Thou Shalt Tell Thy Daughter: Mothers Tell Daughters Their Holocaust Story—Three Case Studies of Contemporary Israeli Women Artists

Abstract

The story of Israel and its raison d’être are suffused by memories of the Holocaust, which construct the self-definition and identity of the state. This article examines works by three contemporary Israeli women artists—Dvora Morag, Miri Nishri, and Bracha Ettinger—who subvert the traditional telling of history and enable rethinking of the past as the basis for the individual’s existence in the nation state. Through the works of these artists, official memory disintegrates into fragments of personal memories of the artists’ mothers, enabling a new moral, historical perspective. The reconstruction of history through stories that pass from mother to daughter contrasts sharply with Jewish tradition in which the historical story passes from father to son. The yearly Passover retelling of the Exodus admonishes “Thou shalt tell thy son on that day to say, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt’”. The two narratives, the Exodus from Egypt and the Holocaust, are told as stories of redemption of the Jewish people—from ruin to resurrection. The art examined here reassesses the past, while unraveling parallels between the stories from a female perspective that reflects a personal moral stance.