Today is Yom Yerushalayim, a national holiday commemorating the reunification of Jerusalem and the establishment of Israeli control over the Old City in 1967. It officially became a national holiday in 1998, though it had been celebrated since 1968. Mostly it's commemorated by state ceremonies, assemblies and activities in school, etc.
As it turns out, today is also Yom HaStudentim (Day of the Student), the Israeli version of spring break. Apparently, Yom HaStudentim is not the same day in every city, but in Jerusalem it is always on Yom Yerushalayim. I don't have school today, which is a plus, but on the other hand there was an all-night concert (about 8pm until 6am) in a park near our apartment and we couldn't get to sleep all night, so I guess that's the minus...
We commemorated Yom Yerushalayim in the preschol this morning during our daily circle time. Mazal, one of the teachers, talked about her memories from before Jerusalem was unified, when Israelis couldn't access the Old City or Mt. Scopus. Then, she said, there was a big war and the wall between East and West Jerusalem came down and everyone was happy. She asked the students to name some big Jerusalem institutions that they are proud of -the Knesset, the Western Wall, the Biblical Zoo (that one was a big hit - lots of kids stood up and screamed "I've been to the zoo!") But most of the kids she called on wanted to answer the question "What is in Jerusalem" with "my house." or "grandma and grandpa's house." At some point during the conversation, Mazal started listing museums in Jerusalem and asking me if I'd been to them. "Jessica is visiting us from America," she told the kids, "so she hasn't been to a lot of places here before. She really should go see the museums. What else should she see?" "My house! You should come to my house, Jessica!" "My granparents' house!" (I don't think they really understood what she was going for). Anyway, we learned a bit about Jerusalem, and then we did some Jerusalem dances.
(I should mention that while the Jerusalem education was going on, I was sitting next to a little boy who just moved here from the US. He didn't understand any of the Hebrew, and he kept leaning over to whisper to me about dinosaurs. So as my attention drifted between him and the rest of the class, what I heard was something like, "And then the giant T-rex stands on its legs like a person and...we have hospitals in Jerusalem - how many of you were born in Haddassah on Mt Scopus? When I was a little girl we couldn't go to Mt. Scopus...he runs really fast because he's a dinosaur, but I can run faster." The kid from America has a little sister in the other class, and the other day I gave myself a headache by playing with an English-speaking 3 year old, two Hebrew-speaking 2 year olds, and a Hebrew-speaking 4 year old who is much more able to have a mature conversation - I kept speaking the wrong language to the wrong kid...it was a mess!)
As we were going down to the playground, Mazal said to me, "I can't believe I forgot to talk about how there are churches and mosques in Jerusalem. I was going to talk about how in Jerusalem the three religions live together, but I forgot all about that."
Showing posts with label civil religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil religion. Show all posts
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Israel Seminar Journal
.יומן סמינר ישראל
Today, our Israel Seminar class went to Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl. Although I don't have the time to write tonight about our full experience, I can share the journal entry that I composed for class. Enjoy!
There are many American Jews who find themselves in dialogue with two extreme relationships with Israel. On the one hand, their Jewish identity can be completely separate from Israel, based instead on the thriving American Jewish community. On the other hand, it can be difficult to discount Israel as the Jewish State and Homeland as well as the self-identified representative of world Jewry. Yad Vashem, an Israeli memorial to a world Jewish event that occurred in the Diaspora, is a symbol of the interplay between the undeniable reality of valid Jewish experience outside the land of Israel and the Israelocentric model of Jewish identity.
The primary association I had while visiting Yad Vashem today was of personal stories. In nearly every room, several televisions showed witnesses recounting their experiences - some were composed and some were crying; some were speaking Hebrew and some English. Personal profiles were found throughout the galleries, highlighting individual survivors and victims of the Shoah. A house of a wealthy German Jew was reconstructed to give visitors a sense of pre-war Jewish life in Germany, and people’s clothes, books, and personal effects were placed throughout the museum. More than anything else, to me, this museum was a mosaic of personal stories woven together against the backdrop of world events and passions.
