegal immigration. Thus the term demonstrated the Zionist perception that the only true Jewish response to the Shoah was to rebuild productive and creative Jewish life in Palestine, and sustain the link between death and renewed life.5 One article critical of the proposed Yad Vashem project stated with some irony: 'We were naive (temimim) to believe that the building of Palestine was a [sufficient] memorial to the [annihilated] Diaspora, ... that no other monument would be erected to reflect the renewal of Jewish history that is manifested in Zionism.'52

This motif was already apparent in December 1942, some weeks after information about the Final Solution was first publi- cized. The American branch of the Jewish National Fund had then earmarked special funds for the purchase of two million dunams of land in Palestine in memory of the two million Jews who had already perished, and for two new settlements, one of them to be called Am Yisrael Hai (the people of Israel live).53

Shoah utekumah conveyed additional Zionist nuance by stressing to both survivors and the Yishuv that life in the Diaspora was doomed. While this message in the context of Zionism seemed almost self-evident after 1945, the subtext uncovered new anxieties that the destruction of Diaspora communities and the loss of almost all their material possessions and cultural treasures

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might evoke a longing for the lost world. For the Yishuv, which generally identified with the trend in Zionism that negated all aspects of Diaspora life, was beginning to demonstrate signs of remorse. Without abandoning Zionist tenets, people were talking and writing about the diasporic past in a different tone. Adjec- tives depicting the Yishuv as an orphan, alone in a world of strangers, were becoming common, and life in the shtetl, with its sabbath candles and memories of parents' homes, was remembered with great nostalgia. The possibility that the negation of the Diaspora might turn into an affirmation of past life in Europe alarmed Zionist leaders, who emphasized tekumah and the notion that there was no future Jewish life except in a Jewish state.54 After 1948, larger groups of Jews from Islamic countries who emigrated to Israel did not share the negation of Diaspora. Their attitude to Diaspora life was another factor in the trans- formation of the negation of the Diaspora.

A new element penetrated the concept of Shoah utekumah during the long and costly War of Independence in 1948. The heroism of the Israeli soldier became the primary image in the discourse on the War of Independence. The Holocaust was now linked to the War of Independence and was presented as a source of motivation and inspiration for the soldiers. The victory in this difficult war, which ensured the existence of the Jewish state, elevated the self-image of the Yishuv but confronted its population with the loss of children, husbands, relatives and friends. The experience of both the Shoah and the victory were painfully connected to wartime death: the ghetto fighters and partisans joined the pantheon of heroes of Israel. Until then the major sources of heroic inspiration in the history of the Yishuv were recovered from the times of the Second Temple, the Maccabeans, the fighters of Massada and Bar Kochba on the one hand, and modern heroes such as Joseph Trumpeldor on the other.55

On 19 April 1948, the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was commemorated throughout the Yishuv. This was the date on which the major commemorative ceremonies had been happening since 1944. Yad Vashem organized the main ceremony, which featured several ghetto fighters who spoke about the ghetto resistance and its present meanings. The daily independent Haaretz called the event 'a great undertaking that is occur- ring now, in the days of our own war'.56 'Our war' - the War of Independence - was compared in Haaretz to the second world

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war, when the Jews were unable to participate as an independent people. A few weeks earlier, on 11 March 1948, Davar, the Labour organ, had referred to the forthcoming Memorial Day and to the progress being made in establishing Yad Vashem: 'It was clear from the outset that we must link the memory of the Shoah to the hope of [national] independence, to erect a shrine in our free homeland to those who had perished in the Diaspora.'57 In reference to the delay in turning the Yad Vashem project into a reality, the Davar columnist said:

Maybe it was fated that the project be delayed until it could be realized in an independent state, so that we could tell the martyrs and those who fell in the ghetto uprisings that their dream is coming true; our people is redeemed from the yoke of the Diaspora.58

The same theme was evident in memorial ceremonies initiated by Landsmannschaften, or hometown associations from specific destroyed communities, which stressed that the lesson of the Shoah was being manifested in the struggle for Jewish rebirth and independence.59

