Rona Sheramy is Executive Director of the Association for Jewish Studies. She received her PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University. In this article, she examines the scope and impact of the March of the Living.
When a member of the Israeli Knesset and a small group of North American Jewish educators created the March of the Living more than twenty years ago, the landscape of Jewish and Holocaust education looked quite different. The March was revolutionary for its time in its goals, approach, and scale. Modeled after Israeli youth trips to Poland (see the article by Jackie Feldman in this issue, ZG), the March drew thousands of teens from around the world for a bi-annual, two-week pilgrimage to Poland and Israel. (For discussion of Israeli youth trips to Poland, see Lazar, et al (2004), Ofer (2009), Feldman (2002)). While the March’s tour of Poland was mournful, uncomfortable, and somber, the trip to Israel was liberating, celebratory, and uplifting. This itinerary reinforced the Zionist narrative of history and the “study in contrasts” at the core of the March: “in Poland you will search for traces of a world that is no more” while “in Israel, you will encounter a country that is striving valiantly to keep the age-old flame of Jewish nationhood alive” (available here). By retracing the history of the Holocaust and founding of the Jewish state, the March sought to give memory to a generation born decades after the Second World War, and to use that memory as a basis for future Jewish commitments. As the first survey of the March, conducted by a team of Israeli researchers in 1990, heralded: “‘The March of the Living’ is the largest educational project on the Jewish World level, that took upon itself to concentrate on the commemoration of the Holocaust in Poland and then celebrating the birth of the State of Israel. It has succeeded in bringing together thousands of young Jews [in] Poland and to unite them in memory of the Jewish past and Jewish fate” (Gutman, et al, n.d., p.1).
By teaching Jewish history outside of the classroom – by doing and seeing – the March embodied the ideals of experiential learning and informal education, major trends in Jewish education in the 1980s and 1990s. Certainly, other forms of informal education existed well before the March, Jewish overnight camps and youth trips to Israel being just two examples. But the March was the first sustained international program to combine this pedagogical approach with study of the Holocaust, and to emphasize the nexus between experience, memory, and Jewish identity (Sheramy, 2007). The March of the Living was, above all, a Jewish identity-building program, intended to inspire Jewish affiliation and commitment in its young participants. Marchers followed a rigorous itinerary of death camps and ghettoes in Poland, joining together on Yom HaShoah for a collective “march of the living” from Auschwitz I to Birkenau, the notorious extermination center. The teenage participants then continued their journey in Israel, visiting sites of Zionist and Israeli history and enacting a carefully prescribed and compressed narrative of seminal twentieth-century Jewish events. Throughout it all, Marchers engaged in “collective emotional experiences” – rituals and ceremonies – that reinforced memories of the trip (CAJE, 1995a, p. 2). By the end of the program, Marchers were to use their new-found memory as the basis for Jewish commitment. As heralded by the 1996 Adult Manual, “the March of the Living is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to educate teens and motivate them to continue their educational process. The teens on the march develop an intense feeling of pride in being Jewish. They begin to get connected to the concept of K’lal Yisrael. They have taken a major step on the path to becoming the future leaders of the Jewish community, through their newly-found commitment to Yiddishkeit and their newly developing love for and responsibility to all things Jewish. We need to capture that spirit and intensify it” (CAJE, 1995a, p. 57).
From 1 500 participants in 1988 to more than 10,000 Marchers expected in spring 2010, the March has evolved from a bi-annual project coordinated in North America by the American Zionist Youth Foundation (AZYF), to a major annual enterprise, orchestrated by the independent March of the Living International organization and drawing the participation of world leaders and special delegations of college students, Birthright Israel members, and non-Jewish groups (phone interview with Yosef Kedem, 25 August 2009). According to Yosef Kedem, Executive Vice Chairman of the International March of the Living, more than 150 000 Jewish tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders from around the world have participated in the March as of spring 2009. This is a significant figure especially given the hefty price tag for participation ($2000 to $5000, depending on where the delegation comes from and how much fundraising they have done) and, for much of the 2000s, a much higher profile for Birthright Israel as an identity-building program. But the March continues to thrive, according to Kedem, and is as popular as ever. How has this unique and, at times, controversial Holocaust educational program evolved over the past twenty years, and what impact does the journey have on its participants today, relative to the first Marchers more than twenty years ago? Moreover, what understanding of the Holocaust do participants derive from a program meant primarily to inspire Jewish identity?
