Selling the Holocaust by Tim Cole

Author:Tim Cole [Cole, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351549158
Google: G8w3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T03:29:23+00:00

That kind of reaction can be seen over and over again, and is consciously looked for in the very ordering of the pilgrimage.

'Auschwitz' has become the sacred space of a secular religion, and pilgrimage there has become 'a secular ritual, one that confirms who they are as Jews, and perhaps, even more so, as North American Jews'.49 For an American Jew, the 'Holocaust' and 'Auschwitz' are powerful ethnic markers, which many have pointed to as taking the place of traditional Judaism for an increasingly secular generation. Lopate reflects how he

... first began to notice the usurpation of the traditional Passover service by Holocaust worship at a large communal seder in Houston, about 1982 ... For many of the people at that seder in Texas, the Holocaust was the heart of their faith; it was what touched them most deeply about being Jewish ... The table conversation turned to accounts of pilgrimages to Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, package tours organised by United Jewish Appeal. The ancient Jewish religion was all but forgotten beside the lure of the concentration camp universe.50

It is surely ironic – as Kugelmass suggests – if American Jews feel their most Jewish when walking through 'Auschwitz'. How ironic that this place where hundreds of thousands of assimilated European Jews were taken because they had been defined as Jews in the Nuremberg Laws, has now become the place where hundreds of thousands of assimilated American Jews go to rediscover their Jewishness.

But perhaps more ironic still is that for a number of survivors, 'Auschwitz' is seen as a potential burial site. As the Deputy Director of the Auschwitz museum told Timothy Ryback in 1993

... recently a number of Holocaust survivors have contacted us and asked that their remains be buried at Birkeneau ... Many of these people lost their entire families here – mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings. We understand their desire to have their remains interred here. Birkeneau is a cemetery, but not a cemetery where you can conduct funerals.51

A symbolic funeral of sorts was held there in 1988, when the Israeli government minister Avraham Scharir made a visit to Auschwitz, to lay 'a little sack of earth from the Holy Land' as 'a symbolic gesture in honour of the ashes of the millions who could have no grave, whose ashes and bones were strewn among foreign fields.52 In taking the a symbolic handful of earth from Israel to this place, Scharir reasserted the connection between Auschwitz and Israel which both Steven Spielberg and the organisers of the March of the Living articulate. It is a connection which is made in the other direction through the burial of ashes from Auschwitz at Israel's shrine to the 'Holocaust': Yad Vashem. And it is a connection which is highly politicised within contemporary Israel as Avraham Scharir self-consciously reflected on his return. His visit had reminded him of the significance of this place which represents the 'Holocaust' to contemporary Israel and therefore he urged that, 'every boy and every girl must visit Auschwitz'.

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