Jerusalem Diary: Monday 28 April

By Tim Franks http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7370910.stm

An exhibition at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, puts Holocaust survivors at the heart the creation of an Israeli identity

REMEMBRANCE

On Thursday, Israel will mark Yom Hashoah.

The siren will sound, people will emerge from their cars, and stand still on the street. They will remember the deaths of six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.

That memory is there to be seen and read about every day, should you wish.

Rarely is there a day when the Israeli newspapers do not make some reference - at least in passing - to the Holocaust.

It is estimated that 250,000 survivors are still alive in Israel.

Now, as Israel approaches its 60th anniversary, Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, wants a reappraisal.

“It’s a shame,” says Yehudit Shendar, the curator of a major new exhibition about Holocaust survivors in Israel at Yad Vashem.

In pictures: Yad Vashem exhibition

“For the past year or two, the survivors have just been portrayed as ‘miskenim’, as unfortunates.”

This has happened because of long-running arguments about measly government stipends.

What Ms Shendar wants to show is that these survivors have not just been passive recipients of Israeli citizenship, but that they helped create the very symbols of Israeli identity.

“We took it for granted,” Ms Shendar told me, as we walked around the then unfinished exhibition. “The survivors came here, saw us, and wanted to emulate us; and so they deciphered the code.

“They were able in their art to give a portrayal of Israeli-ness that no-one else was able to give.”

We stopped in front of the prolific graphic art of Dan Reisinger - “colourful and ultra-modern”, Ms Shendar enthused.

We looked at images and logos and designs which he created decades ago, and which pervade Israel even today.

Reisinger survived, as a child, by spending a year hidden in a barn in Serbia. His father was deported to Hungary for forced labour, and was never seen again.

“They didn’t forget the family members that they lost,” Ms Shendar told me. “This is the drama. It’s not that they eradicated what happened; they suppressed it.”

LETTING THE WORLD KNOW

Yad Vashem is not just a museum and exhibition hall. It also contains a vast archive. It has amassed the names of 3.3 million victims.

They are meticulously cross-referenced to avoid the danger of replication. The search engine was created to handle what museum staff say are the approximately 1,500 variations of the name Isaac.

Esther Livingston helped gather the names of 300 Polish Holocaust victims

Below ground lie the vaults containing 75 million pages of documentation: the photographs, the papers, the testimony. Even now, fresh evidence is coming in.

Esther Livingston (nee Stirka Katz) is now in her mid-80s. She was a young woman in the small Polish town of Michaliszki, when it came under German occupation and was turned into a ghetto, into which Jews from the surrounding areas were crammed, and in which they died.

Esther’s recollections of those years have been collated by an American woman called Toni Rios.

“She has been very matter of fact,” Ms Rios told me. “Even when she was explaining that one of her jobs was going through the cart-loads of dead bodies, and every so often having to point out there was someone who was still alive.”

Ms Rios says that Esther has also supplied Yad Vashem with the names of more than 300 people who did not survive. These were names which Yad Vashem did not have, names to add to the 3 million in their records.

Esther is now too ill to speak.

“My mother is dying,” her daughter Helen said on the phone from her home in California. “For her it was important to let the world know that these people existed.”

WHERE WAS GOD?

One of the last exhibits you see at Yad Vashem is an excerpt from the book The Last of the Just, by Andre Schwarz-Bart.

It is painted on the wall. The opening phrase of the Mourners’ Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, is interwoven with the names of concentration camps and death camps.

The Kaddish is a paean of praise to God; its language is Aramaic rather than Hebrew; it has an instinctive rhythm and a flow: “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’may raba.”

But on this wall in Yad Vashem, Schwarz-Bart breaks that quiet, rocking rhythm.

Eastern European place names, awkwardly transliterated into Hebrew, are wedged between the ancient words of prayer.

“And praised. Auschwitz. Be. Majdanek. The Lord. Treblinka. And praised. Buchenwald. Be. Mauthausen. The Lord. Belzec. And praised. Sobibor. Be. Chelmno. The Lord. Ponary. And praised. Theresienstadt. Be. Warsaw. The Lord. Vilna. And praised. Skarzysko. Be. Bergen-Belsen. The Lord. Janow. And praised. Dora. Be. Neuengamme. The Lord. Pustkow. And praised… Amen.”

Some people read the poem as an affirmation that Jews continued to pray even in their darkest times.

What I saw on that white wall was a shattering re-statement of the question: Where was God during the Holocaust?

It is a question that still resonates through this place they call the Holy Land.