Jackie Feldman is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben Gurion University. Dr. Feldman’s areas of interest are pilgrimage and tourism, civil religion, Holocaust memory and commemoration, and museum studies. This article is part of his most recent book published as Above the Death-Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity.
Since their inception in the mid-1980s, over 400,000 Israeli high school students have traveled on organized voyages to Poland. As they are mainly from academic tracks, many of them will become part of future Israeli elites. What images and perceptions of the Holocaust, present-day Poland and the Jewish past are transmitted through the structure and practice of these voyages? What role do such images and perceptions serve in the formation of Israeli identity?
I claim that the voyage should be understood as a civil religious pilgrimage, rather than a study tour. Pilgrims “pick their way through the jungle of cultural irrelevance to find what it is that they are looking for; the intervening countryside, so to speak, is simply ignored” (Webber, 1992, p. 12). Through acts of ritualization based on paradigms brought with them from their home-worlds, pilgrims project meaning onto territories that thus become sacred. Furthermore, pilgrimage is a highly sensory experience. It is through bodily performances that pilgrimages present taxonomies of the world which clothe concepts in visible, tactile symbols which produce moods so intense that the world-as-presented through the pilgrimage ritual and the lived-world are perceived as one. Through such bodily practices, religious or national conceptions become part of the natural order of things. Hence, the meanings of the voyage should be sought in the structure of the trips’ space-time and in their dynamic performance.
“I was glad I didn’t have to go to Chernobyl.”
The youth visits to Poland began in the mid-1980’s, after the gates of Poland were reopened to Israeli visitors and in a social situation in which common bases for national identity were weakened by the rise of ethnic identity and the emphasis on individual self-realization. The old mythical figures – the pioneer and the soldier – lost much of their moral authority, and identity began to coalesce around smaller units – my ethnic group, my religious group, my social circle, myself (Bilu & Ben-Ari, 1997). Popular global culture (TV, fashion, music, MTV, video, the internet) has consistently weakened the power of the Israeli nation to mold identity, and the Poland visits have been promoted as a reaction – a means of shoring up loyalty to the national collective. As Oded Cohen, former head of the Education Ministry’s Youth Division and the single most important organizer of youth visits to Poland said, “[as a result of the voyages] the State of Israel becomes better understood as an expression of revival, of independence, of the capacity for self-defense. This is the new message of responsibility in an age of eclipse of moral values.”
In a talk to Israeli tour guides to Poland, Oded Cohen provided the following account of its origins:
“They showed me the program: a meeting with this Konsomol (sic) and that Kusmomol (sic)… I was supposed to go to Chernobyl that day, but ‘The Holy One Blessed Be He’ helped me, and the explosion took place that day… I was glad that the explosion took place at Chernobyl and I didn’t need to go there…”
“So I say [to the Polish government official], ‘you know for us Jews… on Shabbat we read “it is my brothers whom I am seeking.” I am not interested in the program, I am seeking my brothers. Here is the program I want!’” (lecture, 27.8.92).
In this foundation narrative, modern-day Poland (or Chernobyl) is of no interest. National identity – “my brothers” – is all that matters. The opposition of “us” to “them” was built into the trip from its inception.
The social context of the voyage: Israel as enclave
The geopolitical situation of Israel, and the weakening of its interior grid, as a result of social fragmentation and globalization, have increasingly led it to see and present itself as an enclave – an inherently fragile community within a hostile world. One of the main strategies used by enclaves to retain their members is boundary-marking practices: “The committed enclave members… erect… a wall of virtue between themselves and the outside world” (Douglas, 1993, pp. 44-45, 61).
By identifying with victims of the Holocaust, citizens can strengthen the conviction in the innocence and the existential (or cosmic) nature of the isolation of the Jewish-Israeli collective in the present. As one of the founders of the program put it, “Even if there were amongst us social, ethnic and ideological differences – in Treblinka, Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen these differences disappeared … there they made us one nation – the nation that was murdered!” (Keren, 1993).
The voyage draws a clear, existential boundary around the Israeli group, and constructs a ritualized universe that will make that boundary seem natural. Although the understanding of the “complexity of Polish-Jewish relations,” the universal messages of the Shoah and the recognition of the thousand-year history of Polish Jewry are all part of the Ministry of Education’s statement of purpose, Poland remains first and foremost, the place of the murder of the Jewish people.
