Educational Functions of Cultural Heritage in Tourism

The cultural heritage of the city of Wrocław provides a perfect opportunity to practice educational tourism. It can serve to shape the desirable attitudes of acceptance and tolerance based on closer cognition of diverse cultures. The aim of this chapter is to indicate the tourist potential inherent in the Jewish cultural heritage of Wrocław. The culturally complex history of the city is analyzed, and then the most essential elements of the cultural output of Wrocław are presented in order to better recognize the background of the Jewish heritage. The following step is to locate the presented assets within the operating tourist products fulfilling educational function assumed to be within the city's tourist strategy. The products arise the interest of receivers of any age: from kindergarten children to seniors. Also, in this chapter, the authors observe good practices of the Four Denominations District (depicting a close coexistence of the Jewish heritage and the Christian world – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) or the City Museum of Wrocław, with the Old Jewish Cemetery as its division. The pedagogical, training, and cultural educational functions fulfilled with the implementation of the cultural product are emphasized.

Musical Analyses of Mordechai Gebirtig's Chosen Pieces

Restoring the memory of the irretrievably lost word of a Jewish community is important for many reasons. To start with, familiarization with the unknown helps with better understanding of the everyday life of Polish Jews, often perceived as a hermetic society, rousing anxiety particularly among those who are totally unfamiliar with Jewish culture and traditions. Secondly, for the young, currently developing Jewish community, it is the way of building their identity by recalling their own historical roots. Gebirtig's creativity is portrayed in this chapter in two inextricably connected aspects: (1) the historical background of musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in Cracow; (2) the perspective of analysis of the musical layers of his pieces. The study emphasizes how the universal language of music is of a crucial importance for building a dialogue based on education, cultivation of memory, and restoration of identity.

Post-Holocaust Heritage of Trauma

In the 1930s, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, tens of thousands of Jews immigrated to Eretz-Israel. Many of them kept on missing their former homeland and culture, while simultaneously despising Germany. This chapter analyzes the complex identity of these Jews, who had to leave Germany, but could not really detach themselves from the homeland that betrayed them, as reflected in the film The Flat (2011). In the film, Director Arnon Goldfinger reveals a family secret: his grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, maintained close contacts with a Nazi couple, the Von Mildensteins, before and after the Holocaust. In a world of post-Holocaust, the analysis of the film tells the story of a transgenerational transfer of the trauma, and its different effect on three generations.

Effect of Holocaust Consciousness in General and the Journey to Poland in Particular on the Fighting Spirit in the IDF

This chapter discusses the effect of Holocaust consciousness in general and of the journey to Poland in particular on the fighting spirit in the IDF. With the purpose of exploring to what extent Holocaust consciousness in general and the journey to Poland in particular influence the fighting spirit of former soldiers and career soldiers in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the authors examined two major relationships between variables, on the ethical, emotional, and cognitive level: (1) the association between the soldiers' fighting spirit and their Holocaust consciousness; (2) the association between participating in the journey to Poland and the perceived fighting spirit in the IDF. They conclude that Holocaust consciousness was found to have an effect on the fighting spirit. The journey itself, however, was found to have no effect on the fighting spirit. These research findings may illuminate one of the important projects of the IDF, “Witnesses in Uniform,” with regard to its purposes and efficacy.

Cultivating Holocaust Memory in the IDF

This chapter discusses the transformation in the Education Corps' approach to the conceptualization of Holocaust memory among its soldiers between 1987 and 2004, and the factors that influenced this change. The historical events are the background for the milestones in the IDF's approach to the Holocaust, which is the foundation for this discussion. The Education Corps, which is in charge of the IDF's educational activities, is poised between the IDF and society and was therefore selected as the object of this study, through which we can gain an understanding of the IDF in general. In particular, the diversity of voices of delegation members—who come from different backgrounds, different personal situations, are of different ages, and serve in different positions in the IDF—reflects the complex nature of the experience and the trip's personal impact on the commanders.

Has This Hectacomb Been Over?

This chapter presents various forms and functions of subversion referring to three literary examples which come from the recent Polish and German fiction. Subversion in this study is comprehended as a transgression of all textual boundaries; as such, it is present in a wide range of narrative strategies and artistic techniques which contest and deconstruct the accepted established cultural forms of transmission of the Holocaust memory. The three analyzed examples are Polish author Igor Ostachowicz's Noc żywych Żydów (Night of the Living Jews [2012]), Polish author Mariusz Sieniewicz's Żydówek nie obsługujemy (We Don't Serve Jewesses [2006]), and German author Maxim Biller's In Kopf von Bruno Schulz (Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz [2013; translated 2015]).

The Ongoing Major Distortion of the Holocaust

This chapter analyzes mainly recent developments of the various types of distortions of the Holocaust. The analysis follows the main categories of the author's earlier book, The Abuse of the Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses (2009). These are justification of the Holocaust or promoting a new one, Holocaust denial or its minimization, deflection or whitewashing of guilt, Holocaust de-Judaization in part through its universalization, Holocaust equivalence, Holocaust inversion, Holocaust trivialization, and obliterating Holocaust memory. The abuse keeps increasing at a rather fast rate and has permeated several quarters of mainstream society. It is feared that manipulation of the truth may become a substantial part of the debate on the Holocaust. This will be even more possible when all surviving Holocaust victims are very old. It is difficult to see how in a more and more chaotic world this trend could be halted. It is recommended that Holocaust memorial institutions start to systematically and professionally monitor abuse in their respective countries and categorize them.

The Pictorial Testimony During the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961-1962

Drawings by four painters were presented at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961-1962, in three different testimonies. The paintings, made during and after the Holocaust, included depictions of Holocaust events from the Theresienstadt ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp and were an inseparable part of constructing the comprehensive story of the Holocaust in the trial. Presenting the paintings as forensic evidence calls for an inquiry about their importance and their unique contribution to the process of the trial as complementary evidence to a witness investigation. This chapter shows how the paintings allowed witnesses to expand the information that they could lend the court, and that in practice the testimonies were held in two combined languages: pictorial and verbal.

A Swastika in the Temple

Holocaust inversion is the demonization of Jews, who were the major victims of the criminality of Nazi Germany. It is the claim that Israel behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews. After reviewing the phenomenon and understanding its psychological, political, and historical origins, this chapter focuses on its strange occurrence in the West, most strangely among the Jewish people, and oddly enough within Israeli society. This study shows how Israeli Holocaust inversion is manifested among intellectuals, political leaders, and most disturbingly among the rank and file of the IDF, even within this institute's educational system.

Self-Criticism and Confronting Anti-Semitism

Much has been said and written about anti-Semitism in the Islamic and Arab world, concerning its roots and its significance in political life all over the Arab world and beyond. However, within the volume of religious and secular ideas of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Arab and Islamic world, we can find few voices that express views that contrast the deep-rooted conventional hatred toward Jews. These voices present a tolerant and inclusive approach that opposes both religious and secular anti-Semitism. This study focuses on anti-Semitism in the Islamic world, presenting rather the other voices in the Arab world, those that oppose anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.