After 1949, the idea that the State of Israel was the inheritance of those who perished became more frequently expressed in

public discourse. The heroism of the solider who fell in the War of Independence was seen not only as having been inspired by that of the ghetto fighters, but also as representing a link in the chain of Jewish heroism: 'From the Maccabeans to the ghetto fighters and to our soldiers in the War of Independence.' On the other hand, the ghetto fighters were said to have derived their motivation from the elite units of the pre-state Palmach, 'which

they did not even know'.6 This new dimension of heroism paved the way to a more

complete conceptualization of Shoah utekumah. The reality of kibbutzim like Yad Mordechai (Memorial to Mordechai) which was named after Mordechai Anielewicz, who led tne Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters), forged an ideological link between the Shoah and the revival of the Jewish people in their own country and underlined the obligation of Israelis to remember the Shoah. Thus, sentences like: 'The remembrance day [for the Shoah] reminded Israel of the need to remain alert and courageous in order to prevent battles like that of Massada from recurring in our renewed life, in our redeemed land' were often repeated after the War of Independence.61

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The Knesset debate on the Yad Vashem Law epitomized new and old nuances and understandings of the Shoah as they had developed since 1942.

By the time the Yad Vashem Law was brought to debate, terms like Shoah, gevurah, tekumah had become prominent in the public discourse of Israelis; they now assumed such a central role in the lexicon that it was almost impossible to conduct a discussion without referring to them. The first Knesset debates on the Yad Vashem Law on 12 and 18 May 1953 were long ones in which representatives of every political party spoke.62 The debate was so protracted that some speakers commented on the half-empty assembly hall.63 The law was presented by Minister of Education and Culture, Professor Ben Zion Dinur (Dinaburg), since Yad Vashem was to be under the authority of the Education Ministry. Dinur, a historian and member of Al Domi, had been involved in attempts to disseminate information on the destruction of European Jewry to the Yishuv and the world, with the aim of stepping up rescue efforts. At the war's end he represented the Hebrew University on the committee established to discuss a way to commemorate the Shoah. Thus, his presentation of the law in the Knesset expressed both conventional understanding and discourse on the Shoah as well as his own historical understanding.

Dinur began by outlining the chronology of the Shoah during 1933-45, underlining the role that nazi ideology had played in determining the fate of the Jews in the years preceding the war. He estimated that the number of Hitler's Jewish victims had reached 6.5 million in an area covering twenty-one European countries (North Africa, for example, was excluded). Dinur then gave a graphic description of the nazi extermination policy and told how the murder machine fulfilled its quota of Jewish victims by utilizing German national institutions, thereby legitimizing the policy in the eyes of the German public. This, he said, accounted for the large number of Germans who had co- operated. He stressed the collaboration of most governments and peoples in occupied Europe, making it clear that the context of the war had been important to the execution of the mass killings, which had been carried out with the aid of science and technology. He went on to warn that this should not, however, lead to

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the view that the killings were an outcome of the war. They were an integral part of the nazi plan to exterminate every European Jew as well as the Jewish culture and heritage. While Dinur presented his case in the neutral language of the social sciences, and refrained from portraying the nazis or the German people as demons or beasts, his many quotations and paraphrases from the Bible and other Jewish sources - not to speak of the bare facts themselves - resulted in a stirring speech.

Dinur went on to identify another group later acknowledged in the literature as 'bystanders', who had wittingly or unwittingly aided the nazi plan. They comprised the free world, the churches and intellectuals, who, despite information on the killings and the pleas of Jews in the Yishuv, did nothing to help rescue the Jews. The Yishuv, Dinur charged, was the only voice that endeavoured to alert the world to what was being done by the nazis - but to no avail. At this point Dinur's speech was charged with emotion. He used words like 'the alarm and warning from Jerusalem', (az'akat azharat yerushalayim) and phrased his account of the world's failure in direct speech, for example: 'Don't stand on our blood. Save us! Rescue us!'64

In his recapitulation of the Shoah from the Jewish victims' perspective, Dinur emphasized their response to nazi policy. Here he did not utilize religious symbols, refraining from the common word kedoshim to describe those murdered. Instead, he concen- trated on the heroic Jewish responses, highlighting the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For Dinur, the heroism of these fighters, who were able to organize their uprising despite the difficult conditions of the ghetto, symbolized the Jewish response to the Shoah. The flames of the burnt-out ghetto 'lit the [way for] hundreds of other uprisings. In almost every place, it was the same scene: the desperate fight of a lonely people, starved and humiliated, with no hope of succeeding.'65 Dinur's metaphor of

light was significant here, as it complemented the concept of resistance fighters and partisans having endeavoured to provide a

guiding light for those Jews in Europe and in the Yishuv.66 Dinur did not limit his interpretation of heroism, gevurah, to

the uprisings. He portrayed the roots of Jewish heroism in the

everyday struggle for survival, the struggle for life. The solidarity of the Jewish people under nazism, their faith that justice must in the end prevail, their struggle to maintain human dignity - all these indicated a very special kind of heroism.67 Dinur's interpre-