The March of the Living came to fruition at a time when Holocaust consciousness was reaching a new turning point in American culture. Events such as Ronald Reagan’s controversial visit to the Bitburg cemetery, the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus 1 (1986) and Maus II (1991), the wide release of films Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Schindler’s List (1993), and the opening of the United States Holocaust Museum (1993) all helped to bring the Holocaust to the forefront of popular discourse. What had been a more privately-held Jewish story in the early postwar years was by the end of the twentieth century an integral part of the American narrative; several states implemented requirements to teach Holocaust and genocide studies in public schools, and educators used the Holocaust to convey lessons about tolerance, discrimination, and democracy.
To be sure, the early March of the Living curriculum for American participants echoed these more universal lessons; the study guide urged participants to “think about [their] own personal prejudices and commit [themselves] to trying to purge them forever” and to “become an advocate. Fight racism in our world. . . . Get involved!” (CAJE, 1995b, II-2, XIX-11). But, the March was most insistent about using Holocaust education to ensure commitment by participants to living a Jewish life, continuing the “chain of tradition” nearly eradicated by the Nazis, and supporting Israel. The trip, according to the North American leader manual, was about “building bridges between Jewish teens from around the world, intensifying their connection with the State and People of Israel, teaching K’lal Yisrael (the unity of the Jewish people), Ahavat Yisrael (the love of one Jew for another), Tikkun Olam (making the world a better place for humankind) and Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh Bazeh (every Jew is responsible for every other Jew)” (CAJE, 1995a, p.1). Understanding of the Holocaust was not an end in itself, but an essential tool for teaching Jewish youth about the importance of their Jewish identity, participation in the community, and the Jewish state. As Israel Gutman and a team of Israeli researchers summarized in the first research report conducted on the March, “We assumed such a large project would be a powerful trigger increasing the involvement of young Jews within their communities, strengthening their Jewish identity and their identification with the State of Israel. . . .” (Gutman, et al, 1995, p.1).
The March attempts to “trigger” Jewish identity by giving memory to a generation born well after the most dramatic events of twentieth-century Jewish history – the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state – and by inspiring a sense of klal Yisrael and commitment to Israel among those who had not lived through the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973. While the March makes some effort to teach the “facts” of these events by distributing a curriculum guide and requiring preparatory meetings of delegations, class time is limited and it is up to regional groups to decide if and how to use such materials. The March’s main emphasis, rather, is on making history come alive through visits to sites of the Jewish past, and by providing powerful group experiences (re-enactments, ceremonies, and rituals) that reinforce memories and inspire a sense of community and peoplehood. The most dramatic and significant example of this approach is the actual march of the living from Auschwitz I to Birkenau, on Yom HaShoah, in which Marchers re-create the route that imprisoned Jews walked decades earlier. It is a solemn event, with marchers walking in silence, unified by their blue March of the Living jackets and Israeli flags.
The March encourages participants to identify with the plight of Jews during the Holocaust so they may understand Jewish victimization and vulnerability. “Imagine yourself as a concentration camp inmate. How would you feel?” the study guide asks. “If you had to move into the ghetto. . . what would you bring?” (CAJE, 1995b, VII-6, X-33). Founder Abraham Hirchson urges Marchers to see themselves, too, as survivors of the war, “whether we were there or not, even if we had not yet been born when it all happened. The Holocaust left its mark on us, on our collective and individual being. . . .The Holocaust victims beseech us to live and remember!” (Hirchson, n.d., p. 6). Marchers absorb this message; as one teenager from a 2009 BBYO delegation declared: “I am now a witness of the atrocities that occurred and can carry on the stories of the survivors who traveled with us” (see http://www.bbyo.org/news/releases/MOTL_2009/, “BBYO Teens Call March of the Living a ‘Life-Changing Experience.”).
March program materials encourage participants to use their “witness experiences” to combat Holocaust deniers and, even more so, to spur future Jewish commitments. The March’s carefully constructed program aims to change Marchers’ self-perception as Jews and, with it, their “potential for greater involvement and expression of their Jewishness” (CAJE, 1995a, p. iii). Thus, the 1996 Adult Manual instructs bus captains that, “at the last evening session in Poland, it is a good idea to raise the subject about the importance of making commitments to Jewish life. Many of the teens by this time will already feel they need to commit themselves to living a Jewish life for those who can no longer live that life. . . .” (CAJE, 1995a, p. 24, 27).
