Follow
May. 27, 2021
Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit asked the Jerusalem District Court Wednesday to block the sale of a letter written by Joseph Trumpeldor, calling it an “asset of a public-national character” and of “historical and national importance of the first order.”
The letter, in Hebrew, was written in 1915, five years before Trumpeldor’s death in the Battle of Tel Hai. Trumpeldor is regarded as one of the greatest heroes of the Zionist movement. The letter was sent to the father of Benjamin Wertheimer, a soldier who served in the British army’s Zion Mule Corps under Trumpeldor in World War I and died at the Battle of Gallipoli.
Get email notification for articles from Anshel Pfeffer
Follow
Apr. 14, 2021 10:13 PM
On Memorial Day last year in Israel, at the height of the first coronavirus lockdown, when even immediate family members were not allowed to visit their loved ones’ graves, the IDF sent an honor guard to every military burial ground. As a result, for the first time in over a century, since fallen Jewish soldiers serving in the British army were buried in Palestine during the First World War, they were honored by an army that hadn’t even existed in their lifetimes.
As the sirens sounded over Jerusalem, two IDF lieutenant-colonels saluted the graves of 24 Jewish soldiers buried in the British War Cemetery on Mount Scopus. The cemetery is run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is funded by the British government in partnership with the governments of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa, whose soldiers fought alongside Britain in the war, and is responsible for
Are there now memory communities in Holocaust discourse?
Are there now memory communities in Holocaust discourse?
The controversy around the identity of Yad Vashem’s directorate chairman seems to suggest that Holocaust discourse is now deteriorating into polemical argument.
(January 14, 2021 / BESA Center)
The controversy over the identity of the directorate chairman of Yad Vashem, when viewed from a broad perspective, is quite worrying, as it might represent a new stage in the politicization of Israeli collective memory (that is, its de facto disintegration into “memory communities”). Such a process has already occurred with respect to the military and security domain (including the contribution of the respective pre-state underground movements to the establishment of the state)