Spatial Storytelling in Yad Vashem: An Ethnographic Exploration on the (Dis)Placement of the Sacred in Israel's National Holocaust Memorial

Abstract

[""This thesis traces the interface of Holocaust memory and religious text, symbolism, and motifs at Yad Vashem, Israels official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Working with the notion of spatial storytelling, I analyze how religion is infused into the commemorative practices of Yad Vashem, and how this is spatialized on the memorial’s grounds. Taking ‘storytelling’ as the primary methodological concept for my ethnographic engagement with Yad Vashem, this thesis explores issues of reflexivity through putting researcher-researched dialectics center stage. Through spatial analysis and by following the body’s course through Yad Vashem, I suggest how mentalism and materialism can be thought off conjointly in walking over Yad Vashem’s grounds and in engaging with changing understanding of trauma in Israel and its visual repercussions on the landscape of Yad Vashem. The thesis ultimately argues that the nature and location of religion at Yad Vashem can be understood in terms of transferable biblical quality onto Yad Vashem’s grounds. Through sacred reference and ritualized practice, Yad Vashem cloaks the memory of the Holocaust in a biblical garb, begging the question whether the stories of the Holocaust themselves are not stories of a new Bible. The analysis necessitates a reflexive turn inwards that further denaturalizes the concept of ‘religion’ itself. Through taking serious (dis)placeable biblical quality and pointing to a biblical idea, the thesis points to the interconnections of memory, religion, and sacrality, whilst simultaneously questioning the effect of the sacred status for Holocaust memory itself.""]