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Immediately after the Holocaust, while most of the survivors were waiting in the Displaced Persons Camps for a resolution of their status, the Zionist movement's leadership together with the survivors' leadership made an unconscious choice of addressing the Shoah as a collective catastrophe, which overrides individual calamity. This view led the newborn state to adopt almost solely the narrative and conceptualization of the Holocaust, disregarding individuals' suffering and emphasizing elements of national heroism, active resistance to collective danger, and the exclusive role of the nascent Jewish state in assuring a secure life for the Jewish collective. It was not until the 1980s that individual memories and narratives trickled into public consciousness through literature, film, and the media. Around the same period, a parallel process occurred concerning national attitudes toward war trauma. The earliest public acknowledgement of Combat Stress Reaction and war trauma emerged in Israel only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, shortly before the psychiatric community in the West acknowledged Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The article argues that there is a clear connection between the two processes, and that the primacy of securing the collective over rehabilitating the individual significantly affected both the memory of the Holocaust and the attitudes toward war trauma for many years. Focusing the Holocaust memory on the narrow aspect of persistent danger to the Jewish collective has significantly limited empathy toward war trauma casualties, as the two issues are based on similar social beliefs.

Hitlerwelle, Führerboom, Hitlernostalgie in the German language; in Hebrew there is the famous La'Hit-Ler (Hitler-Schlager) coined by Israeli poet David Avidan, or what Professor Moshe Zuckermann has just recently called Hitleriada (a combination between Hitler and Olympiad):1 all phrases share the wish to describe the great interest that people often (re-)find in the figure of the Nazi Führer. And this interest usually emerges in waves. During the 1990s, Israeli art showed an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of Hitler that lasted around a decade and is considered to be a turning point with respect to the ways the Holocaust is represented among Israeli-Jewish artists. By focusing on the work of Israeli artist Boaz Arad, Marcel Marcel (2000), which ended this decade, in comparison to the work of German artist Rudolf Herz, ZUGZWANG (1995), this essay wishes to re-think the recruiting of the image of Hitler in Israeli art, in order to introduce the advantages of transnationalism and a comparative approach to the local art discourse with respect to Holocaust related imagery.

The article explores several Israeli documentary films of the past fifteen years which dare to touch on the under-researched subject of romantic relationships between Israeli Jews and German non-Jews, in three different documentary sub-genres. The main premise here is that overall, the heightened emphasis in Israel on Holocaust commemoration, the unique insights of second and third generation survivor offspring, the rise of globalization and the attraction felt by contemporary Israelis to Berlin have inspired the production of films that tackle a subject once considered taboo. Unlike current Israeli documentaries however, which treat political and social issues like the plight of the Palestinians, immigrant workers, asylum seekers, etc., and focus on “the other” or “the stranger”, the films discussed here, burdened by Holocaust memory, foreground the Jewish-Israeli side of the relationship, thus precluding an in-depth representation of the German side.

The phrase ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ is commonly regarded as a derogatory term associated with the actions of Jewish victims during the Holocaust and attributed to Abba Kovner. This article explores its usage during World War II and the early decades of Israel’s existence, revealing that it was first used pejoratively within the Yishuv as early as 1942 when news of the European annihilation surfaced—predating knowledge of Kovner’s usage. Kovner had used the term not pejoratively, but rather in an effort to enhance defiance among ghetto residents. The negative connotations intensified after the war, especially during attempts to identify Jewish leaders deemed ‘responsible’ for the Holocaust, as in the Kastner trial, and the phrase came to function as a tool differentiating ostensibly submissive Jews in exile from those ready to resist in the Land of Israel. It also permeated the Israeli-Arab conflict, highlighting Israeli resolve to stand firm. The evolving meanings of ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ over time mirror shifting attitudes toward Holocaust survivors in Israel and serve as an example of divergent trends in the collective memory of an event, which developed even before the event had concluded.

The article illuminates the process by which the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) memory of the Holocaust has been transformed to enlist society in reconstructing consciousness of the tragedy into a carefully nurtured memory of idyllic ultra-Orthodox life in interwar Eastern Europe, with the assertion that there is a direct continuity between that vanished life and life in Israel today.

