2However, a musealisation of Holocaust requires a narrative semiotics which deletes by necessity the inherent contradictions involved in the interpretation of any historical event. To what extent does the appeal to « other groups » of victims of Nazism consolidate a « Jewish perspective » of the Holocaust in the new exhibition?

3In order to answer this question, the first part of this article will be devoted to a description of the new exhibition. Then, after having portrayed the narrative structure of the museum, the summoning of the memory of victim groups could be debated. Lastly, the dialectical nature of the commemoration will be analyzed from the point of view of one group of victims: the homosexuals. Finally, the controversy of 1994, which caused confrontation between « secular Jews » and « religious Jews », will permit us to consider the limits of a religious interpretation of the Holocaust.

5In 1958, an initial exhibition had been « improvised ». The historical museum itself opened in 1973. The exhibition, just like the museum, complied with two requirements: on the one hand the public wanted to « comprehend », to better understand how the destruction of Europe’s Jews took place. On the other hand, the very young State of Israel aimed at legitimating its statute as heir of the six million victims. Thus the museum appears as an ideal mass-medium.

6In 1978 the exhibition was enlarged to include the destiny of survivors after the catastrophe. However, the exhibition emphasised the perspective of the perpetrators but not that of the victims. Tom Segev describes the old exhibition as follows:

9However, by the intermediary of exogenous influences which update the meaning given to them, the aforementioned message evolves.

10For instance, following instances such as the mobilisation of Gypsies and homosexuals for the recognition of their « martyrdom », the Holocaust, which was initially defined as the genocide of the Jews in Europe, underwent a process of evolution from the point of view of its meaning. From now on, the term requires the integration of other groups of victims, following the Jews. The definition offered by the Holocaust Encyclopaedia is: « The genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II ». It is by means of the very vague term « others » that Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, or disabled people can be « included » in the martyrology of the victims of the Holocaust.

I. The New Holocaust History Museum

12The new museum, designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie and built several meters away from the former one which has since been destroyed, is a 180-meter-long concrete construction which offers 4 200 m² of exhibition surface. It has the form of a triangular prism and slices through Har HaZikaron, Remembrance Mountain. Visitors entering the museum have to cross a long wooden ramp that marks the descent into the universe of the heroes and martyrs of the Holocaust. After crossing the immense hall, an interpretative key is provided: from deep underground, where the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto hid, but also there where ashes of the million victims remain, we go towards the Light: a large window which opens onto a terrace with a panoramic view of the green hills of Judea.

13The higher section of the prism, a narrow pane, allows sunlight to penetrate the interior. It serves as a guide, materialising « the axis of memory » which leads from the time « before » to the time « after », i.e. the creation of the State of Israel.

14Inside the dark and immense hall, the audio-visual installation by Michal Rovner tells of a world that no longer exists. The black and white video film stages the Jewish Diaspora of Europe, dancing to klezmer music. We are immediately confronted with the new technology employed by the exhibition »s creators: to pass on the testimony of the survivors when after they have died. One of the museum’s aims is to call up the technology so that the visitor « lives the events ».

15We are then guided towards the « first ditch ». While the museum does appear to be linear, it is in fact made up of eight rooms, distributed on both sides of the « axis of remembrance », which leads from Catastrophe to Redemption. Each room plays a part in the comprehension of the Catastrophe, whilst emphasising the strength of resistance.

16The first ditch is strewn with books by authors of whom the Nazis wanted to cleanse the country through their campaign « wider den undeutschen Geist ». Television screens show the book burning of 10 May 1933. The sound installations largely contribute to visitors reliving the event: in addition to the violence of the images themselves, the songs of Burschenschaften and the speeches of Nazis bring the event back to life.

17The ditch cannot be crossed, visitors are directed into the first gallery. Just like in other museums for Judaism or the Shoah, a film lasting less than ten minutes recalls the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism prior to the Nazi period. It is here that the « other groups of victims » are presented, in order to illustrate the racist Nazi policy of exclusion and cleansing during the Third Reich.

18As part of a strategy geared towards identification with the martyrs and heroes, we go in off the street into a corridor lined with anti-Semitic posters and find refuge in the apartment of a family of Yekkes. At the end of the gallery hangs a photograph of young Zionist pioneers with a streamer in the background: « Erez Israel braucht uns, wir brauchen Erez Israel » (Eretz Israel needs us, we need Eretz Israel). In this world hostile to Jews, individual biographies illustrate the only viable solution: emigrating and surviving as opposed to staying and dying.

