Fifty years ago on April 11, 1961, shortly after the conclusion of Pessah, over 700 people packed into Beit Ha’am, Jerusalem’s new cultural center, for the trial of a man accused of being the chief operational officer of the Final Solution. By mid-December when Adolf Eichmann’s guilty sentence was handed down by High Court Judges Moshe Landau, Yitzhak Raveh and Benjamin Halevi, all German Jews, the trial had transformed Israeli society.As Deborah Lipstadt notes in her new book The Eichmann Trial, even though the Holocaust had been remembered and commemorated, never before had it received such consistent attention. Novelist Moshe Shamir, for instance, described in 1963 how the trial had transformed the Holocaust from something he saw from outside “the burning house” into a “personal, moral, problem.”Why did it take the Eichmann trial to so radically change Israeli attitudes? Obviously, part of the reason has to do with historical proximity to such a huge tragedy that could not be fully confronted in all its enormity without the perspective of time.But the belated grappling with the Shoah also had to do with the dynamics of Israeli society. Holocaust survivors, who at the time of the trial made up a full quarter of Israeli Jewry – 500,000 men and women – had been encouraged to forget their horrific past and to focus instead on the more important task of state-building and transforming themselves into “new Jews” devoid of all the pathologies bred by the despicable existence in galut.In a society that valued courage, self-reliance and the romantic idea of an indigenous Hebrew man who emphasized action over words and was tied to the soil of the Land of Israel, there was little room for articulation of the memory of the Shoah. Except for isolated incidents of partisan uprisings against the Nazis, the story of the survivors simply could not be integrated into the Zionist collective’s meta-narrative of a bold return to history. (It is no coincidence that the approximate date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on Pessah eve, was chosen for Holocaust Remembrance Day.) The David Ben-Gurion-orchestrated and Gideon Hausner- executed “production” of the Eichmann trial, which literally took place in a theater house, was unabashedly designed to affirm Zionist ideology and emphasize the importance of a Jewish sovereignty capable of capturing and bringing to justice a Nazi war criminal, and the futility and humiliation of living in exile as another people’s guest.Ironically, however, by turning the Eichmann trial into a public forum for the voicing of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, Ben-Gurion unwittingly brought about what Lipstadt noted in the conclusion of her book was “the polar opposite to this Zionism Weltanschauung.”The testimonies made it clear that Jews had not “gone like sheep to the slaughter” and that the few instances of physical rebellion were truly remarkable. The extremely personal accounts of survivors were broadcast to a captive audience glued to the radio throughout the day, and were avidly read in transcribed form in Israeli dailies. Israelis understood that through a thousand small acts of heroism- of-the-spirit, the Jews of Europe had maintained their humanity. Israelis understood that but for chance they might have ended up in Europe during the Shoah and shared an identical fate. The testimonies also acquainted Israelis, many of them born here, with the rich Jewish Diaspora culture that had been lost.THE IMPACT of the Eichmann trial was all the more powerful because it coincided with other developments. A new generation of Israelis who took the State of Israel for granted lacked the sense of purpose shared by the founding generation. These young citizens were the first to reject a narrow, parochial Israeli self-identity, enabling them to be more open and less judgemental of the suffering of Jews in the Diaspora. Also, as Israel celebrated its bar mitzva, most Jews continued to live in the Diaspora and probably would continue to do so in the future, which made many Israelis think more seriously about Jewish life outside Israel. Even the 1959 rioting and street violence in the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa by mostly Moroccan Jewish immigrants in protest against Ashkenazi establishment discrimination was a sign of change in Israeli society. A new generation of Israelis was coming of age who questioned the old Zionist narrative, including its analysis of the Shoah. The Eichmann trial helped change, and improve, Israeli society, making it more empathetic to Holocaust survivors’ suffering. Today, as the generation of survivors grows smaller and there are so few people left to speak in the first-person singular, we should use the 50th anniversary of the trial to appreciate the power of survivors’ testimony and take steps to ensure this testimony is never forgotten.
