In this Unit, we’ll consider the creation of our collective memory by critically examining Memorial Day ceremonies. We’ll use the film, “Izkor, Slaves of Memory” to ask important questions about how collective memory is constructed in Israeli society.
Goals:
1. Understand the concept of “collective memory.”
2. Examine how Israeli collective memory is constructed, using memorial ceremonies as an example.
Keywords: Collective, Memory, Art, Education
Activity
1. Introduction:
What does the Memorial Day ceremony in school look like? What is its structure? What’s on the program?
2. Activity in small groups: Divide the class into three groups. Give each group a blank sheet of paper, on which it will describe, in words or by drawing, some aspect of the Memorial Day ceremony: what happens on stage, how is the space decorated, how does the audience react, etc.
3. Presenting the groups’ work: Each group will describe to the rest of the class the part of the ceremony they worked on.
4. Class discussion: Theoretical conceptualization of “collective memory”.
Why do we remember the ceremony so clearly?
Why do we all remember the ceremony the same way, even though we’re so different in other things? (You can give for example an event which all the students attended but remember differently).
The teacher begins by defining “collective memory”: Collective memory is a sociological concept referring to a social phenomenon in which a society assigns contemporary significance to past events. What are the components of our collective memory? What does it include, and what is missing from it?
The teacher writes the following expanded definition on the blackboard or on a poster so that it will be visible during the course of the activity: Collective memory is a sociological concept that refers to a social phenomenon in which a society assigns contemporary significance to past events. Collective memory is expressed in “spaces of memory”– specific locations or events such as monuments, memorial days, ceremonies, artifacts, films, etc. – whose purpose is to remind the public of past events and assign meaning to them. Collective memory does not necessarily require remembering accurately what happened in the past. It is a memory that is constructed, developed, molded, and changed frequently according to society’s current needs and interests.
What do you think about this definition?
5. Viewing the excerpt from the film, “Izkor, Slaves of Memory” (1991), directed by Eyal Sivan. The excerpt shows a high school Memorial Day ceremony held on the Memorial Day for the Fallen in Israel’s Wars, and a conversation with Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz (cf. Supplementary Material 1).
6. Class discussion of the film:
What did we see in the excerpt?
How did you feel when watching the ceremony?
What was Professor Leibowitz’s reaction to the ceremony? What do you think about what he said?
The film we saw was made in 1991. Are there any similarities and differences between that ceremony and the ones held today?
What do those similarities and differences tell us about the nature of collective memory?
What do you think is the purpose of memorial ceremonies? What messages do they convey?
7. Concluding discussion – Memory, forgetting, and the future:
Why do societies remember? How is collective memory useful to society?
Why does society remember some things, but not others?
The teacher reads aloud the following quotation from an article by Uri Ram :
“Memory is ‘memory’, and forgetting is ‘forgetting’, and each of them is the reflection of the other rather than its opposite, so that the important question is not whether to remember or to forget, but rather what should we remember and forget, how to remember and forget, who will do the reminding, who will make people forget. And we should realize that memory and forgetting are not oriented at all to the past, but to the future.”
Why does Uri Ram put quotation marks around the words “memory” and “forgetting”?
What is the relationship between memory and forgetting? What are their functions?
What do we, as a community, want to remember, feel that we should remember – or, on the other hand, prefer to forget?
Suggestion for a follow-up activity:
You can apply the collective memory model that we applied to memorial ceremonies to examine additional aspects of mass education, such as heritage museums. We recommend visiting such museums (for example, the Etzel Museum in Tel Aviv, the Palmach Museum in Ramat Aviv, and others), and encouraging the students to use their critical faculties to answer questions such as: Who visits the museum? How is it laid out? What does the building try to tell us? What does it try to conceal?
Supplementary Material 1: An excerpt from the film
An excerpt from the film, “Izkor, Slaves of Memory” (1991)
Director: Eyal Sivan (15 minutes)
Theoretical background
Collective memory is a sociological concept referring to a social phenomenon that involves combining various events from the past into a single story that assigns them contemporary meaning. The concept of collective memory is a useful tool for characterizing the unique identity one community compared to that of others. It defines the boundaries of “us” – who’s within, who’s outside – and is thus the result of struggles among various social groups. Since collective identity is seen as a central tool for creating the national state, the state has made, and continues to make, considerable efforts to gain a monopoly over memory. Society’s collective memory helps situate it in time and specifies its origins by stressing particular facts and events. Collective memory is constructed, developed, molded, and frequently changed according to contemporary needs, and is in fact a guided process of remembering and forgetting, oriented not to the past but to the future. In order for it to survive, members of the group must transmit it from one generation to the next.
The historian Pierre Nora believes that collective memory is formed via “spaces of memory” – a system of signs located in our surroundings, such as monuments, and in time, such as memorial dates. The purpose of such signs is to “remind” the public of events from the past that are seen as important and meaningful for the present. Collective memory must usually be renewed by means of physical activities and practices: a person must sing, recount, stand, observe, etc. In this way, collective memory is mobilized to create a collective identity.
