Abstract
In her speech at the opening of the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM), Holocaust survivor and then President of the Australian Association for Jewish Holocaust Survivors (AAJHS), Marika Weinberger, explicitly referenced Isaiah 51:1 as the ‘motivating spirit guiding the architects, curators, designers and our planning committee in establishing the terms of reference, guidelines, blueprints and, at times, in deciding even minute details of this unique museum’.2 Just how influential this directive was in the actual development of the SJM’s exhibition and memorial spaces is impossible to determine, but its significance regarding the museum founders’ understanding of their task is readily apparent. For this was to be a museum in which Jewish tradition would be modified and reinterpreted by those who understood themselves to be simultaneously the product of, and the exception to, the tradition itself. Against this backdrop the story of destruction would be told from the perspective of those who had endured it. In the telling, the figure of the survivor would emerge as the SJM’s ‘authentic voice’, the voice of both the witness and the victim, an embodied testament to the ‘living and the dead’.3
Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the pit from which you were dug up (Isaiah 51: 1)
‘The rock from which you were hewn’ — millenniums [sic] of Jewish history and tradition which shaped our peoplehood — ‘and the pit from which you were dug up’ — the ‘Final Solution’ aimed at the total destruction of the Jewish people.
(Marika Weinberger, Opening of the Sydney Jewish Museum, 18 November 19921)
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Notes
Marika Weinberger, Surviving Survival: A Selection of Speeches (Sydney: Sydney Jewish Museum Community Stories, 2008), pp. 30–1.
Sylvia Deutsch, ‘The Holocaust is Unique’, Australian Jewish News, 23 July 1993, p. 10.
Sylvia Rosenblum, ‘Are Museums the Best Place for the Memorialization of the Holocaust?’, International Network on Holocaust and Genocide 11, no. 4 (1996), p. 17.
Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 14.
See W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The Evolution of Post-War Australian Jewry: The Non-Universalistic Community’ in Hilary Rubenstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, vol. 2 (Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1991), p. 30,
Judith E. Berman, Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945–2000 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2001), p. 11.
Suzanne D. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 1997), pp. 369–71.
Gael Hammer, Sydney Jewish Museum Catalogue (Sydney: Sydney Jewish Museum, 1992).
Sections of the following account of the SJM’s history can also be found in Avril Alba, ‘Displaying the Sacred: Australian Holocaust Memorials in Public Life’, Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, 2007, 13 (2–3), pp. 151–72
Avril Alba, ‘Set in Stone? The Intergenerational and Institutional Transmission of Holocaust Memory’, in Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean (eds), Remembering Genocide, (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 92–111.
Cf. Avril Alba, ‘Displaying the Sacred: Australian Holocaust Memorials in Public Life’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 13, nos. 2–3 (2007), pp. 151–72.
Sharon Kangisser-Cohen, ‘Remembering for Us: The Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Memory and Commemoration’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 13, nos. 2–3 (2007), pp. 109–28.
As noted in the introductory chapter this desire is not without historical precedent. After other major destructions in Jewish history such as the Crusades, new fast days and commemorative rituals were enacted in light of what was experienced as ‘extraordinary suffering’. See Jacqueline Ninio, Out of the Depths I Cry Out to You (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Rabbinical thesis, 1998).
Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (New York: Touchstone, 1988), pp. 326–9.
See Stephen Schmidt-Wulffen, ‘The Monument Vanishes’, in James E. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1994), pp. 69–76.
Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 213; emphasis added.
This notion of ‘global Holocaust memory’ is explored in detail in the following section. For an introduction to this idea, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), Preface p. ix.
This archetype of Abraham as man of faith finds its classic exposition in Soren Kierkegard, Fear and Trembling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954). Originally published in 1843.
Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 243–57.
Yisrael Gutman, ‘Kiddush Ha-Shem and Kiddush Ha-Hayim’, in Alex Grobman, (ed.), Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vol. 1 (Chappaqua, NY: Rossel Books, 1984), p. 188.
David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 262.
Francois Mauriac, ‘Foreword’, in Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960).
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ‘Anne Frank and the Future of Holocaust Memory’, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture (1994), p. 5. http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/publications/occasional/2005-04-01/paper.pdf.
For a recent compilation discussing the permutations of popular memory surrounding the diary, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (eds), Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012).
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), pp. 186–7.
Naomi Seidman, ‘Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage’, Jewish Social Studies, 3, no. 1 (1996), p. 1. Emphasis added.
Ruth Wajnryb, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), pp. 55–81.
See chapter 2 of this study and Michael Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), in particular chapter 2, pp. 17–32.
Neil Levi, ‘“No Sensible Comparison?” The Holocaust in and out of Australia’s History Wars’, History and Memory, 19, no. 1 (2007), p. 125.
See, for example, James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993);
James E. Young, The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1995);
James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Judith E. Berman, Holocaust Agendas: Conspiracies and Industries? Issues and Debates in Holocaust Memorialization (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), pp. 34–5.
Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 2000), p. 19.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The Holocaust from War Crime to Trauma Drama’, European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002), p. 6.
Alexander, ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals’, p. 11. For a full explication of Alexanders’ central thesis, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
For an overview of the ‘uniqueness debate’ in Holocaust scholarship, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the “Racial Century”: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,’ Patterns of Prejudice, 36 no. 4 (2002), pp. 7–36;
Gavriel Rosenfeld, ‘The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 13, no. 1 (1999), pp. 28–61.
William F. S. Miles, ‘Third World Views of the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, no. 3 (2004), pp. 379–81.
An example of this approach is found in Lilian Friedberg, ‘Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust’, American Indian Quarterly, 24, no. 3 (2000), pp. 353–80.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London and New York: Verso 2001);
Vinay Lal, ‘Genocide, Barbaric Others, and the Violence of Categories: A Response to Omer Bartov’, The American Historical Review, 103, no. 4 (1998) pp. 353–80;
Vinay Lal, ‘The Concentration Camp and Development: The Pasts and Future of Genocide’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39, no. 2 (2005), pp. 220–43;
Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39, no. 2 (2005), pp. 220–33.
For an example of this dynamic in the Australian context, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and Holocaust Consciousness in Australia’, History Compass, 1 (2003), pp. 1–13.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–7.
Avril Alba, ‘Teaching History and Teaching Ethics’, Teaching History: Journal of the History Teachers Association of NSW, 39, No. 2 (2005), pp. 37–41.
The exemplar of such conflicts were the Cronulla Riots of 2005. See Greg Noble (ed.), Lines in the Sand: The Cronulla Riots and the Limits of Australian Multiculturalism (Sydney: Institute of Criminology, 2009).
For a more detailed discussion of the intergenerational forces at work at the SJM, see Avril Alba, ‘Set in Stone? The Intergenerational and Institutional Transmission of Holocaust Memory’, in Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean (eds), Remembering Genocide (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 92–111.
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Alba, A. (2015). A Redeemer Cometh: The Survivor in the Space. In: The Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45137-8_5
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