Of interest, though not surprising, is that nowhere did I hear a non-Jewish voice telling her story. While non-Jewish narratives were briefly represented, and while the Righteous of the Nations were honored with their own gallery, personal stories were reserved for Jews. Moreover, one can interpret the final steps of the museum as a continuation of that story through the visitor. The final gallery is comprised of a display of witnesses’ quotes with contemplative music and a hypothetical visitor can refocus his attention on him and his own relation to the stories just explored. As the visitor walks out into the clear, green Jerusalem air, he hardly needs the seven David Ben Gurions or the singing of Hatikva to remember that he is currently standing in the free State of Israel, the one place on earth where a second Shoah is guaranteed not to occur. The implicit assumption made in the case of this hypothetical visitor is that he is Jewish and that his story includes a visit to his Jewish Homeland. Although the museum also targets non-Jews, this final experience, after so many hours hearing about the personal stories of the Shoah, enables a Jew to imagine herself as the personal legacy of those terrible events and as secure in her Jewish home.
For these reasons, Yad Vashem has a strong claim as the Jewish Shoah memorial. Other Holocaust museums may focus on righteous gentiles, historical context, etc., but the museum in Israel focuses on Jews and their perspectives. To better understand the context in which Israel can make this claim, we can turn to the fourth chapter of Charles Liebman’s and Eliezer Don-yehiya’s Civil Religion in Israel (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1983): The Civil Religion of Statism.
The Statists who worked to build a civic religion in Israel, including most prominently David Ben Gurion, saw Jewish life in Israel as naturally superior to Jewish life anywhere else. Ben Gurion is seen as a proponent of “Israelocentrism, which [is defined] to mean, ‘that all which is done by Jews in Israel is central, vital, critical for the Jewish people and for Jewish history … [and] what is done by Jews in the Diaspora is … secondary’” (87). Having built a Jewish state from the ground up, Ben Gurion and his allies would not tolerate the focus of Judaism being anywhere else. This centrality of the State of Israel was based on an assertion that only among Jews could Jews be safe. In 1945, Ben Gurion stated baldly that the place of Jews is in a Jewish land and that their presence anywhere else is an invitation to disaster: “The cause of our troubles and the anti-Semitism of which we complain result from our peculiar status that does not accord with the established framework of the nations of the world. It is not the result of the wickedness or folly of the Gentiles which we call anti-Semitism” (104). Although Ben Gurion recognized the tragedy of the Shoah, he nonetheless saw it as a curable symptom of being exiled from the Land of Israel. To him, Israel is the true final solution to the Jews’ problems: “The one suitable monument to the memory of European Jewry … is the State of Israel” (106). These founders, then, saw Israel as the ultimate sanctuary and home of all Jews and worked tirelessly to create a Jewish society that would unite Jews as Israelis in a new country of progress and security.
In the face of such a deliberate and fervent insistence on Israel’s centrality to world Judaism, one can hardly be surprised at Yad Vashem’s unspoken assertion that it is the Jewish Holocaust museum. As a Diaspora Jew who disagrees with Ben Gurion’s association of the period of the creation with the State of Israel with “the days of the Messiah” (86), however, I feel a responsibility to challenge the claimed ultimacy of Yad Vashem. Certainly I recognize the power and validity of the stories shared within its walls, and I find the museum to be a moving, brilliant, and effective memorial to the Shoah; nevertheless, I also believe that Jews can find meaning in other Holocaust museums around the world. While the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, might be considered to highlight a “human rights” perspective as compared to Yad Vashem’s “Jewish narratives” perspective, this nevertheless is a true and valid perspective with which Jews can build a meaningful connection to the events and people of the Shoah. If I should ever find myself leading Jews to Yad Vashem, I would want to make clear the history and context of the Israelocentrism inherent in the creation of the museum. I do not believe that this context takes away from the stories being told in the museum, but a fuller appreciation of the Israel experience would be enriched by a nuanced understanding of Israel’s historical relationship to the problems of Diasporic Judaism.
Today, our Israel Seminar class went to Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl. Although I don't have the time to write tonight about our full experience, I can share the journal entry that I composed for class. Enjoy!
There are many American Jews who find themselves in dialogue with two extreme relationships with Israel. On the one hand, their Jewish identity can be completely separate from Israel, based instead on the thriving American Jewish community. On the other hand, it can be difficult to discount Israel as the Jewish State and Homeland as well as the self-identified representative of world Jewry. Yad Vashem, an Israeli memorial to a world Jewish event that occurred in the Diaspora, is a symbol of the interplay between the undeniable reality of valid Jewish experience outside the land of Israel and the Israelocentric model of Jewish identity.
