![]() ![]() Traits that these people had displayed in Europe, it was assumed. Those prejudices were motivated by the assumption that it was impossible for the survivors in DP-camps to be reputable and virtuous since the underlying belief within Israel was that – apart from the few celebrated heroes – only corrupt, selfish, cunning, and nasty people could have survived the murdering, while the good, decent people must indeed all be dead.ġ0 The largest wave of Holocaust survivors immigrated to Israel in 1948/49, where they encountered a dominant social leitbild that condemned weakness and passivity. The reports conveyed a negative image of European Jews, in so far as they portrayed Jews as part of black marketing, and lacking in independence and productivity. The disparaging reports about Jews in European Displaced Persons camps for survivors of the Holocaust additionally had a negative impact – those camps were built by the Allies, in many cases on German territory. ![]() ![]() ![]() Appreciation of armed battle spread and stereotypical criticisms of the alledged “passive Diaspora-Jew” intensified (Segev 1995, 244). What has changed in many ways, however, is the manner of remembrance.ĩ This tendency was reinforced by the long-lasting war of independence. Already in the 1940s, the memory of it was an important part of the state of Isreal’s founding myth. The Holocaust repeatedly entered various debates and discussions and oftentimes led to much unrest in the community. Both its remembrance and its direct consequences have come alive time and again in public life and have had a definite impact on Israel’s society. In fact, the Shoah had constantly been present and had shaped Israeli society since the days before the state was founded. Israeli press described the historic encounter between established Israelis and the group of immigrating survivors as hostile until the 1970s and 1980s and charachterized the entire era as a “period of silence” (Segev 1995, 251).ĥ The idea that the Holocaust was treated as an irrelevant and tabooed topic until the turnaround that will be addressed later on, only emerged against the background of a novel Isreali iden-tity forming following the foundation of the state, however, and, according to detailed research, it is only partly correct. 2 According to this hypothesis, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, is one of the people primarily responsible for neglecting the Nazi period apparently, he did not show any sensitivity for the European Jews’ fate at the time either (Porat 2008b, 11ff). Thumbing through history books and fiction might certainly create the impression that, in the 1940s and 1950s, this topic was almost being suppressed. 2 For the course of historical research on the Holocaust, see Michman 2002.Ĥ A central hypothesis, which should be questioned at this point, implies that during the first twenty years after the end of World War II, hardly any public debates about the Holocaust took place in Israel.Dealing with the Holocaust and its significance for israeli society What is incomprehensible to us today, too, is what it must have meant for those often severly traumatized individuals to be immediately forced back to military service. Many fell victim to the war or were seriously injured not least because they did not understand the language of the orders, Hebrew. Some actually arrived in the midst of the 1948 war of independence and had to participate in battles without ever having held a weapon in their hands before. Many years after the Holocaust, encounters with the survivors were still characterized by alienation: misunderstandings and conflicts ruled interactions with one another.ģ What also contributed to the alienation was the fact that the survivors, who had escaped hell and immigrated to Israel, almost immediately found themselves in another war situation. The Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine did not have a lot of time to look back, though already in the 1940s, it would face many existential problems itself. Accusations for not having done enough to help the by-now murdered people in Europe quickly emerged. Only towards the end of the war, in fact, did it start to develop compassion for the victims of the National Socialist crimes. Because it observed things from a certain distance, the small Yishuv understood the extent of the horror that had been happening in Europe at a very late stage. 1 The territory of Israel today, before the founding of the state.Ģ In comparison, the Jewish population of Eretz Israel 1 (the so-called Yishuv) faced a set of completely different problems at that time. ![]()
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