Deep-lomacy #16

Collective Identity, the Memory of the Holocaust and a New Commemorative Project / Rebecca Kook

For many years I have been fascinated by the idea of a collective memory – by the idea that societies, like individuals, tell themselves certain narratives about their own pasts – remembering and emphasizing some events and people, while forgetting others. And indeed, the identity of societies, just like the identity of individuals, is linked very deeply to what we remember collectively about our shared past. For societies to remember, however, they need agents, who construct the narratives about this shared past, and devise practices through which individual members of societies can remember together: ceremonies, rituals, monuments, national memorial days. For many years national states were the main agents of this shared collective memory. However, over the past few decades, within the context of changes in global patterns of political power, communication and migration, increasingly non-state agents have emerged, promoting, constructing and developing narratives and practices aimed at providing alternatives to traditional state-constructed memorials and narratives.

For Israel, the Holocaust has always constituted a very significant part of the story that we tell ourselves (and others) about our shared past. For many years the shared collective memory of the Holocaust was determined and constructed by state-agents, defining by law an official Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day, conducting official state run ceremonies, and designing monuments and memorials. The narrative of the shared memory of the Holocaust was premised on two national slogans: “Never Again” and “from Destruction to Redemption” – which posited the state of Israel as the historical outcome and resolution of the history of Jewish persecution. Thus the shared memory of the Holocaust contributed towards defining Israel as the contemporary guardian of Jewish survival and has thus played a major role in securing Israel’s political legitimacy. The practices with which the state agents of Holocaust memory constructed this narrative were what we call “paradigmatic” memorial practices: somber and sacred, taking place within a strictly defined memorial protocol with the audience removed from the memorial performance, and designated the role of passive recipients of a pre-scripted memorial narrative. In this narrative the state was the hero and the savior. Over the years younger generations of Israelis have felt less and less involved with these memorial practices with few if any alternatives available to them.

Since the early 2000, many non-state memorial agents have emerged, offering alternative ways of collectively remembering the Holocaust. Zikaron Besalon – literally translated as “Memory in the Living Room” - is a commemorative project which was founded in 2011 and is probably the most popular and significant amongst these new memorial events. For the past two years I have been researching this commemorative project, and have conducted in depth interviews with the founders and participants, attended numerous gatherings and participated in their workshops. The idea behind Zikaron Besalon is quite simple: the act of shared commemoration is privatized. People are encouraged to host a gathering in the privacy of their own living room, to listen to a Holocaust testimony, to hear some music, and to have a discussion. There is no script, there is no single story, there are no commemorative protocols that one needs to adhere to. In each living room, a different testimony is heard, and a different kind of discussion takes place. Participants are encouraged to ask questions, raise relevant issues, and to take an active role in the memorial event: you can laugh, you can cry, drink wine or sing. In the course of the decade since the first gathering took place, Zikaron Besalon has emerged as a form of traveling, or transnational memory with gatherings taking place in all major European cities, in north and south American, in Africa and in Asia. In this past year – 2021 – it is said that close to one and a half million people took place in such gatherings – in other twenty different countries.

All in all, Zikaron Besalon refuses to tell a specific narrative or story, insisting on a plurality of narratives about the Holocaust; it rejects the collectivist assumption that members of society remember their past in exactly the same way; and it celebrates the individual identity – both of the testimony giver, and the participants in the commemorative event. As an agent of a traveling memorial practice, Zikaron Besalon is fascinating, and reflects many of the most important changes that have been taking place within Israeli society. Zikaron Besalon tells us a different story about how Israel remembers its own past, and thus tells us a different story about contemporary Israeli identity.