Do the living need monuments?
March 8th, 2010
Eliezer Sneiderman
This is a difficult assignment. On one side I see the importance of monuments. Every six months I take a group of college students to Israel. Many of the experiences that we have are interactions with monuments. We go to Cesearea and see a huge Roman amphitheatre and hippodrome; monuments to a dead people. The lesson we draw from the visit is that the modest Jews still live here, while the Romans for all their advancements are gone.
However, we also see Jewish monuments. It seems every battle is commemorated with a monument. Some of these monuments are quite extraordinary. They are elaborate structures based on tremendous forethought and effort.
Here is a picture of the Helicopter memorial. There are 73 boulders here. Each boulder represents one of the soldiers that was lost. The field is planted with red flowers. There is a poem written into one of the stone's that ends, "We shall meet again like red flowers blossoming when the last shot is fired in these hills." The water is also a symbol of life. When the water gets to the memorial field it is trapped by plexiglass, just as the souls of the fallen are trapped. The formal elements of this memorial are partnered with informal elements as well. A path leads visitors from the stone memorial to a small forest, where are group of trees have been decorated by the friends of the fallen. Stones have been painted with the names of each of the soldiers. These stones hang in the trees, a vast network of chimes.
There are other monuments that we see. Herzl's tomb, brutal in its simplicity just four letters. There are the graves of Rabin and his wife, white and black complementary stone structures. One was the victim of a shocking assassination, the other died of natural causes. There is another Rabin memorial at the site of his assassination. Brass markers are stuck in the concrete, marking the standing place of the individuals involved. "How could the killer get that close?" Sometimes, memorial open up questions along with emotions.
The strongest emotions come from Yad V'ashem and the Children's memorial. One candle is reflected off of a series of mirrors to fill an entire dark room with points of light. One gets the feeling that one is walking through space, a type of purgatory, punctuated only by points of light and recited names.
The question is whether a memorial for the Jews can work outside of Israel. In Israel, Jews are the majority. They have taken over all aspects of society. From the heights of the political elite to the lows of petty criminals. In this context a memorial, something marking death and loss or merely the passing of history, seems appropriate.
In the diaspora, monuments take on a macabre quality. Longfellow's poem "Jewish cemetery at Newport" is an example of Jewish monuments amongst the nations. Monuments devoid of a living culture become ancient albatrosses.
"But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again."
A Jewish memorial amongst the nations evokes a sense of gentile triumphalism that strikes me as offensive. My memorial would confront this feeling head on and attempt to shock the community from its complacency. All around us, Jews are disappearing, suffering Sklare's Sociological Death, and the larger Jewish community is not focused on a solution. Jewish education does not have the central place that it deserves.
My memorial would consist of the front doors of synagogues that have closed in the last decade. The doors would be arranged in a circle in a large grassy area. One would open and close a series of doors that would lead one to no where. Beth Shalom, Beth Emeth, Anshe Shalom, etc... Perhaps a brass number, representing the maximum number of congregants that these synagogues had in their heyday. Hopefully, a memorial of this type, installed prematurely, before we reach the level of Newport, will shock the community into action.
Once there were Jews here. Today there is a monument.