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tation of life in the ghettos was radically different from the way in which it was being depicted. Most descriptions relied heavily on language describing the misery of the people, their suffering and their helplessness. The only group that had been portrayed as having taken an active role were the youth movements, which only served to emphasize the alleged passivity of the majority. Dinur's address provided a striking contrast to Kovner's por- trayal of life in the Vilna Ghetto which stressed low morale, loss of the will to live and a yearning for death.68

Dinur introduced an element that had not been as closely examined in previous interpretations of the Shoah, that of the Judenrat. This issue had little place in the public discourse until the late 1 940s, when survivors' reports of the Judenrite's co- operation with the nazis brought the issue to the fore. While the press tended to doubt that all members of the Judenrat blindly obeyed their nazi masters, pointing out that they had acted differently in different places,69 Dinur maintained that the real beginning of the Shoah was when Jews accepted appointment to a group clearly aimed at breaking the spirit of their own people.70

Dinur's last point related to tekumah, or rebirth, in connection with the Shoah and the State of Israel. Establishing the link between the heroism of the Jews in the Shoah and that of the soldiers who fought in Israel's War of Independence, he underlined the unity of gevurah, or heroism, as exhibited by ghetto fighters, partisans, Jewish soldiers in Allied armies, and all those who managed to survive the Holocaust, and the Israeli soldiers who aided in the revival of the Jewish homeland as a political entity and haven. In this exegesis, Dinur, too, presented the heroism of the ghetto fighters, and the very metaphor of gevurah as a link in the chain of resistance that stretched to the Israeli soldiers. In an emotional climax, Dinur quoted from the Song of the Partisans - using the metaphor of a spring taken from the famous Hebrew poem of H.N. Bialik, acknowledged as the national poet - citing it as the source of the dedication and hope that had sustained the endurance of the people.71

Dinur's address was aimed at the Israeli public. Intending to present both the reality and the emotional aspects of the Shoah, he accomplished this by carefully constructing his speech, its vocabulary, its quotations and its substance.

Those who took part in the deliberations underlined the principles mentioned by Dinur in accordance with their political

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inclinations. Thus, discussions of the proposed Yad Vashem law were highly political and revealed considerable differences. Com- prising the left were the communist Maki, the Zionist Marxist Socialist Mapam and the ruling Social Democratic Mapai, of which Dinur was a member and a representative voice. The liberal centre was made up of the General Zionists and the Progressives. The right was represented by Menachem Begin's Herut. The religious parties included Mizrahi, Agudat Yisrael and Poalei Agudat Yisrael. Issues hotly debated included the Cold War and Israel's affiliation with the west, and the reparations agreement and the relationship with West Germany. As many aspects of this debate are not relevant to this article, I shall only present the concepts and terminology which were used by passionate speakers from all areas of the spectrum.

The left, particularly the communists, linked the nazi extermination policy with nazism as fascism rather than antisemitism. From their ideological perspective nazism was a means to appeal to the masses and a manifestation of the most extreme reactionary capitalist ideology. Thus, the communists did not view the Shoah as a unique phenomenon in Jewish history or in the history of western civilization, but expressed fears that there would be a new Shoah if war broke out between the west, which they identified with the fascist bloc and the east, or the Soviet bloc.72

The left disagreed in general with Dinur's comprehensive definition of gevurah. Mapam, in particular, claimed that the Zionist left was the patron of the resistance, stressing that Jewish resistance during the war originated in the socialist Zionist youth movements and that this resistance was supported by the Soviets, the leftist Polish underground and the Polish workers. Mapam's representative did, however, agree with Dinur's concept of unity between Jewish resistance during the Shoah and the heroism of Israeli soldiers. He viewed the resistance as the first stage in the War of Independence and therefore insisted that Yad Vashem commemorate both groups, as well as those who perished: 'This institution should not commemorate only the victims (korbanot) of the Holocaust and the ghetto fighters. The War of Indepen- dence was intertwined with the uprisings in the ghettos and the heroism [of the fighters].'73

This use of the word victim, quite unusual in the discourse of the 1940s and the early 1950s, appeared mostly among those on

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the left; it was meant to demonstrate the dramatic demarcation between the Jewish public, who went 'as sheep to slaughter' and those who had stood up to fight the nazi oppressors. The left also took up and developed Dinur's accusation against the Juden- rite, which it depicted as being comprised of members of the bourgeoisie. It established the dichotomy between the youth movement socialist fighters, who were the forerunners of the Palmach soldiers, and the rest of Europe's Jews, including those who had betrayed their brethren by co-operating with the nazis as members of the Judenrat.

