Displaying the Sacred: Australian Holocaust Memorials in Public Life

Abstract

Focusing on the Sydney Jewish Museum’s (SJM) Sanctum of Remembrance, this article explores the relationship between Holocaust memorials, the Jewish commemorative tradition and the sacralisation of Holocaust memory in the Australian context. I argue that the building, design and function of the Sanctum reflects a deeply felt need within the Australian Jewish survivor community to develop alternative commemorative forms as a response to perceived ‘inadequate’ theology. Subsequently, the sacred Holocaust memory housed in this space departs significantly from traditional Jewish responses to destruction. Further, the public nature of the Sanctum has the dual effect of transforming the Jewish commemorative tradition and conveying that tradition to a largely non-Jewish public, explicitly linking Jewish tragedy to broader public concerns. In this progression, a sacred Holocaust memory is created that is at once particular and universal, providing Australian Holocaust memorials with unprecedented opportunities for empathy and identification with other victims of genocide. Yet this powerful dialectic remains, at present, under-utilised. Whether the SJM and other Australian Holocaust museums choose to engage in these opportunities will ultimately depend on the ability of these institutions to grapple with the complexity of Australia’s colonial past and contemporary multicultural society. To contend with these issues requires the ability to understand and ‘display’ the nation as perpetrator and resistor of genocidal acts, a complex narrative difficult to assimilate into largely ‘static’ museum and memorial space. To not do so, however, risks rendering Holocaust memory in Australian museums a solely ‘internal’, Jewish concern.