The primary association I had while visiting Yad Vashem today was of personal stories. In nearly every room, several televisions showed witnesses recounting their experiences - some were composed and some were crying; some were speaking Hebrew and some English. Personal profiles were found throughout the galleries, highlighting individual survivors and victims of the Shoah. A house of a wealthy German Jew was reconstructed to give visitors a sense of pre-war Jewish life in Germany, and people’s clothes, books, and personal effects were placed throughout the museum. More than anything else, to me, this museum was a mosaic of personal stories woven together against the backdrop of world events and passions.
Of interest, though not surprising, is that nowhere did I hear a non-Jewish voice telling her story. While non-Jewish narratives were briefly represented, and while the Righteous of the Nations were honored with their own gallery, personal stories were reserved for Jews. Moreover, one can interpret the final steps of the museum as a continuation of that story through the visitor. The final gallery is comprised of a display of witnesses’ quotes with contemplative music and a hypothetical visitor can refocus his attention on him and his own relation to the stories just explored. As the visitor walks out into the clear, green Jerusalem air, he hardly needs the seven David Ben Gurions or the singing of Hatikva to remember that he is currently standing in the free State of Israel, the one place on earth where a second Shoah is guaranteed not to occur. The implicit assumption made in the case of this hypothetical visitor is that he is Jewish and that his story includes a visit to his Jewish Homeland. Although the museum also targets non-Jews, this final experience, after so many hours hearing about the personal stories of the Shoah, enables a Jew to imagine herself as the personal legacy of those terrible events and as secure in her Jewish home.
For these reasons, Yad Vashem has a strong claim as the Jewish Shoah memorial. Other Holocaust museums may focus on righteous gentiles, historical context, etc., but the museum in Israel focuses on Jews and their perspectives. To better understand the context in which Israel can make this claim, we can turn to the fourth chapter of Charles Liebman’s and Eliezer Don-yehiya’s Civil Religion in Israel (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1983): The Civil Religion of Statism.
The Statists who worked to build a civic religion in Israel, including most prominently David Ben Gurion, saw Jewish life in Israel as naturally superior to Jewish life anywhere else. Ben Gurion is seen as a proponent of “Israelocentrism, which [is defined] to mean, ‘that all which is done by Jews in Israel is central, vital, critical for the Jewish people and for Jewish history … [and] what is done by Jews in the Diaspora is … secondary’” (87). Having built a Jewish state from the ground up, Ben Gurion and his allies would not tolerate the focus of Judaism being anywhere else. This centrality of the State of Israel was based on an assertion that only among Jews could Jews be safe. In 1945, Ben Gurion stated baldly that the place of Jews is in a Jewish land and that their presence anywhere else is an invitation to disaster: “The cause of our troubles and the anti-Semitism of which we complain result from our peculiar status that does not accord with the established framework of the nations of the world. It is not the result of the wickedness or folly of the Gentiles which we call anti-Semitism” (104). Although Ben Gurion recognized the tragedy of the Shoah, he nonetheless saw it as a curable symptom of being exiled from the Land of Israel. To him, Israel is the true final solution to the Jews’ problems: “The one suitable monument to the memory of European Jewry … is the State of Israel” (106). These founders, then, saw Israel as the ultimate sanctuary and home of all Jews and worked tirelessly to create a Jewish society that would unite Jews as Israelis in a new country of progress and security.
In the face of such a deliberate and fervent insistence on Israel’s centrality to world Judaism, one can hardly be surprised at Yad Vashem’s unspoken assertion that it is the Jewish Holocaust museum. As a Diaspora Jew who disagrees with Ben Gurion’s association of the period of the creation with the State of Israel with “the days of the Messiah” (86), however, I feel a responsibility to challenge the claimed ultimacy of Yad Vashem. Certainly I recognize the power and validity of the stories shared within its walls, and I find the museum to be a moving, brilliant, and effective memorial to the Shoah; nevertheless, I also believe that Jews can find meaning in other Holocaust museums around the world. While the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, might be considered to highlight a “human rights” perspective as compared to Yad Vashem’s “Jewish narratives” perspective, this nevertheless is a true and valid perspective with which Jews can build a meaningful connection to the events and people of the Shoah. If I should ever find myself leading Jews to Yad Vashem, I would want to make clear the history and context of the Israelocentrism inherent in the creation of the museum. I do not believe that this context takes away from the stories being told in the museum, but a fuller appreciation of the Israel experience would be enriched by a nuanced understanding of Israel’s historical relationship to the problems of Diasporic Judaism.
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