Taxonomy of voyage space in Poland
The Ministry of Education sets guidelines and itineraries which have become the norm for almost all youth groups. In Poland, students visit at least three death camps, several cemeteries and mass graves, remains of former Jewish shtetls and abandoned synagogues. They listen to the testimony of survivors at the sites of their suffering and struggle, and perform ceremonies at the Warsaw Ghetto and the crematoria. The world of the voyage is sharply divided into interior space, which is an extension of Israel, and exterior space, which is identified with Holocaust Poland:
Ceremonies sites take place in exterior space, while discussions, meals and socializing are held in interior space. In exterior space, students are expected to conduct themselves in a serious manner, as representatives of Israel; in interior space – in the hotel and the bus – the students are free to act like teenagers. The bus constitutes an insular Israeli community; the symbols of death and the strangeness of being in a foreign country remain outside, beyond the foggy window pane. Clothes are strewn around, Israeli snack food is passed among participants, and Israeli music plays on the bus’s audio system. The enclaval nature of the environmental bubble that typifies all guided tour groups is here given moral value and becomes a prototype of imagined historic Polish-Jewish relations.
Each bus is accompanied by an armed guard, usually Israeli. The security measures and tight itinerary eliminate any possibility for casual contact with Poles. Groups must follow their programs to the letter. The overruling authority for the schedule is delegated to security, yet the ideological underpinnings of such arrangements are concealed, often even from the eyes of the delegation leaders.
The Ministry of Education groups are organized in large delegations, in order to manifest Israeli presence on Polish soil and to claim contested memory sites for the State of Israel. These are blue and white, emblazoned with a large barbed wire star of David surrounding the word “ISRAEL” in Latin letters. This mass presence makes tighter and more visible security necessary, which further heightens the group’s profile. Thus, any anti-Semitic skinhead in the area knows that on the Saturday before Holocaust Memorial Day, he can always find a group of Jews at the Sukenice in Cracow. He arrives, spitting and shouting “Heil Hitler!” Thus, the logic of the enclave generates conditions that facilitate anti-Semitic confrontations, which, in turn, confirm participants’ conception of Poles as anti-Semites.
Between Israelis, Poles and Diaspora Jews
As I have suggested, voyage organizers construct a totalizing environment designed to affirm the integrity and moral value of the Jewish-Israeli collective. How then do they maintain the impermeability of its borders when faced with morally gray areas, phenomena that appear to transgress the borders of the voyage’s taxonomy?
1. No fun in Poland. Exuberance and rowdiness are channeled into the interior spaces of the hotel and bus or into purely Israeli spaces and events. For example, on the night preceding the visit to Auschwitz an Israeli song evening is organized in a rented auditorium, often with singers imported from Israel. Among National Religious groups, having fun in Poland is more explicitly delegitimized. One Orthodox group leader described shopping in Poland as a temptation that had to be overcome. A popular trip guidebook reads: “We are traveling to Poland only in order to stand and pray at the tombs of the Jewish saints (tzadikim), and to visit the death camps and the places that served as synagogues … The program, therefore, does not allow free time for wasting money or shopping sprees” (Alfasi, 1994).
2. Marginalizing the sympathetic Polish “Other.” Delegation organizers and Israeli security guards depict Poland as a dangerous place. When meetings with groups of Polish high school students are scheduled, they are poorly planned, and take place during the down time slots usually allocated for ventilatzia – “cooling out.” They almost never deal with central issues of the pilgrimage.
The Righteous Gentile, the Pole who risked his life to save Jews during the Holocaust, presents another challenge to the voyage’s dichotomous division of the world into innocent victims (us) versus perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders (them). His presence is, however, bracketed. Rather than being heard in situ, where the site could lend its authority to his story (“this is where I hid them,” etc.), the Gentile is encapsulated “inside” an Israeli space, the hotel, often seated at a raised table along with the three Holocaust survivor-witnesses. Righteous Gentiles are encountered here as stage figures: singular objects retrieved from oblivion by the grace of the State of Israel’s recognition and respect. He becomes, in the words of Israeli poet Haim Hefer, frequently read at the ceremony, “the one righteous man in Sodom.”
3. Appropriating of the extinct Diaspora for the state. The view of the Diaspora in the Poland voyages is marked by deep ambivalence. On the one hand, students are required to identify with the existential situation of Diaspora Jews at the time of the Holocaust and to appreciate the richness of former Jewish life in Poland. On the other hand, the student must remember that he has “a State and a flag and an army”. I suggest that the schedule, group ceremonies and the framing of the role of the survivor-witness serve to delineate the border between the Jewish-Israeli enclave and that of Diaspora Jewry.