19The second gallery is devoted to Poland, the country that was home to most of the Jews before the Shoah. In the third gallery, the fate of Europe’s Jews under the « Nazi boot » is presented, country by country. Through audio-visual installations a survivor of each country bears testimony. The objective is to present backgrounds according to national contexts in a didactic and brief way in order to move on to the fundamental themes. In the case of France, for example, the narration is divided into five periods: « National Revolution » versus occupation, the aryanisation of Jewish property, the arresting of the Jews, the internment camps, deportation to the East. A large panel integrates North Africa into the narration. This has the effect of associating the Jews of North Africa with the Shoah, an aspect that contradicts the definition: « the Genocide of the Jews of Europe ».

20We then find ourselves in the Warsaw Ghetto. A paved street is reconstituted with tramlines along the middle. The doors of the houses are open, in each of them a video focuses on a particular moment of life in the Ghetto: the famine, the small Schmuggler, or the constitution by Immanuel Ringelblum of the Oneg Shabbat. The fourth gallery is more specifically devoted to the Einsatzgruppen. There we follow Group C, known for the massacre of Babi-Yar during the night of 29-30 September 1941.

21On entering the fifth room a giant screen takes us eastwards by train, to the extermination camps. On the opposite wall, the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto: Mordechaï Anielewicz, leader of the Jewish Fighting Organisation, simultaneously embodies the figure of the hero and martyr. The second part of the gallery is more specifically devoted to Auschwitz. The wagons, the barbed wire, a gigantic picture of the incinerators, used boxes of Zyklon B and a heap of shoes give us the feeling of being inside the camp. At the end of the gallery, a replica of the model of Mieczyslaw Stobierski – whose original is at the Auschwitz Museum – illustrates the extermination process, from the selection ramp to the crematorium.

23In the seventh gallery, entitled « the last Jews », homage is given to the Jews who served in foreign armies: 50 000 in Great Britain, 500 000 in the USSR and 550 000 in the USA. The space opposite these heroes is dedicated to the everyday lives of the concentration camps’ internees who escaped « selection ». The concentration camps’ universe is presented in a concise way. A text recalls that, alongside the Jews, Gypsies were also subject to deportation. It is stressed that « the nomads were treated like the Jews whereas the sedentary were not persecuted »; however « more than 25 000 perished in Auschwitz ». The environment of the camp is « recreated »: a hut, beds, the clothing of Häftlinge, a coach intended to transport the blocks of stone drawn by the deportees and a photograph of a quarry add to the effect. After the last part devoted to the Death Marches and the release of the camps. A narrow corridor takes us to the eighth gallery. This one is dedicated to the survivors; they are « liberated but not free ». Artefacts of the Displaced Persons camps are displayed. Beneath the picture of the Exodus, it is written that the D.P. « claimed the right to migrate freely towards Israel ».

24The Nuremberg Trials of 1945, where twenty-four high-ranking Germans with political, military and economic backgrounds were put on trial before an international court, announce the narration’s conclusion: the culprits are condemned. The exhibition is completed by the return to Eretz Yisrael and the Eichmann lawsuit: lesson from the Holocaust and national catharsis. This is the moment when Light reappears.

25Throughout the whole exhibition, heroes and martyrs are linked, contributing to the direction of the narration. The way leading from catastrophe to redemption is the conducting thread of the exhibition. This synthesis that embodies the « martyr-hero » has been present since the origins of Yad Vashem – and is to be found in the institutional title of the place: « The Holocaust Martyrs » and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority ». In his description Tom Segev raises the definition of the martyr given at Yad Vashem. It is stressed that

II. The commemoration of the « other victims » of Nazism in Yad Vashem

27From the very start of the exhibition, in the first gallery, just after the « ditch » representing the book burning on 10 May 1933, a panel indicates that « the Nazi regime did not solely stigmatize the Jews, but also other groups: political opponents on the one hand and all those who were excluded from the national community on the other, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Gypsies and the disabled, these being considered as a threat towards the purity of the race ».

28By exploiting the concept of Lebensunwertes Leben (worthless life), the Nazis elaborated Programme T4; it consisted of the systematic elimination of children, adults and senior citizens, the mentally defective, those suffering from incurable diseases or the malformed. The « euthanasia » of handicapped people is illustrated by a set of photographs of the Hadamar Centre near Koblenz. That of a mentally handicapped child, shortly before its assassination, presents this as a fact; that of a shower-room transformed into a gas chamber makes it possible to grasp that the T4 Programme was the prelude to mass extermination. Furthermore, two propaganda posters from a film in favour of « euthanasia », Leben ohne Hoffnung (Living without Hope), illustrate the mechanisms of legitimating through the policy of such an institutional measure.