In contrast, members of the right centred their remarks on current political issues, entering their views of Shoah, gevurah, or the resistance. Esther Raziel Naor of Herut disagreed that the current Knesset would pass the law, since she viewed the initia- tive of the Mapai government as a cover-up for the reparation agreement with West Germany passed in January 1952. She attacked the government as the successor of the Zionist leadership of the Yishuv, which she claimed had been indifferent to the plight of European Jewry during the war, and was now attempting to whitewash its guilt. The discourse of Herut representatives was very emotional and judgmental, referring to national honour, and laden with religious terminology such as 'pure', the 'sacred', and the 'profane'.74

In the presentation of the General Zionist, Elimelekh Rimalt, the concept of Shoah utekumah was developed in an effort to introduce some kind of meaning into it. Rimalt agreed in general with Dinur's interpretation, but emphasized what he saw as a causal link between Shoah utekumah and the establishment of the State of Israel. The long history of Jew-hatred, he thought, made it feasible to assume that the Shoah had been the outcome of a blind and senseless fate (goral iver, lelo higayon, lelo ta'am, lelo takhlit). 'Is it possible', he asked, 'that all the victims of the murders and the flames died in vain, with no compensation or benefit?' And he answered that 'there was a predestined historic reaction of the people to the Shoah -to establish the [Jewish] State'.75

The contributions of the three religious parties varied widely since they did not share the same ideology, either religious or political. All, however, refrained from addressing the issue of Shoah utekumah, referring instead to the biblical injunction to remember, and therefore expressing opposition to any limits or

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definitions of whom or what to remember. In their view, the com- mand to remember, as represented in the name Yad Vashem, would not be fulfilled if it did not adopt the traditional Jewish interpretation of the biblical verse from which it was taken. To them it was not just in a physical monument that Holocaust victims, survivors and heroes would be commemorated, but through the spiritual act of applying renewed emphasis to the study of halakhah (Jewish law) and establishing yeshivot that commemoration could be accomplished.

While they agreed that the Holocaust stood out even in the continuum of Jewish history, to them it was one more manifestation of the eternal conflict between Good and Evil, with Hitler the 'Amalek and Haman of modern times.76 Using demonic images to describe the nazis, they presented a universal interpretation of the Shoah in terms of the long-standing relationship between Jews and gentiles. Disagreeing that the resistance was grounded in the secular socialist youth movement, they referred to a number of rabbis in occupied Europe who stated that, unlike past history when Jews had given their lives in kiddush hashem (sancti- fication of God's name), the highest goal during the Holocaust was the saving of lives and that the taking-up of arms to this end was the fulfilling of a commandment. This interpretation, then, centred on rescue rather than on honour, or the will to act against the nazis. It was a religious discourse and as such made use of biblical events like the sacrificing of Yizthak and many examples from the Talmud and the Midrash.77

The findings of this study demonstrate the process of incorporat- ing the Holocaust into the consciousness and emotions of the public. Therefore, the linguistic expressions that were suitable to a long historical experience of persecutions proved unsatis- factory. The adoption of the new word, Shoah, could not become established until the shocking events of the Holocaust had first been conceptualized, about two years after the war ended. When the Yishuv faced the renewal of its political struggle for independence, without the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors became a major factor in the Zionist political struggle. This reality was reflected in an elaboration of the term heroism, or gevurah, in its dialectical sense. Gevurah alludes to the heroic act of fighting the nazis, but was preceded by the understanding

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of the intentions of the nazis and the true hopelessness of the Jewish situation. Resistance was not viewed as a natural response by a persecuted people but almost as a miracle that occurred despite life in the ghettos and camps.

