In Blessed Memory of a Dream: Mordechai Shenhavi and Initial Holocaust Commemoration Ideas in Palestine, 1942-1945 (original) (raw)

This study examines the initial social construction of Holocaust commemoration in the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine). It presents and analyzes proposals that were put forward in Palestine and abroad to commemorate the exterminated European Jews between the summer of 1942, when the first reports about mass exterminations were received, and the summer of 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. The following questions are posed: What was the reasoning in the Yishuv for the need to establish a national commemorative project for those who had been annihilated in the Diaspora? Who were the people who suggested such projects and what were their motives? What kind of memorial site did they wish to erect? Where did they propose to build the memorial site and what were the reasons for their choice? Finally, what can the answers to these questions teach us about Holocaust consciousness in the Yishuv at that time? The research on methods of preserving the past in diff...