| dc.description.abstract | [""This thesis traces the interface of Holocaust memory and religious text, symbolism, and motifs at
Yad Vashem, Israels official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Working with the notion
of spatial storytelling, I analyze how religion is infused into the commemorative practices of Yad
Vashem, and how this is spatialized on the memorial’s grounds. Taking ‘storytelling’ as the
primary methodological concept for my ethnographic engagement with Yad Vashem, this thesis
explores issues of reflexivity through putting researcher-researched dialectics center stage.
Through spatial analysis and by following the body’s course through Yad Vashem, I suggest how
mentalism and materialism can be thought off conjointly in walking over Yad Vashem’s grounds
and in engaging with changing understanding of trauma in Israel and its visual repercussions on
the landscape of Yad Vashem. The thesis ultimately argues that the nature and location of religion
at Yad Vashem can be understood in terms of transferable biblical quality onto Yad Vashem’s
grounds. Through sacred reference and ritualized practice, Yad Vashem cloaks the memory of
the Holocaust in a biblical garb, begging the question whether the stories of the Holocaust
themselves are not stories of a new Bible. The analysis necessitates a reflexive turn inwards that
further denaturalizes the concept of ‘religion’ itself. Through taking serious (dis)placeable biblical
quality and pointing to a biblical idea, the thesis points to the interconnections of memory,
religion, and sacrality, whilst simultaneously questioning the effect of the sacred status for
Holocaust memory itself.""] | |