The second stage of integration of the Shoah into emotional and cognitive awareness took place between 1948 and 1953, when the great victory of the War of Independence confronted the Israeli public with even more death. As the large-scale immigration of survivors and Jews from Arab countries became a major factor in transforming Jewish society in Israel, the concept of heroism underwent further elaboration. The establishment of the State of Israel broadened the term to a new conceptualization, Shoah utekumah. This revealed that the interpretations of the events of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel by a number of Zionist ideologues followed the conventional Jewish response to tragedy. Thus, this study shows that Ezrahi's statement,78 'Genocide in Europe turned the errant son in Palestine into an orphan who had to live not only with his grief but with the guilt of his separation and denial', pushed towards the search for a conceptualization and the integration of the Holocaust into the future understanding of Jewish life and history.

The development of this discourse followed a twisted path and did not have a straightforward chronology. However, the descrip- tive vocabulary used by most speakers in the Knesset debate on the Yad Vashem Law revealed that by the time of the debate, per- ceptions and understandings of the Shoah had been substantially formed. By this time, the Shoah had been politicized, and the members of various political parties were attempting to put forth their own interpretation of these tragic events. There was a strong need to integrate the Shoah into the national legacy, and even more so to place it within a solid set of national, social and religious values.

Notes

1. The expression Yad Vashem appears in Isaiah 56: 3-5, where it denotes an everlasting memorial to those who join the Lord. 'Neither let the alien, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak saying: The Lord will surely separate me from His people .... Even unto them will I give in My house and within

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My walls a monument and a memorial better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting memorial that shall not be cut off.' The Holy Scriptures: According to the Masoretic Text, A New Translation (Philadelphia 1956).

2. The literal meaning of the Hebrew term 'Yad' is hand and it symbolizes a monument or a memorial. I refer to the origin of this term later in the article.

3. Benjamin Harshav, 'Masah 'al tehiyat halashon ha 'ivrit' (On the Revival of the Hebrew Language), Alpayim, 2 (1990), 9-54.

4. Alan Mintz, Hurban. Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature

(New York 1984). 5. The conference was convened in Jerusalem on 13-14 July 1947. Part

of the proceedings, decisions and a list of participants can be found in the Central Zionist Archive (CZA) Jerusalem, S26/1326 and J1/6449. On the decision to establish Yad Vashem see letter of 26 November 1946 to the direc- tory of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) (Keren Kayemet Leyisrael) from the National Committee (Va'ad Leumi), ibid., J 1/6437.

6. Zephaniah 1:15: 'The day is the day of wrath, A day of trouble and dis- tress, A day of wasteness and desolation, A day of darkness and gloominess, A day of clouds and thick darkness.' In Zephaniah the term Shoah umeshoah is used to describe waste and dissolution. See also Isaiah 10:3: 'And what will ye do in the day of visitation, And in the ruin which shall come from far?' Proverbs, 3:25: 'Be not afraid of a sudden terror, neither of the destruction of the wicked, when it cometh.' Holy Scriptures. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago 1980), chap. 1, indicated a cosmic catastrophe that is expressed in the term Shoah. I take issue with this interpretation. I think that although it is implied in the description in Job, it is not the main point in the above citations.

7. Uriel Tal, 'On the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 13 (1980), 7-43; Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical

Perspective (Seattle 1980), 30-50. 8. On the position of the ultra-Orthodox and their attitude, see Menahem

Friedman, 'The Haredin and the Holocaust', The Jerusalem Quarterly, 53 (Winter 1990), 86-114; Dina Porat, '"Amalek's Accomplices" Blaming Zionism for the Holocaust: Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel during the 1980s', Journal of Contemporary History, 27, 4 (October 1992), 695-729.

9. 'To the Hebrew Yishuv', 23 November 1939, CZA S25/326. 10. Shoatyehudei Polin (The Shoah of Polish Jewry) (Jerusalem 1940). 11. A source of information on the first impact of the war on the Jews in

Poland came from the emissaries of Palestine who left Poland after the beginning of the war and managed to reach Palestine soon thereafter. More details on this issue and their descriptions in Havah (Wagman) Eshkoli, Elem: mapai nokhah hashoah 1939-1942 (Silence: Mapai and the Holocaust 1939-1942) (Jerusalem 1994), 121-77; Yechiam Weitz, Muda'ut vehoser onim. mapai lenokhah hashoah 1943-1945 (Aware but Helpless, Mapai and the Holocaust 1943-1945) (Jerusalem 1994), 153-73.