29The persecution of homosexuals is represented by a picture of Eldorado plastered with propaganda posters and swastikas. This dancing hall located in Schöneberg, famous throughout Europe as a stronghold of the homosexual scene, both for males and females, was indeed one of the first homosexual venues to be closed by the Nazis.

31Moreover, the Gypsies are mentioned on several occasions during the exhibition. In the sixth gallery, which presents the death camps, it is indicated that approximately « 150 000 Gypsies were exterminated, including 25 000 in Auschwitz ». The indications relating to them remain ambiguous; they imply that the term « genocide » does not « strictly » apply to the Gypsies because, « the nomads were treated like the Jews, but the sedentary like the Aryans. » This assertion makes it possible to stress that only one part of them were victims of Nazism.

34In the seventh gallery, devoted to the concentrationary universe and the Death Marches, two « details » merit particular emphasis. On the one hand, a lithography made in 1945 by the German Richard Grune is presented alongside ones made by David Olère and Henri Pieck: Forced Whipping and Labour. Grune was condemned by the Nazis under the terms of §175 and deported to Sachsenhausen and then to Flossenbürg. A note specifies that he « was deported for homosexuality. »

37Within the framework of the programme « Yad Vashem 2001 », certain voices had expressed a wish to see represented, in the new museum, the persecution of homosexuals under the Third Reich; the path Yad Vashem adopted remains nonetheless particularly elliptic. The closing of Eldorado, a famous Berlin dance hall that some would imagine to be a « den of iniquity », would rather appear to be more of an illustration of the stigmatisation of homosexuals. Moreover, knowing that Yad Vashem is « the memorial of the Jewish people in remembrance of the Holocaust », we may formulate the following question: Were there no homosexual Jews who were victims of the Shoah, given that none of them appear in the exhibition?

40The study of Andreas Sternweiler, in spite of its compartmental character, makes it possible to answer the question previously put in the affirmative, informing us that homosexual Jewish men were deported, interned and exterminated as such by the Nazis. Moreover, the ban on representing the singular destiny of homosexual Jewish victims of the Shoah finds its origin partly in the controversy of 1994.

III. The 1994 Controversy

43On 1 June the scandal made the front pages of the newspapers. The Jerusalem Post described the event in an unsigned article.

45Yosef Burg himself specifies that the ceremony in remembrance of homosexual victims of Nazism was in his eyes a deliberate provocation on the part of gays. Furthermore, he stands up for Yad Vashem and upholds that « even if Yad Vashem had not authorised the ceremony, the gays would have petitioned the High Court and been permitted to hold the service ». Shevach Weiss, Labour deputy in the Knesset and member of the committee of Yad Vashem himself argues in favour of the institution. The survivor of the Shoah condemns the demonstrators because for him « Holocaust Survivors should be sensitive to the suffering of homosexuals whom he said were among « the first guinea pigs » of the Nazis ».

46By insisting on the sacredness of the site, Yad Vashem agrees with the condemnation expressed by the « strongly religious ». The halachic argument employed by them condemns homosexual relations, homosexuality as such and finally the very commemoration: the commemoration is to be considered as halachically illegal. This « sacred » argument leans on religious semiology which is the origin of Yad Vashem (just like the term Ohel Yizkor and Yad Vashem, even the expression of the « Righteous Among the Nations », all originating from the Bible). Yosef Burg does give his personal opinion on the question when he considers the ceremony to be a provocation; nonetheless, from his point of view he is not in a position to accuse the institution he represents and shrugs off the problem by pointing out that by virtue of Israeli law the ceremony could not be prohibited. Shevach Weiss also falls back on civil law and contradicts opponents who, contrary to Keshet Ga’avah, held an illegal demonstration in Yad Vashem. Moreover, he uses his quasi sacred standing as a survivor of the Shoah to emphazise that the stigmatisation of which homosexuals were victims (« they were the first guinea pigs of the Nazis ») was one of the first manifestations on the part of the National Socialist Regime prior to the Judeocide.

47In addition, the (unfounded) argument put forward by Avner Shalev during a televised debate, namely the illegality of the commemoration, is no longer used. Finally, two members of Yad Vashem arrive at two antithetic conclusions. Yosef Burg, wanting neither to vex the religious nor to lose face, considers that this ceremony was a provocation; conversely, Shevach Weiss considers the demonstration improvised by the Religious to be a provocation.

48Thus, in its official statement, Yad Vashem, while forgetting to recall that homosexuals were indeed victims of Nazism, refuses to participate and lets two members of its directory address the issue speaking in own names. The institution is caught between its statute of quasi religious institution, endowed with a kind of sacred aura and the laical character of the place (the Tent of Remembrance is the place where the Heads of States on official visits are received). Indeed, Yad Vashem is confronted with intrinsic contradictory dialectics according to its double statute: at the same time a laical civil commemorative institution established by Israeli law and a remembrance place of Jewish martyrdom equipped with a synagogue. Consequently, the only solution to avoid entering the debate was to condemn both parts, a strategy which made it possible to transform the « incident » into a traditional controversy opposing the laics and religious sides.

