A Reason to Forget

By Steve Rodan

The initiative to memorialize Germany's killing of six million Jews did not come from the State of Israel. The decision was taken by the Chief Rabbinate, which in 1947 chose the Jewish fast of 10 Tevet to remember the victims of Hitler. Two years later, on Dec. 28, 1949, the rabbis buried the ashes and bones of thousands of Jews killed in the Flossenberg camp in Germany.

Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, boycotted the ceremony. Ben-Gurion hated the rabbis and despite the hundreds of thousands of survivors avoided addressing the Holocaust. Publicly, he declared that the new state must look ahead and not behind. Privately, he brooded over being blamed for his role in collaborating with Nazi Germany before and during World War II. As chairman of the Jewish Agency, he had quelled protests against the extermination, ensured that the Mapai media deny German atrocities and praised Judenrat chiefs who facilitated the transport to the death camps. [1]

Still, the rabbis' initiative caught on in the new state. A year later, the memory of the six million was again commemorated on Teves 10, which came out in December 1950. This time, the establishment joined in. Ben-Gurion allowed the military, filled with Holocaust survivors, to conduct ceremonies that included those who died in the War of Independence.

No religion

Ben-Gurion concluded that his regime would have to take over the memorial or else cede authority to the rabbis. His first aim was to replace the date of the commemoration to avoid religious connotations. Indeed, for more than a decade, Holocaust Day would mark the divide between Judaism and the new state. The lion's share of rabbis saw the Holocaust as divine punishment that must be answered by atonement and prayer. Officials regarded the Holocaust as a tool to bolster loyalty to the state while insisting that the killing of the six million symbolized God's abandonment of the Jewish people.

By 1951, there was another reason for Ben-Gurion to shape Holocaust memory. His government was deep into negotiations with West Germany over reparations -- in which billions of dollars were demanded -- and the last thing Ben-Gurion wanted was to upset Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who steadfastly refused to accept responsibility for the Final Solution.

Finally, the Knesset decided on a date -- the 27th of Nissan on the Hebrew calendar, or a week after Passover and eight days before Independence Day. The Knesset did not pass legislation, rather voted on a resolution that could be easily dismissed. Opposition leader Menachem Begin, Ben-Gurion's nemesis, offered to mark Holocaust Day on the Ninth of Av, the mourning of the destruction of the two ancient Jewish Temples. The proposal reflected an appeal by one of the leading sages in Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik. As Begin saw it, a separate day that focused on resistance, called Heroism Day, would be marked on Israel's Memorial Day, one day before Independence Day.

Regardless, on May 3, 1951, Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked in the new Chamber of the Holocaust in Jerusalem's Mount Zion. Devout Jews stayed away because of the prohibition on public mourning during Nissan. Ben-Gurion, for a completely different reason, did so as well: The chamber, sponsored by the Religious Affairs Ministry, had come into competition with Yad Vashem, years before it was built with money from Bonn.

Ignoring the Holocaust

For nearly a decade, Ben-Gurion's regime virtually ignored Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day. The prime minister refused to allocate significant funds for Yad Vashem and avoided the complex. He also stopped the search for Nazi war criminals, particularly Adolf Eichmann, regarded as the chief bureaucrat of the Final Solution. Ben-Gurion recruited the state-supported academia, many of whom argued that the Holocaust was taking up too much research.

"Large segments of Israeli society are deeply interested in their history," Jacob Robinson, a founder of Yad Vashem, wrote. "...On the other hand, there is a small but strongly influential group of university professors and intellectuals who strongly oppose the overemphasis of 'remembrance.'" [2]

Throughout the 1950s, Holocaust Day was associated with opposition to Israeli relations with Bonn. The main lobbyist for commemoration in the Knesset was Mordechai Nurock, a rabbi on the Mizrahi list in the Knesset who strongly opposed reparations as well as formal ties with West Germany. In his address to the Knesset on April 12, 1951, Nurock portrayed the Germans as the progeny of the long list of Jew-haters throughout history. The parliamentarian agreed with a Knesset commission that the best time for commemoration was the Sefirah, the period between Passover and Pentecost, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Rome some 1,800 years earlier.

"We need to choose a date that coincides with most of the slaughter of European Jewry and with the ghetto uprisings that took place in the month of Nissan," Nurock said. "It was during the Sefirah that the crusaders, ancestors of the Nazis, destroyed so many holy communities." [3]

The State of Israel tried to dismiss Nurock and Holocaust survivors. The state-controlled media and educational system fabricated a narrative that the Holocaust stemmed from the cowardice of ghetto Jews in Europe who refused to flee or fight the Germans. Survivors were humiliated at every turn, and in the 1950s historians and educators claimed that resistance to the Nazis had been useless and largely meant for show. That argument was employed during and after the libel trial in 1954 in which a senior Mapai politician, Rudolf Kastner, was judged to have been the Nazi collaborator that facilitated the killing of some 500,000 Hungarian Jews in the spring of 1944.

By 1959, things changed. A West German prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, was told by a blind Argentinian Jew that Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires. At first, Bauer sought to work with Israel. But when the Mossad insisted that the information was incorrect, the Hessen district attorney warned that he would find and prosecute Eichmann alone.

Politics

At the time, Ben-Gurion was running for reelection. His regime was seen to be riddled with corruption and nepotism. In July 1959, the government was stunned by nationwide riots in which thousands of Eastern Jews rampaged through Mapai-aligned institutions. The prime minister was condemned by international figures, including the king of Morocco.

Now, Yad Vashem and Holocaust Day were seen as tools for Mapai's survival. In April 1959, Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day became an official commemoration, a bill signed into law by Ben-Gurion and President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The day was meant to be modest -- flags would be flown at half-mast; a siren would mark two minutes of silence, and special programs would be aired on state radio. Two years later, during the Eichmann trial, the law was amended to close places of entertainment, including cafes and restaurants. The maiden ceremony did not even take place at Yad Vashem, rather at the Ghetto Fighter's House in Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot, which fought the state narrative of futile resistance.

In the end, Ben-Gurion had the last word. On April 24, 1960, some two weeks before the capture of Eichmann, the Mapai organ Davar put the Holocaust into Zionist context. In a front-page article, the Davar editors -- or perhaps Ben-Gurion himself, who often wrote anonymously -- passed over Germany and its allies and focused on the role of the Jews in the Final Solution.

Davar, which censored German atrocities throughout World War II, said the sin of the Jewish people was that they didn't choose Zionism. In a massive distortion of history, the Mapai mouthpiece, ignoring British and Zionist restrictions as well as the alliance with Hitler, accused the Jews in the Diaspora of refusing to return to their ancient homeland until it was too late. The editorial referred to the warnings of Yosef Haim Brenner, the Zionist ideologue killed in the Arab riots in Jaffa in 1921.

"Had Brenner lived during the Holocaust and afterwards -- what would he have shouted about?" the editorial asked, "on only the crimes of the Germans or Latvians, or also, and mostly, of our sins?" [4]

Notes

1. The Strength of Remembrance: Commemorating the Holocaust during the First Decade of Israel. Dalia Ofer. Jewish Social Studies. New Series. Vo. 6. No. 2. Winter 2000

2. Robinson report, 1958. Quoted in ibid.

3. "When a Day Remembers: A Performative History of Yom ha-Shoah." James E. Young History and Memory, Vol. 2, No. 2. Winter, 1990. When a Day Remembers: A Performative History of "Yom ha-Shoah" on JSTOR

4. "Davar Today" Davar. April 24, 1960. Page 1

Below: The Chamber of the Holocaust, the first memorial in the State of Israel.