The trip in Poland focuses on key sites of Holocaust history – Auschwitz, Plazow, the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, Majdanek, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Treblinka – to the exclusion of much else. While the itinerary includes visits to Jewish cultural landmarks – the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw and the former Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin, for example – these are minor parts of the itinerary, overshadowed by sites of Jewish destruction. The itinerary in Israel is far more diverse; while Marchers visit sober sites of Zionist history – for instance, Atlit, the British camp for illegal immigrants; Har Herzl, the military cemetery; Ammunition Hill, the site of a battle in the Six Day War; and Latrun, the memorial to members of Israel’s tank division – the ultimate narrative is redemptive and heroic. In addition, Marchers observe Yom Ha’atzmaut in Israel, marked by a massive celebratory gathering of all the delegations. They enjoy jeep rides, boat trips, and other leisure activities, providing much-needed levity and relaxation after the arduous Poland journey. This structure has a significant impact on participants, as recalled by one teen on the 1996 trip:
I fell in love with Eretz Yisrael immediately. Perhaps it was that we had just come from the dead cold and dreariness of Poland, where smiles are a luxury and the air still seems full of the ashes of our brothers and sisters, but as the sun began to rise on the morning we arrived in Israel, and the landscape exploded. . . I was blown away by the power and beauty of the land, and I knew I was addicted. . . . In my infatuation with the country, I almost forgot the question that had been on my mind for months – Why devote half of a program designed primarily to promote Holocaust awareness, to touring Israel? Later, after I returned home, I had the answer. If ‘never again’ is to have any meaning, then maintaining a strong and secure Israel is just as important as the remembrances of the Holocaust taught by the March of the Living. (Kaufman, 1996, p. 180)
By following the March’s carefully constructed route, Jewish teens come to see Israel through the lens of European Jewry’s destruction.
Over the past twenty years, the structure and narrative of the March has remained largely the same. While curricular materials for North American delegations have been updated over the years, much of the text resembles that used in the 1990s; its goals, then and now, bear the imprint of the continuity debates embroiling the American Jewish community in the last two decades of the twentieth-century. In the 1980s and 1990s, an unremitting stream of reports on the rise in intermarriage rates, the decline in synagogue membership and observance rates, and the indifference of Jewish youth on college campuses piqued anxiety about the survival of the American Jewish community, and mobilized communal leaders to ensure the preservation of Jewish life. Jewish education was heralded as a critical part of this campaign (Israel & Mittelberg, 1998). The March curricula is explicit about the program’s work in countering such survival anxiety:
There are some doom and gloom sociologists today who suggest that the Jewish people face extinction in the next few generations. Yet . . . none of us would want to even consider the possibility. . . . Every link in any chain is important, because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. . . . [The March of the Living] is the story of how some of the links were forcibly excised . . . and of our continued fight to bridge the gap and re-link the chain. . . . A significant link in that chain is YOU. (CAJE, 1995b, I-2)
Indeed, the first survey of March alumnae revolves largely around the trip’s impact on participants’ Jewish identity and attitudes towards Israel. Conducted by the sociologist William Helmreich in 1993 on March participants from the 1988, 1990, and 1992 trips, the survey’s first key finding reports that “the March of the Living has had a profound effect on participants in terms of how they identify Jewishly. This shows up in their attitudes towards intermarriage and assimilation and in their self-perception as Jews.” The second key finding states, “The March plays a crucial role in the Israel-America relationship. The majority of participants have returned to Israel since going on the March. . . . Most cite the March as having been a major determining factor in their decision to return to Israel and/or consider aliyah. . . .” The sixth key finding reiterates this message: “As the Jewish community in North America continues to search for ways in which to prevent assimilation and intermarriage it is important that it takes a good look at programs of this sort as a major weapon in that effort” (Helmreich, 1994, p. 2).
These barometers have continued to guide the program into the twenty-first century. In a more recent survey of the March, conducted in 2004, Helmreich again focuses on alumnae views on intermarriage, interest in making aliyah, support for Israel, number of trips to Israel, Jewish education, importance of living in a Jewish community, and likelihood to donate to Jewish causes. Interviewing close to 300 Marchers from trips in 1992, 1999, and 2003, Helmreich concludes that the “March of the Living is an extremely successful program. It greatly enhances Jewish identity, commitment, and behavior. For researchers and program planners, the results definitively prove that the combination of experiences that participants go through and the images they evoke have a deep and lasting impact on them” (Helmreich, 2005, p. 7).
While many have hailed the March of the Living for such results, the program also has its critics. They include alumnae who argue that the March’s dramatic impact is fleeting, and that it promotes a Jewish identity rooted in Jewish suffering. “I was astonished that everybody [on the trip] knew how these people had died,” one March alumnus describes, “but how little people cared about these peoples’ actual lives. One thousand teenagers who could name concentration camps, but could they name four Yiddish writers?” (Helmreich, 2005, p. 10). Another alumnus remarks, “We’re told we need to support Israel and be Jewish, but we don’t know why, except if we don’t, things like the Holocaust are going to happen again” (Ulman, 2006). Some argue that high school students are simply too young to absorb the March, and the experience is better suited for college students, who “generally seem more equipped to handle such an intense experience and to actually learn from it, rather than just feeling it” (Schnitzer, n.d.).
