Identity And Memory Of Israel To The Holocaust History

The Nazi Holocaust is a great unprecedented catastrophe in the Jewish history, killing about 6 million Jews and destroying a number of historic Jewish communities in Europe. How to remember and reflect the traumatic Holocaust memory is the bounden duty of the Jewish people and the state of Israel in the post-Holocaust period. The Holocaust survivors are the direct bearers of the historical memory of Holocaust. Due to the adaption of new life and the horrors of Holocaust, many Holocaust survivors would not touch their sufferings after the Second World War. In addition, the state of Israel have been the harsh geopolitical environment in its early foundation, and paid attention to shaping the historical memory of Holocaust heroism to arouse the awareness of survival crisis of the Jewish people in Palestine, ignoring the spiritual comfort and social integration to the Holocaust survivors.Holocaust survivors dissociated from the discourse system of Holocaust before the Eichmann trial. Their injured stories only existed in the individual memory of the survivors. But the Eichmann trial which was conducted in 1961 has changed the narrative mode of Holocaust heroism, and incorporated the personal stories of the survivors gradually into the construction of the national public memory, exerting the role of historical testimony of the survivors in the Holocaust. After the Eichmann trial, a large number of survivors overcame their Holocaust trauma and shared their experiences as a victim to seek a self-redemption by retelling their ordeal in the Holocaust once more time. However, the privileged survivors who were the members of European Jewish Committees and the Kapos in the concentration camps confronted the dilemma of self-redemption. They had to face the external legal charges, but also reflected their own unspeakable difficulties in the Holocaust. Therefore, many privileged survivors avoided to share their Holocaust experiences or narrated them selectively, presenting the phenomena of memory that the privileged survivors distorted the Holocaust history and clarified the Holocaust guilt.Through the muti-channel way of establishing the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, setting the Holocaust memorial day and memorial ceremony, regulating the contents and forms of Holocaust education, constructing the websites of Holocaust researches and education, the state of Israel reshaped the Holocaust identity and memory to strengthen the national identity and a sense of crisis of all Israelis. Holocaust survivors have participated actively in the national Holocaust memorial and educational activities in the process of self-redemption, making their efforts to enhance the Holocaust identity of Israel.However, it must be noticed that Israel has made the political use of the Holocaust in the process of shaping the national identity to demonize the Arab countries. Nevertheless, the Holocaust memorial and memory system of Israel has promoted the worldwide reflection to the Holocaust and made the prominent contributions to shape the Holocaust memory which share with all of the world, while it has provided the abundant reference experiences for other massacres to conduct the commemoration and education.