Chambers of Horror: Holocaust Museums in Israel and the United States

Abstract

ONE COULD MAKE THE CASE that if there is any site in the world where a Holocaust memorial and museum should stand, it is in Jerusalem, this ancient symbol of unity and discord, faith and fanaticism, hope and despair, where the Jewish people was formed as a nation and whence the universal message of Christianity first began its long journey into the world, creating the vast, rich civilization which finally turned upon its origins in Auschwitz. From this spot it is not difficult to imagine the troubled millennia of the surroundings, the countless stories that every stone seems to contain, the forebodings of a future that still, as always, mixes promises of salvation and prophesies of doom. Yad Vashem is of course a national institution, and as such was set up to serve many purposes, some of them quite contradictory. It is Israel's official memorial of the Holocaust and is therefore based on the assumption that the Jewish state is the only political entity that can appropriate the memory of the attempted genocide of the Jews as part of its own selfdefinition and legitimation. All visiting foreign dignitaries are taken there (or were until the protocol was recently changed by the foreign ministry), along with school children, soldiers, policemen, trade union members. The State of Israel is therefore seen as both the consequence and the panacea: the visitor should come out with the thought that had there been a Jewish state before the Holocaust, genocide would not have occurred; and since genocide did occur, there must be a state. But also that, just as the state can be traced back to the Holocaust, so too the Holocaust belongs to the state: the millions of victims were potential Israelis, just as the Israelis are the offspring of the survivors. And more: that all Israelis are potential victims, in the past, the present, and the future. Hence the tie is not only historical, 66