In Israel, as in other nation-states, the schools play a central socializing role in inculcating national culture and collective memory. The school, as the nation-state’s socializing agent, is conceived as preserving the existing social order. Among the principal expressions of this function are commemorative ceremonies whose content in Israel was set during the 1950’s to serve a national-integrative function, create feeling of shared fate and of patriotism as well as insure commitment to societal goals and motivation for military service. The Israeli narrative is structured annually in a framework focused on the period that includes Passover – Holocaust Remembrance Day – Memorial Day – Independence Day. The mythical chronology is presented during Passover, defining Jewish fate as comprising cycles of pogroms, war, and redemption, while the modern era is represented by the period from Holocaust Remembrance Day through Independence Day. Jewish fate is thus linked to the Zionist revolution, and the historical Zionist narrative inculcated.
The site of memorial ceremonies is decorated with national symbols, accompanied by visual effects of fire and flames. The ceremony, drawn from a relatively stable repertoire, stresses patriotic messages. It opens as participants come to attention to the wail of a siren, and is conducted as if it were taking place on a military parade ground. Participants know how they are expected to behave: remain silent, stand at attention, heads bowed. Every participant moves in the same way, and for a moment all comprise a single organism. The ideology is transmitted physically through the participants’ bodies, emphasizing the personal, emotional experience that is shared by them all.
Beginning in the 1970s, the form that collective memory and forgetting took in Israel, and in its educational system, began to change, as a result of social and political changes. Uri Ram, a sociologist, argues that collective memory in Israel today is ordered along two dimensions – the first stresses nationalistic values, while the second, in opposition to the first, stresses the values of civil society. According to research conducted by Edna Lomsky-Feder, another sociologist, school ceremonies that focus on values of civil society stress personal pain and mourning. In doing so, they encourage participants to widen the circle of shared experience, focus on their common humanity and avoid ideological controversies.
Pedagogical rationale
This Unit raises questions about the structuring of collective memory among Israeli Jews, and about the assumptions underlying that process. It critically examines one of the principle mechanisms through which students in the educational system become participants in that collective memory: the memorial ceremonies.
Asking questions about the structuring of our collective memory is not an easy task. Doing so could meet with resistance, and there could be a backlash. You should expect students to respond fearfully, aggressively, defensively – to defend the collective. But raising such questions is an essential component of a critical pedagogy. This process is aimed at undermining the approach according to which the content of collective memory and its mode of operation seem self-evident. It attempts to re-evaluate the ideology and how it is inculcated. Raising questions critical of current reality and of our fundamental assumptions will help students analyze the reality in which they live, respond to it actively, and develop an independent, mature, point of view. To do so, we begin by asking questions such as: What are the components of the ceremonies in which we participate every year? What are their messages? How are these messages transmitted? The first part of the Unit shows the students that they’re very familiar with Memorial Day ceremonies, and examines the reasons they remember them so vividly. That section continues by conceptualizing the sociological concept of “collective memory.” In the second part of the Unit ,we’ll watch an excerpt from the film, “Izkor, Slaves of Memory” (1991), directed by Eyal Sivan. The film follows Israeli schoolchildren from kindergarten to their military swearing-in ceremony. It focuses on how collective memory is structured in Israel by examining how the educational system deals with the period from Passover to Independence Day.
We’ll watch the excerpt that shows a high school Memorial Day ceremony, including an interview with Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli-Jewish philosopher, who scathingly criticized nationalism and Zionism. Students will use the film to examine the collective memory inculcated by the institutions in which they grow up, insofar as these affect their Israeli identity, and the educational system.
-------------------------------
1. Nora, P. (1993), “Between memory and history – on the problem of place,” Z’manim 45, pp. 5-19 (Hebrew)
2. Ram, U. (1999), “On behalf of forgetting,” 50 to 48, Theory and Criticism, No. 12-13, Jerusalem, Van Leer Institute, p. 357 (Hebrew)
3. Bar-On, M. (2000), “To remember and commemorate – collective memory, communities of memory and heritage,” in Meisel, M. and Shamir, A. (eds.) Forms of Commemoration Ministry of Defense ,: Tel Aviv, pp. 11-47 (Hebrew)
Sand, S. (2004) Historians, Time and Imagination, Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew).
Zerubavel, Y. (1995) "The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors", Alpaim 10, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, pp. 42-67 (Hebrew). The English verstion of this article is in: Representations, Winter 1994, 45: 72-100.
Ram, U. (1999). Ibid.
4.Bar-On, M. (2000). Ibid.
5. Sand, S. (2004). Ibid.
6. Lomsky-Feder, E. (2003), “From an agent of national memory to a local community of mourning: Memorial Day ceremonies in Israeli schools,” Megamot, 42 (3), pp. 353-387 (Hebrew)
7. Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971, first published in La Pensée, 1970.
8. Ram, U. (1999). Ibid.