The Cellar (Hamartef, Natan Gross, 1963) is a groundbreaking film—the only Israeli fictional film created by Holocaust survivors regarding the Holocaust and its aftermath from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor protagonist. Yet it has been largely ignored by studies on the representation of the Holocaust in Israeli cinema and has not been attributed proper significance. This article is the first to give center stage to this pioneering film. It shows that this under researched film was the marker of change, a first cinematic attempt at relating the story of Holocaust survivors with complexity and depth, which threw aside the shallow narrative of national redemption in Israel, that characterized Israeli cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Instead it focused on 1930s Germany and the return to Germany after World War II, periods which had thus far been neglected in Israeli cinema. Moreover, the article highlights The Cellar as exceptional in comparison to fictional films produced after 1963, which focus mainly on the lives of Holocaust survivors in Israel, and which disregard the themes of life in 1930s Europe, as well as the attempts by survivors to return home after World War II.

The Fall of a Sparrow is the only full biography in English of the partisan, poet, and patriot Abba Kovner (1918-1987). An unsung and largely unknown hero of the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence, Kovner was born in Vilna, \"the Jerusalem of Lithuania.\" Long before the rest of the world suspected, he was the first person to state that Hitler was planning to kill the Jews of Europe. Kovner and other defenders of the Vilna ghetto, only hours before its destruction, escaped to the forest to join the partisans fighting the Nazis. Returning after the Liberation to find Vilna empty of Jews, he immigrated to Israel, where he devised a fruitless plot to take revenge on the Germans. He then joined the Israeli army and served as the Givati Brigade's Information Officer, writing \"Battle Notes,\" newsletters that inspired the troops defending Tel Aviv. After the war, Kovner settled on a kibbutz and dedicated his life to working the land, writing poetry, and raising a family. He was also the moving force behind such projects as the Diaspora Museum and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.The Fall of a Sparrow is based on countless interviews with people who knew Kovner, and letters and archival material that have never been translated before.

Seventy years have passed since the Holocaust, but this cataclysmic event continues to reverberate in the present. In this research, we examine attributions about the causes of the Holocaust and the influence of such attributions on intergroup relations. Three representative surveys were conducted among Germans, Poles, and Israeli Jews to examine inter- and intragroup variations in attributions for the Holocaust and how these attributions influence intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that Germans made more external than internal attributions and were especially low in attributing an evil essence to their ancestors. Israelis and Poles mainly endorsed the obedient essence attribution and were lowest on attribution to coercion. These attributions, however, were related to attitudes towards contemporary Germany primarily among Israeli Jews. The more they endorsed situationist explanations, and the less they endorsed the evil essence explanation, the more positive their attitude to Germany. Among Germans, attributions were related to a higher motivation for historical closure, except for the obedience attribution that was related to low desire for closure. Israelis exhibited a low desire for historical closure especially when attribution for evil essence was high. These findings suggest that lay perceptions of history are essential to understanding contemporary intergroup processes.

The article is concerned with the processes by which the collective memory of Israelis relating to the fate of their families in the Holocaust is shaped. The central issues raised are how and when one remembers, what significance is attached to this act of remembrance, and how this memory is transmitted from generation to generation. I shall deal with the transmission of the family memory to two generations and the various public contexts within which the significance of family memory developed.

Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the “unspeakability” of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendants entail only the “absence of presence” of the past and the absence of descendant knowledge of that past, while the familial social milieu is thought to foster only the wounds of transmitted PTSD. Contrary to the literature, ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants depict the survivor home as embedding the nonpathological presence of the Holocaust past within silent, embodied practices, person‐object interaction, and person‐person interaction. These silent traces form an experiential matrix of Holocaust presence that sustains familial “lived memory” of the past and transmits tacit knowledge of the past within the everyday private social milieu. The ethnography of silent memory may also provide a tentative model of nontraumatic individual and familial memory work in everyday life.