12. 'Let the Yishuv face the test of a nation and the test of man', Ha'aretz (The Land, the independent daily), 13 July 1942. This was a report on a writers' conference dedicated to the situation of European Jewry. Most of the

590




well-known writers participated, among them Shimeon Shinonowitz, Martin Buber, Saul Tchernichowsky and others.

13. Dina Porat, The Blue and Yellow Star of David (Cambridge, MA 1990), 43 (henceforth, Porat 1990).

14. Ha'aretz, 13 July 1942; see also note 11. 15. Ibid., talk by poet Saul Tchernichowsky. 16. Ya'akov Eshed, 'In expectation of those who would come, illegal boats

search their way to our land', April 1942, in Shlomo Even Shosah and Zerubavel Gil'ad (eds), Heshbon shel zekhut (An Account for Right) (Tel Aviv 1978), 36-43. This concept was very clear from the Zionist resolution adopted at the Biltmore Conference in New York in April 1942, concerning the future of Palestine. For further information on this issue, see Yosef Heller, Bema'avak lemedinah (The Struggle for a State) (Jerusalem 1989), 46-51; Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism 1933-1948 (Detroit 1990), 85-95.

17. Rabbi Binyamin (Feldman), at the writers' conference, Moznayim, no. 14 (1942), 377-80.

18. Ben Zion Dinur (Dinaburg), Zakhor: neumim 'al hashoah velekakh (Remember: Speeches on the Shoah and its Lessons) (Jerusalem 1958), 14-48.

19. Ibid., 19-20. 20. A.N. Yirmiyahu in Mishmar (The Guard, newspaper of Hashomer

Hatza'yir), 21 July 1947. 21. Fishel Shneurson in Eliezer Turtziner (ed.), Psychological History of the

Shoah and Renewal (Tel Aviv 1968), 72-82. On the Al Domi group, see Dina Porat, 'Al Domi: Palestinian Intellectuals and the Holocaust 1943-45', Studies in Zionism, 5, 1 (1984), 97-124.

22. Avraham Levinson, 'In memory of the Diaspora', the opening words of his plan to commemorate the destruction of European Jewry (no date [probably in early spring 1945]), CZA S26/1326; meeting on the establishment of Yad Vashem, in the office of the Va'ad Leumi, 4 June 1945, ibid., J1/3610.

23. David Remez, Jacob Lestschinsky at the conference on 'Research on the Shoah and Heroism in our Time', Jerusalem, 13-14 July 1947, CZA J 1/6449. For the decisions adopted by the conference, see ibid., S26/1326.

24. Menahem Kaufman, Non-Zionists in America and the Struggle for Jewish Statehood: 1939-1948 (Jerusalem 1984).

25. See note 4. 26. Greenboim, at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem,

19 January 1943, CZA S25/259. 27. On Abba Kovner and his manifesto to the Jews in the ghetto, see

Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames (Jerusalem 1980), 231-2. On the debate in Palestine, see CZA S25/259 and note 22.

28. A group of sixty-nine Palestinian Jews who were caught in the war in Eastern Europe were allowed to return to Palestine in autumn 1942. They were an important source of information on the Final Solution and life in the ghettos. For further elaboration, see Porat 1990, 36-7.

29. Ibid., 240-1. (A more detailed discussion is found in the Hebrew version, Hanhagah bemilcud. hayishuv nokhah hashoah 1942-1945 (An

591



592 Journal of Contemporary History

Entangled Leadership: The Yishuv and the Holocaust, 1942-1945) (Tel Aviv 1988), 437-8.

30. David Remez, at the conference on 'Research on the Shoah and Heroism in our Time', 13 July 1947, CZA J 1/6449. See note 5.

31. 2 May 1945, CZA S26/1326. During 1945 and 1946, a number of other commemorational proposals were presented to the Jewish Agency, established in 1929 by the Zionist movement and non-Zionist organizations to be responsible for the development of Palestine as the Jewish national home and to represent the Yishuv in relations with the Mandatory government, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the owner of all Jewish public land in Palestine, as well as the Va'ad Leumi, which was responsible for the Yishuv's internal affairs. Several proposals were discussed at a number of meetings: 'In memory of the Diaspora', by Avraham Levinson op. cit.; 'A Memorial to the Destroyed Diaspora and to Those Who fell in the War of Independence', by Shragai, 19 February 1946, CZA J 1/6442; 'In Memory of Our Holy Ones and Those Who Made Us Holy, in the Diaspora', by Leibele Goldberg, CZA, 12 September 1946.

