There’s a period of time in Israel, shortly after Passover, where we begin a special nine-day cycle of remembrance days. On April 14, Israelis marked Yom HaShoah, remembrance day for the victims of the Holocaust, followed a week later by Memorial Day for the country’s fallen soldiers and, in an abrupt change of tone beginning on Tuesday evening, the street celebrations of Independence Day.
What are these days all about? Why were they grouped together? What are Israelis actually marking in this period? The answer is a journey into Israel’s founding experience and culture, and how different it is from the cultures of commemoration in the West.
The people remembered in these holidays, the victims of the Holocaust, wars, and terrorism, can seem like abstractions from the other side of the world, or from four generations later. But the nine-day arc of these national holidays is all about reifying these lost souls. In gatherings throughout the country, names are read out. Stories are told of specific loved ones remembered and lost. Historical abstractions and distant cultural touchstones that a nation’s fallen inevitably become over time are pulled back into our consciousness as real remembered human beings. It is commemoration through specificity and intimacy.
That’s how the date of Yom HaShoah was chosen. Israeli leaders rejected the obvious choices: The Ninth of Av—Tisha B’Av—a traditional Jewish fast day that marks the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, the expulsion from Spain, and other disasters of Jewish history. The legislators of the early Knesset were loath to lump the Holocaust, unique in scope and result, with the rest of that history. They considered the eve of Passover, when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was launched in 1943. They wanted to center the commemoration on that act of desperate defiance and doomed courage, rather than on vulnerability and helplessness. But that date, too, was rejected. It would interfere with the celebration of Passover.