The main sites of past Jewish life are linked with Orthodox Judaism – shtetls, cemeteries and synagogues. (Orthodox groups have greater interest in the Jewish past and stronger connections to it. For more, see Appendix A in Feldman (2008)). The Polish Jew thus becomes distinguishable from his Gentile counterpart through his dress, his food, his beard, his worship – his entire way of life. He is an alien in the Kingdom of Amalek, a member of “a people that dwells apart.” The visit presents Polish Jews, not as a product (and agent) of specifically Polish conditions and history, but as one example of “exilic Jewry.” Unlike the contemporary ultra-Orthodox haredi, the Polish Jew offers no challenge to the Zionist narrative, or to secular students’ world-views, as he is no longer among the living. The living redeemed Israeli Jew can thus proclaim himself free of the norms and the weakness of his dead exilic predecessor, but heir to the symbolic capital of his innocent victimhood.
Poland can serve as an ideal stage for Israeli Jews playing out the drama of their identity, as it provides so many good props and so few competing performers. There are few living Jews in Poland, and their artifacts – cemeteries and vacant synagogues – more easily communicate the community’s exterminated absence than their living presence. The living Jew who chose to live in Poland after the Shoah poses a potential threat to this order. Witness this happenstance encounter between an Israeli student and an old Polish Jewish beggar in a Warsaw synagogue:
Student: “Why don’t you come to Israel?”
Beggar: “I come twice a year to visit.”
Student: “Where were you in Israel?”
Beggar: “In Jerusalem, in Bnei Brak, I danced by the Kotel on Shavuot.”
Student (turning to me): “That’s not the question. He didn’t understand the question. Why does he stay in Poland”?
Beggar: “I live here. Every Jew has his pekl (burden). It is bashert (decreed) in heaven.”
Student: “I don’t understand – why doesn’t he immigrate to Israel?”
Second student: “An old man like that should immigrate? This is his home. What should he do in Israel? Move into an absorption center?”
The girl is perplexed by the old man’s living presence in a land depicted as a Jewish cemetery. When the girl refuses to accept the beggar’s right to be a “normal” Jewish tourist in Israel, the beggar then confirms the Israeli stereotype of Polish Jewry, by presenting himself as a poor old man, bowed with years and the weight of divinely decreed exilic destiny. The second student’s reply extends the category of “Polish Jewry” to the almost dead.
Performance: ceremonies and witness testimony
While the entire voyage follows a ritualized route that affirms Israeli national identity, group ceremonies serve as condensation points. The ceremonies are designed to create unity in feeling and a sense of community through repetition of central symbols and songs; they manifest strength and lay claim to memory through massive presence on Polish soil. The ceremonies employ discursive symbolism, including music and “authentic environments” which bypass cognitive mechanisms in creating emotion. Participants in the death camp visits are full of symbols, which when triggered externally, primarily through sensory stimuli, cause the participants to feel the naturalness of their own emotions. It is the capacity of those symbols to produce emotion that grants them their power. The dense crowding, the participants’ sense of group isolation and the presence of icons of the death-world create favorable conditions for the “contagion” of emotion (often expressed through public crying), which is cathected into the national symbols centrally placed there.
The sequence of texts and songs within the group ceremonies incorporate individual suffering into a national narrative of redemption. The ceremonies usually begin with the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead; they continue with the personal account of a survivor or ghetto fighter, and always end with the raising of flags and the singing of the national anthem. Thus, the suffering of the individual victim is invoked to remind students of the necessity for a strong State, while the State provides a symbolic future for the victim-survivors and the Jewish people.
The voyages often conclude at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. The Memorial, portraying physical resistance and military heroism, serves as the portal of entry into the land of Israel. Immediately following the rousing chant of the national anthem, students will board the plane for the flight home. The student thus re-enacts the path from exile to redemption (galut to geulah) as a voyage in space – from Diaspora to the State of Israel. This fixed trajectory narrates Jewish history as a teleology in which life in the Diaspora inevitably culminates in its destruction in the Shoah, immediately followed by revival in the State of Israel.
Another crucial element tying the Shoah to the State is the testimony of the accompanying Israeli Holocaust survivor-witness. As a prominent voyage organizer put it, “Without a witness, the trip is not the same… When we talk to the kids in Israel about the millions, it’s not understood. But if you go to Poland and talk about the millions and they don’t get it – you’re stuck! […] The kid takes the witness by the hand – through the honor he gives him. The witness puts the kid in touch with the reality – that it really happened. Also, it’s good that the pupils see that he came out of it. The youth doesn’t come back traumatized…” (Interview with Y.L., 31.7.94).
