Holocaust museums debate what to say about Israel’s war on Gaza

Visitors making their way through the Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC. Will the number of visitors fall as the war continues? — ©2024 The New York Times Company

AT a Holocaust museum in Atlanta, staff members had typically ended their tours by saying that many survivors of the death camps immigrated to the Palestinian territories.

But after the start of the Israel war on Gaza, the guides noticed that some students would ask a simple but complicated question: Is this the Gaza Strip that we’ve been hearing about?

So staff members at the museum, the Breman, made a few changes, according to Rabbi Joseph Prass, the museum’s education director. Now, docents explain to visitors that many Holocaust survivors found refuge in “the British Mandate of Palestine” or “the area that would become the country of Israel.”

Each year, roughly two dozen Holocaust museums in the United States teach millions of visitors – often students on field trips – about the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, a history that is fading from living memory.

Since the start of the Israel war on Gaza last October, holocaust museums have been forced to confront one of the most emotional and divisive issues within the Jewish community: how to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Many holocaust museums include the story of Israel’s founding in 1948, depicting the country as a refuge for Jewish survivors. But they often do not mention, or address only in guarded terms, a subject that increasingly interests some visitors: the Nakba, Palestinians’ term for their displacement amid Israel’s founding.

“The question is always context,” said Debórah Dwork, a Holocaust historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And at these museums, she said, Israel’s founding is set in the context of the mass murder of Jews in Europe.

“The Nakba is not part of that context,” Dwork said. “It’s rarely treated, if at all.”

Many of these museums have a broader mission beyond the Holocaust: They want to raise awareness about prejudice, mass killings and human rights.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has created case studies of other atrocities, including the Ottoman genocide of Armenians, ethnic cleansing in the Ethiopian civil war and the Burmese killings of Rohingya Muslims, which the US State Department considers to be a genocide.

In May, the Illinois Holocaust Museum opened a core exhibition called “Voices of Genocide,” highlighting the experiences of witnesses to mass killings in Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Guatemala.

And many museums have devoted attention to non-Jewish victims of the Nazis, such as the Roma, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities, as well as to US civil rights abuses such as Jim Crow laws and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Now, the museums must contend with the Israel-Hamas war and the fact that all sides invoke the holocaust to make their case. To supporters of Israel’s war effort, there is a direct line between the antisemitism that fuelled the holocaust and the ideology of Hamas.

Others, including many young museum visitors, have heard anti-war protesters’ claims equating the Israel military campaign with genocide. And they have been steeped in social media images that show tens of thousands of Palestinians killed and millions displaced from their homes. For them, no humanitarian crisis is more pressing.

Omer Bartov, a professor of history at Brown University and a scholar of genocide, said that in the current political climate, visitors will naturally have questions about how the museums see the war in Gaza and Israel.

“If you talk about equality, dignity, human rights as the lessons that we learned from the Holocaust, when an entire regime of international law was put into place, does that apply to everyone?” he said.

“Or is the Jewish state exempt from that because of its past?”

Engaging with a new generation

Some holocaust museums have developed plans for how to handle questions related to the Israel war on Gaza.

The Room of Remembrance at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which displays the names of victims of the Holocaust in English, Yiddish and Hebrew. — ©2024 The New York Times Company

If visitors raise the question of genocide, Prass said, he and other museum speakers have developed a clear response: Although the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is tragic, “The term genocide? We don’t feel this is an appropriate use of the term, given the topic we talk about. It doesn’t apply.”

Some museums point visitors to the text of the United Nations Genocide Convention, which does not define the term merely as the killing of civilians from a particular national, ethnic or religious group. It requires that the killings were committed with “intent to destroy” the group.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum – founded by Holocaust survivors in Skokie, outside Chicago – prepared an eight-page guide on the Israel-Hamas war to help volunteers answer questions.

The document states that Hamas was the “aggressor”; that international legal scholars have not found the war to meet the criteria for genocide; and that there is “nothing antisemitic” about supporting Palestinian statehood, but there is in supporting Hamas or in chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.”

“It’s natural that when people are processing what they’re seeing in the world, to ask questions about Israel and Gaza,” said museum CEO Bernard Cherkasov.

He added: “The hostages not being released and the innocent Palestinians paying the ultimate price – that is a humanitarian crisis that needs to be acknowledged, no matter what labels we put on it.”

At the Illinois Holocaust Museum, Marion Deichmann, a 91-year Holocaust survivor, periodically shares her story with middle school students.

As a girl, she journeyed with her mother from their native Germany to Luxembourg, and then France. Her mother was arrested in the 1942 Vél d’Hiv roundup of Jews in France and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed.

Deichmann has thought about how she would respond if a student compared the present war to the holocaust.

“There is no comparison,” she would say, “with the six million Jews that were murdered in camps.”

What about Palestine? — ©2024 The New York Times Company