I n a piece in Tablet entitled “Blow Up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” writer Alex Cocotas meditates on the meanings of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that stands on a sloping field in central Berlin. It consists of an immense grid of stelae (i.e. rectangular gray slabs of concrete of various sizes) numbering 2 711 — precisely the number of blatt in Shas — an astonishing fact that was once the subject of a meditation of my own in this space.
Beneath the memorial is an underground information center and one of its five rooms is dedicated to tracing the fate of various Jewish families across the war years through photos and documents. But apparently not all types of families. He notes that “Haredi Jews of Eastern Europe one of the largest victim groups are often minimized in educational and artistic representations of the Holocaust… To the extent that Haredim appear at all it is frequently during a moment of humiliation: as German soldiers cut off their payot; that is as they become secular.”
It seems that one need not be a fervently Orthodox Jew or even a religious one at all to notice the relative invisibility at various Holocaust memorial venues and even at Yad Vashem until recently of religious Jews as victims of the Nazis yemach shemam.
Cocotas opens his essay with a heartbreaking description of the kinds of behavior a visitor to the site will find others engaged in there ranging from the frivolous to the scandalous. It’s painful but not really surprising especially given the finding of Israeli sociologist Irit Dekel who has studied the memorial that many visitors have no idea they’re even at a Holocaust memorial.