The witness serves as an incarnation of the dead, and the supreme moral authority of the voyage. His testimony is inseparable from his physical appearance and presence. Through the witness’s public performance, statements become testimony, while the watching/listening/co-presence with the witness at the site of his suffering and survival is an act of reception of testimony.
While the witnesses tell their stories in a variety of settings, the story with the most impact is the one presented in the quarantine barracks at Auschwitz. There, students are squeezed into the long, narrow unheated wooden shack, between the moldering bunk beds. The cold, the smell, the detachment from the outside world, the authentication of the remains by the witness’s voice, body and his pointing to the remains serve to efface the distance between Auschwitz and its relics. Students often visualize that they too could have been imprisoned there.
On one visit I observed, the witness concluded his testimony to the students as part of a ceremony held atop the crematoria. He said: “You know, it is you who give me the strength so that I can go on, even until nightfall… so that you can be witnesses to what they did to our people… You who are here in this place know that you are the correct answer to Nazism and anti-Semitism. On the one side are the ovens, in which hundreds of thousands were burnt. And now children, girls and boys, bring many new sons to the nation, so that we live forever.”
The mise-en-scene of the significant testimony of the witness over the crematoria in front of a large delegation of flag-carrying, blue and white clad youngsters nearly assures that the survivor’s tale of suffering and survival will mention Israel as its redemptive close. The students are told that it is they who empower him to give his testimony, and provide the redemptive close to his story, his victory over death. Through this ceremony, students are told, they become “witnesses of the witnesses” – their future service to the nation becomes the ultimate act of homage to the Holocaust dead.
The bottom line and its risks
I have argued that for Israeli participants, performance of the ritualized Poland voyage makes the enclave view of the collective seem natural. In recent years, the Shoah has become even more central in the legitimation of security goals because, unlike in some of Israel’s recent military engagements, the total malevolence of the persecutor and the innocence of the victim are beyond dispute.
One of the great risks of the voyages, to my mind, is that it fosters a perspective of what Zygmunt Bauman terms “adopted victims” or “victims by proxy” – those who “need to re-forge their own imagined continuity of victim-hood into the world’s real continuity of victimization… by acting as if… the world they live in reveals its hostility, conspires against them – and, indeed, contains the possibility of another holocaust.” The consequence of such identification may be the development of a fortress mentality – “to make their homes into fortresses, they need them besieged and under fire” (Bauman, 1998, p. 37).
Can the voyages to Poland be modified so that they might serve to sensitize participants to the suffering of others and foster the development of solidarities and mutual responsibilities that transcend national boundaries? Can a more positive and diverse view of the Jewish past be conveyed in a land with so few living Jews?
The first step, I argue, to expressing alternative messages involves a shift in orientation. There has been too much focus on the numbers of students and flags, and not enough critical thinking with symbols. In order to create visits that do not affirm an enclave view of the world, the security-centeredness of the voyage must be relaxed, and ambiguities must be introduced into the ritual frame of the voyage: figures that pose themselves on the boundaries, dividing the world into “us” and “them”. Furthermore, such figures (righteous Gentiles, living Diaspora Jews, modern-day Polish youth) must be granted authority by allotting them more time and space, including participation in joint projects, visits and ceremonies. With the rejection of the need to ‘manifest presence’ through flags and mass marches, and the introduction of enough border-straddling elements the focus may shift. By providing more opportunities for dialogue, confrontation and self-reflection, the voyage may provide participants – as well as Poles – and Israelis a variety of models for identification and deepen reflection on moral, religious and ethnic categories.
References
Alfasi. Y. (ed) (1994). So That You Remember: The Voyages of Youths to Poland. Second Edition. Petah Tiqva. [Hebrew].
Bauman, Z. (1998). Hereditary Vicitmhood: The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost. Tikkun 13(4).
Bilu, Y. & Ben-Ari, E. (eds.) (1997). Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience. Albany.
Douglas, M. (1993). In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 158. Sheffield.
Feldman, J. (2008). Above the Death Pits, beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Press.
Keren, N. (1993). In It is My Brothers I Am Seeking…: A Youth Voyage to Poland. State of Israel, Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. Youth and Culture Division, Jerusalem. [Hebrew].
Webber, J. (1992). The Future of Auschwitz, Some Personal Reflections. The First Frank Green Lecture, Oxford Center for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.