A Holocaust memorial is an artistic work made of stone, wood, bronze or any other material, which honors the memory of a person or community that perished in the Holocaust. Some monuments are composed of already existing materials, like a bench, suitcases or photos. The first Holocaust memorial was erected within a few days of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp on April 15, 1945,[1] and it still stands today at the entrance to the camp. Since then, Holocaust monuments have developed and evolved.
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The role of Holocaust memorialsThe role of Holocaust memorials
Holocaust memorials have an important historical role. First, they serve to acknowledge this catastrophic event in history and increase societal awareness of the consequences of allowing such a thing to happen again. Secondly, memorials are used to commemorate a specific group or individuals regarding an event that happened to them; for example, a partisans memorial. The most important function is therefore, remembrance. Holocaust memorials typically include inscriptions in Hebrew and Yiddish[1] (or Ladino in Sephardic communities) with names written out in the local alphabet. More recent Holocaust memorials have also included inscriptions in English to enable a wider audience to read and understand them. Holocaust memorials that were built up to the 1960s also serve as a grave marker for victims who were not given proper burials. Burial has a very special meaning according to Jewish tradition, and for this reason, survivors generally erected memorials in memory of lost family members immediately after they were released. Some of these memorials contain ashes from the crematoriums brought by the survivors.[1]
Location of Holocaust memorialsLocation of Holocaust memorials
Holocaust memorials have been built in many places, like liberated concentration and extermination camps; cities and towns where the survivors originally were from, when they returned to search for surviving family members; in Israeli cemeteries, where monuments have been built in memory of the people belonging to specific communities and survivors have often requested their children to add the names of parents and siblings murdered in the Holocaust to their own tombstones; and lastly, a number of memorials have been erected in forests planted by the JNF (Jewish National Fund) across Israel, such as the Ben-Shemen Forest. In these locations, communities of survivors and their descendants have held memorial services. In other countries outside of Europe, Holocaust memorials have been erected at Jewish Community Centers and especially Jewish cemeteries, on behalf of the city or country's Jewish community as a whole; in many cases with the financial support of local authorities.[2]
Genealogical information that can be obtained from Holocaust memorialsGenealogical information that can be obtained from Holocaust memorials
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Many, especially the earlier Holocaust memorials, contain priceless information that can be used by researchers, like names of cities from that district, names of people, dates of birth and death of the victims, and other details that were important to the creator of the memorial, like the name of the camp where the victim was killed.[3] Cities with significant Jewish communities in the Diaspora, as well as almost every city in Israel, have Holocaust memorials; in some cases, survivors of specific communities have erected their own memorials as well. In the Diaspora, mutual aid associations (landsmanshaftn) were set up by emigrés that settled close to each other; during the early days of the State of Israel, immigrants who arrived after the Holocaust often settled near people who came from the same city or town and erected Holocaust memorials dedicated to their common place of origin, in some cases listing names of those killed.
Modern Holocaust memorialsModern Holocaust memorials
Many survivors chose not to immigrate to the State of Israel, in many cases because they found family members who had moved to North America, South America, Australia or South Africa between the World Wars, or because they no longer wanted to face the hardships of war, as the War of Independence was taking place in Israel. After these survivors established themselves and built new families, they often collected funds and requested plots of land to build monuments, usually near a Jewish community center or a Jewish museum. This trend accelerated towards the end of the 1990s, when many of the survivors were retired and had time to devote to activism and education on human rights and racism and were able to speak to audiences about how they were saved and what happened to them during the Holocaust. The first Holocaust memorial in the United States was built in 1964[4] in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the funds collected by survivors and a local Jewish organization. The artist was Nathan Rapaport, who built some monuments in Warsaw and Israel. The monument, cast in bronze, was dedicated to the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Philadelphia continued to develop, and by 2018, the area where it was built had become a large urban center. The monument remained in place, but it was expanded and renovated to reflect more contemporary views.
In the XXI century, Holocaust memorials have unfortunately transitioned from being a monument containing information, to something more of an artistic interpretation of grief and remembrance, generally conceived by people who did not experience the Holocaust or have any family or cultural connection to it. These modern types of memorials don't usually contain the name of a particular community, person, or group and the large number of tourists sharing selfies at these modern Holocaust memorials on social media has become the subject of controversy;[5] in 2017, Shahak Shapira, an Israeli artist, set up the website yolocaust.de in 2017 to expose those individuals who have taken inappropriate selfies at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.[6]
StolpersteineStolpersteine
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A Stolperstein is a ten-centimeter cube made of concrete and with a brass plate on top, inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. These are the brainchild of the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, with the aim to commemorate the memory of Holocaust victims; they are installed in front of the last place of residency or work freely chosen by the person before they fell victim to Nazi terror. By December 2019, 75,000 Stolpersteine have been laid across Europe, making the Stolpersteine project the world's largest decentralized memorial,[7] as well as a very precise source of information about a Holocaust victim. While most of the Stolpersteine are dedicated to the memory of Jewish victims, some have been established for Sinti and Roma people (widely known by the pejorative exonym "Gypsy"), Poles, LGBT, physically or mentally disabled individuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, members of the Communist Party and others opposed to the Nazi regime.
See alsoSee also
ReferencesReferences
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Marcuse, Harold. Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre. The American Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 1 (FEBRUARY 2010), pp. 53-89.
- ↑ Memorial del Holocausto del Pueblo Judío. Government of Montevideo, Uruguay
- ↑ 70 years after the Holocaust, a Surinamese memorial for Caribbean victims. Times of Israel.
- ↑ New Holocaust memorial on Ben Franklin Parkway opens next week. Phylly Voice
- ↑ More than Meets the Eye – The Intricate Relationship between Selfies at Holocaust Memorial Sites and Their Subsequent Shaming
- ↑ Satirist Takes Berlin Holocaust Memorial Selfie-Takers To Task
- ↑ Germany: 75,000th 'Stolperstein' for Holocaust victims laid. Deutsche Welle