49On Friday 3 June, at the end of the first section of the newspaper, the journalist Alison Kaplan Sommer, publishes an article about Agudah, the association which organized the commemorative office. In the second section of the newspaper, partisans and opponents expose their respective positions concerning the event.

52Strangely, he uses the argument of the Bolshevik plot, but without the Jewish predicate. Moreover, the argument of the abandonment of the religion enables him to set up, without arguing its matter, a parallel between communists and homosexuals: both the former and the latter had deserved their fate, considering that « they were a threat to the future of the Judaism and its values. » Thus, they are not « victims. » He then uses the only argument which enables him to condemn the commemoration: « Homosexuality is a wrong form of behaviour. It is proscribed and condemned [by] the Torah. » To conclude, he exhorts the State of Israel to respect Jewish laws, « only in this way is it possible to save Israel from danger; » insofar as Israel is a Jewish State, the State must thus condemn homosexuals.

54Contrary to Macy Gordon, Yael Dayan considers that « Homosexuals and lesbians were defilers of their race, like deviants and the insane. » Also, « In their footsteps came the millions of other « exceptions » and deviants – mainly Jews. » Therefore, she affirms that « The assault on Jewish homosexual « deviants » by those who sanctify the memory of millions of other « deviants » […] – is not only ironic and ridiculous, but monstrous and frightening. »

55She raises the following question: were the Nazis right to kill homosexuals but criminal for killing Jews?

56In this manner she exposes the inherent contradiction of the demonstrator’s speech: can one legitimate the assassination of homosexuals but condemn that of the Jews? Yael Dayan refers then to the pink triangle carried by the homosexual deportees and establishes a parallel with the yellow star. In her conclusion she places the two marks on the same level and affirms that « anyone that believes in our future as an egalitarian, democratic, humane society, one which accepts those who are different and supports their rights as a minority, ought to wear a pink triangle next the yellow star and a blue-and-white emblem. »

58However, only homosexual acts are condemned in the Torah. Consequently, the homosexual desire escapes any judgment. Also, the orthodox Jews’ argument would imply the possible validity of the following premise, namely that on the basis of judgment of the act, one can condemn people (of whom it is not known whether they committed the aforementioned act). Only by this skew may they finally excommunicate homosexual Jews from commemoration and « right to remembrance. » How can this premise be validated?

59On the other hand, for the partisans of the commemoration the inclusion of homosexual victims in the « right to remembrance » is fully justified. They insist on the assertion of their right to be « different », illustrated in particular, before the Shoah, by Judaism in a mainly Christian Europe. Shevach Weiss and Yael Dayan fight the opinion of the religious according to which it is possible to condemn the assassination of Jews by the Nazis while condoning the assassination of homosexuals. This reasoning would necessarily lead to the assumption that Nazism might have had its « good sides. » That would amount denying the uniqueness of the Shoah – i.e. relativising it.

Conclusion

60The witnesses who recount their experience by way of audio-visual installations announce the « period after », the day when there will be no survivors left who can bear witness to the Shoah. The new exhibition was itself conceived as a testimony. It portrays the persecutions suffered by « other victim groups » of Nazism. The Handicapped, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Gypsies benefit from the « privilege » of iconography of their martyrdom. Only homosexual victims remain without face. With the example of gypsies, other victims are included rather like stage props whenever they play a part in the narrative that goes from the catastrophe to redemption. Yad Vashem is a respected and respectable institution and the room for manoeuvre is reduced with regard to the representation of the persecution of homosexuals due to the events of 1994. In fact, the ambiguous statute of Yad Vashem, like the Shoah, considered by some as a « civil religion, » excludes homosexuals from the « right to remember. » Although this is a laical place, the weight of religious opinion explains this phenomenon.

61Let us remember the origin of the name Yad Vashem (English: a memorial and a name). The expression originates from the Book of Isaiah titled « Salvation for Others » (56:5): « To them I will give within my temple to its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters. » The inscription in stone of martyrs without lineage in order to recite kaddish, i.e. the « monument and the name, » are a substitute for the descendents reduced to ashes. Meanwhile, to whom are these promises made?

62They address those who could feel excluded.

63Does it have to have be the eunuch who suffered castration? Or could it be considered that « some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have made themselves eunuchs » ( Mt 19 : 12). Does the « Salvation for Others » not also apply to homosexuals?