32. 'They were condemned to be passive ... but the people were also active participants. Some two million [of them] joined the battle.' CZA, 2 May 1945, S26/1326.

33. A proposal for the name of a commemorative authority, 25 February 1946, CZA J1/6442.

34. This interpretation was given to the JNF Executive by its National Committee, 26 November 1946, CZA J1/5437.

35. At a meeting of the JNF Executive devoted to the issue of commemoration, 16 September 1946, CZA KHU/B/3940, 10.

36. Remez, in the JNF Executive asking that all efforts be made to avoid the separation of Shoah and gevurah, which 'should become the two pillars of our collective memory'. CZA, 19 November 1946, S25/5204. See also Remez, at the conference on 'Research on the Shoah and Heroism in our Time', 13 July 1947, CZA J 1/6449; and Shenhabi's letter to Remez on this issue, 20 June 1945, CZA.

37. Kovner, at the conference, see note 5. 38. Remez, in his opening remarks to the conference, 13 July 1947, CZA

J1/4669. 39. Kovner, 'The Hill of Warning', cited in its entirety in Mishmar, 25 July

1947. 40. Ibid. 41. Upon hearing Kovner's speech, Remez called for its publication so

that Israeli youth would read it, 14 July 1947, CZA J1/6449. Thus, Davar (15 July 1947) reported that 'Kovner spoke of the close tie [indispensable connection] between Shoah and gevurah', and agreed that the great patriotism of the fighters be remembered and commemorated. Other newspapers, too, turned to the issue of gevurah. Between 15 and 20 July 1947, articles and readers' letters supporting Kovner appeared in Mishmar (15 July) and in Haaretz. On the other hand, Hatzofeh (20 July), the paper of the religious Zionist Mizrahi party, expressed opposition to research of the period and called upon the public not to lose the true pathos of commemoration and to avoid criticizing the martyrs (kedoshim) murdered by the nazis.



Ofer: Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust 593

42. A.N. Yermiyahu, Mishmar, 21 July 1947. 43. See, for example, Nachman Blumenthal, Mishmar, 14 September

1947, and his reference to traitors; A.N. Yermiyahu, 'Yad Vashem: Impres- sions from the Conference', Mishmar, 21 July 1947.

44. For a discussion of 'surviving remnants' see Dalia Ofer, 'From Survivors to New Immigrants: Sheerit Hapletah and Aliya' in Sheerit Hapletah 1944-1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Jerusalem 1990), 304-36.

45. For a reference to redemption only being possible in Eretz Israel see, for example, 'Sheerit Hapletah', Hatzofeh, 14 March 1945.

46. For the use of geulah vehazalah in the Zionist discourse see the discussion of the Small Zionist Executive, 18 January 1943, CZA S25/259. Also Dan Michman, 'Leberur hamusag hatzalah' (Clarifying the Term Rescue During the Holocaust), Yalkut Moreshet, 28, 1979, 55-76; also Dalia Ofer, 'The Dilemma of Rescue and Redemption: Mass Immigration to Israel in the First Year of Statehood', YIVO Annual, 20, 1991, 185-210.

47. Rahel Rokah, Mishoah letekumah (From Holocaust to Rebirth) in Documents to the Study of Zionism, folder 11 (Jerusalem 1979), Mishoah letekumah (From Shoah to Rebirth) (no author), summary of a conference on activities in religious elementary schools in Israel (Jerusalem 1975). For further elaboration of the educational perspective see Nili Keren, The Impact of Public Opinion-Shapers and of the Historical Research on the Development of Educational Thought and Educational Programs Concerning the Holocaust in High Schools and in Informal Education in Israel 1948-1981 (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1985).

48. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA 1984); Alan Mintz, see note 3; Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, 'Considering the Apocalypse: Is the Writing on the Wall only Graffiti?' in Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust (New York and London 1990), 137-53, 47.

49. CZA, J1/3610a, 25 May 1945. 50. CZA, J1/3610/I, 27 May 1945. 51. A discussion at the JNF Executive, 16 September 1946, CZA

S53/1671. See also Hatzofeh, 25 July 1945, suggesting that new settlements be named after destroyed Jewish communities. Haaretz, 24 July 1945 opposed the plans for Yad Vashem and gave the name of a new kibbutz, Ma'aleh Hahamishah, near Jerusalem, as an example of a proper constructive commemoration.