A common complaint is that the March portrays Poland one-dimensionally as only “a country full of death camps and anti-Semitism” (Schnitzer, n.d.). According to an article in the Long Island Jewish World, (Ruth Gruber, “Is This the Way to Remember Our Dead?” 7-13 October 1994, p. 13), “many of the young participants [on the 1994 March] came primed with a negative view of Poland as a wasteland populated by antisemites.” “I don’t remember associating anything positive with Poland,” recalls one Marcher. “It was all shock, shock, shock” (Ulman, 2006). Indeed, student writings often refer to the hostility of Poland, such as one in a collection from the 1996 trip: “Screams of dirty Jews. . . . Swastikas on the walls. . . . This is Poland today, 1996. Imagine it 50 years ago” (Kaufman, 1996, p. 29). (The editor notes beneath the student’s poem that “this writing is the allegorical interpretation of events that may or may not have occurred as depicted here.”) Such a narrow representation of Poland not only misinforms Marchers, states Holocaust survivor Severyn Ashkenazy, who is involved in the renewal of Jewish life in Poland. It also sours Polish-Jewish relations: “They are the opposite of ambassadors of goodwill. To the Poles, it seems the whole world comes and looks at them as murderers” (Ulman, 2006). (See David Bernstein’s article in this issue, ZG)
In response to these criticisms, the March of the Living has created more opportunities for Polish-Jewish interaction and for greater exploration or pre- and postwar Jewish life. Some delegations arrange time for Jewish marchers and Polish teens to meet; others arrange time with members of the Polish Jewish community (for instance, a delegation from Los Angeles in 2006 reports planning to spend Shabbat with a Jewish day school in Warsaw, and to visit with a group of Polish university students) (Ulman, 2006). Non-Jewish Polish delegations have also participated in the program for the past several years. In 2000 a delegation from New York held pre-trip meetings with Polish leaders as part of an initiative co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. The initiative’s sponsors were responding to concerns that the “the march concentrates on the past, on Polish antisemitism and Jewish death; it ignores the present, changes in Polish society and the renaissance of Poland’s Jewish community.” As Deborah Sklar, one of the program organizers explained (quoted in Steve Lipman, “Dialogue, As Well as Death Camps,” The Jewish Week, 10 March 2004), “There is a Poland today that is open and willing to dialogue with Jews, not to whitewash the past.”
So, what does this all mean for participants’ understanding of the Holocaust? According to William Helmreich, Marchers report a greater ability after the trip to respond to Holocaust deniers (although he notes that “it’s not that the March gave them new information. Rather, it made it possible for them to respond to such attacks by saying: ‘I’ve been there. I’ve seen the camps and I know.’”) (Helmreich, 2005, p. 7) Indeed, the March curriculum itself notes that students need to “take a special class or course, or read extensively . . . to study the Holocaust in greater depth after the trip.” In many ways, the understanding of the Holocaust inspired by the March is more like the understanding of the Exodus inspired by the Passover story; it is one guided by ritual, collective re-enactment, and an imperative to identify oneself with those who “had come out of Egypt.” As Yosef Yerushalmi argues elegantly in Zachor (1996), such collective memory of group catastrophe is an essential component of Jewish peoplehood. But identification with the survivor experience, especially the experience outlined on the March, has significant implications for its teenage participants. To view Poland through the eyes of a Jew in 1941, or Israel through the eyes of a refugee in 1948, is to acquire an important but ultimately insufficient perspective on both these deeply complex nations. The March may be the beginning of a young Jew’s exploration of the Holocaust and Israel, but it cannot be the ending.
References
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CAJE. (1995b). Study Guide. Miami:Central Agency for Jewish Education.
Feldman, J. (2002). Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective through the Poland ‘Experience.’ Israel Studies 7(2), 84-114.
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Helmreich, W. (2005). Long-Range Effects of the March of the Living on Participants. New York: Department of Sociology, City College of New York.
Hirchson, Abraham “Why Poland?” in To Know and to Remember. New York: March of the Living, n.d..
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Schnitzer, S. (n.d.). The Mistakes of the March. The Jewish Student Press Service, available at http://www.shmoozenet.com/jsps/stories/1098Shira.shtml, accessed 19 August 2009.
Ulman, J. (2006). Jews in Poland Speak of Shoah Remembrance as a Curse. The Jewish Journal, 20 April 2006, available at http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/item/jews_in_poland_speak_of_shoah_remembrance_as_a_curse_20060421/, accessed 19 August 2009.