52. Hagigim 'al ra'ayon gadol (Reflections on a Great Idea), Haaretz, 27 July 1947.

53. Davar, 12 December 1942. 54. D. Malkhin, Davar, 23 March 1947: 'A Mission and its realization:

The stormy debate between negation of the Diaspora and its affirmation ended tragically. The negated Diaspora gained approval ..., however, the unique life of Israel in its land demands a certain way of life to realize its special mission ... to honour the memory of the past and yet to correct its defects.' M. Prager, "Al 'otzmat hashoah ve'oz haheavkut' (On the domination of the Shoah and the vigour of the battle), ibid., 13 July 1947.

55. For an elaborate discussion see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots:




Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago 1994). It is interesting to see that in 1940 a book on Jewish heroism throughout the ages was published. The book related to the modern era and the Yishuv; M. Halpern (ed.), Sefer Hagevurah: antologia historit vesifrutit (The Book of Heroism. A Literary and Historical Anthology) (Tel Aviv 1940), 5 vols.

56. 23 April 1948. 57. 11 March 1948. 58. Ibid. 59. 'Yad Vashem', Hamashkif, 20 and 23 April 1948; 'Yad Vashem', Davar,

23 April 1948; Haboker, 12 March 1951. 60. Zivia Lubetkin, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in a

memorial ceremony at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz), Davar, 20 April 1950.

61. Davar, 19 April 1950. 62. Proceedings of the Knesset, vol. 14, the 227th and 229th meetings of the

Second Knesset (Jerusalem no date), 1310-14; 1331-54; 2402-09 (henceforth Knesset, vol. 14).

63. Knesset, vol. 14, 1333. Presentation of Elimelekh Rimalt, of the General Zionists' party.

64. Ibid., 1310. 65. Ibid., 1310. 66. See above, notes 55, 58. 67. Knesset, vol. 14, 1310, 1314. 68. See above, notes 37, 38. 69. See, for example, the description of the actions of Judenrat members in

Bendin and Warsaw, Mishmar, 3 March 1944; Haaretz, 28 April 1944; and Hamashkif, 13 December 1945. See also H. Grossman's description of Juden- rat member Barasch in Bialystock, Mishmar, 19 November 1945. The words used in these descriptions were 'victims', 'traitors', 'informers', and 'apos- tates' or 'betrayers of one's people'.

70. Knesset, vol. 14, 1310. An unusual article, by Y. Ben Haim, 'Gam zeh lekah hashoah vehamered' (This is also a lesson of the Shoah and the uprising), appeared in the communist Kol Ha'am (Voice of the People) on 18 April 1951. Writing of the celebration of the ninth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Ben Haim contrasted the ghetto fighters, who were socialists, with the Judenrat traitors who were bourgeoisie.

71. Knesset, vol. 14, 1311. The poem of Hayyim Nachman Bialik, 'Im yesh et nafshekha lada'at' ('If Thou Wouldst Know', Selected Poems, Israel Efros (ed.) (revised edn) (New York 1965), 70-2.

72. The speeches of the representatives of the Left appear in Knesset, vol. 14, on the following pages: 1331-3; 1339-41; 1345; 1351; 1353; 2404-5.

73. Ibid., 1332. 74. Ibid., 1335, 2406. 75. Ibid., 1333. 76. Amalek - the people who fought against the people of Israel in the

desert (Exodus 17: 8-13) and had become the symbol of the eternal enemy of the Jews. The tradition recounts that Haman, from the book of Esther, who planned to annihilate all the Jews, was a descendant of Amalek.

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77. The most complete presentation and a very emotional one, was that of Yitzhak Meir Levin of Agudat Yisrael, who escaped from Warsaw shortly after the nazi occupation; Knesset, vol. 14, 1337-9. See also the speech of Mizrachi member Mordechai Nurock, ibid., 1335-7, and of Po'alei Agudat Yisrael member Benjamin Muntz, ibid., 1341-3.

78. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, 'Revisioning the Past: The Changing Legacy of the Holocaust in Hebrew Literature' in Salmagundi, the Literary Imagination and the Sense of the Past, no. 68-9, Fall 1985/ Winter 1986, 248.

Dalia Ofer is the Max and Rita Haber Chair for

Holocaust Studies in the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary

Jewry and Chair of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Research

of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the

author of Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of

Israel 1939-44; The Dead End Journey. The Kladovo Sabac Affair and many articles on the history of

the Holocaust, the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, and emigration to Israel.

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