Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak

In this talk, Dr. Michlic discusses a crucial shift in the process of memorialization of the Holocaust in post-communist Eastern Europe that has occurred around the year of 2010. Despite its limitations, the 1989 – early 2000s liberal phase of memorialization of the Holocaust in postcommunist Europe was conducive to the emergence for the first time of critical history writing about the Holocaust, driven by local Jewish and non-Jewish senior and junior scholars living in their respective homelands or abroad. It also resulted in highly emotionally charged public and historical debates, such as the well-known international Polish debate of 2000 – 2002, about the Jedwabne massacre of 10 July 1941, which aimed at coming to terms with the difficult history of the treatment of the Jewish minority during the Holocaust. However, by the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, troubling undercurrents of the memorialization of the Holocaust, with continuing antisemitic-based prejudices towards Jewish victims and Jewish survivors, have exploded and ascended forcefully. As a result, the memorialization of the Holocaust has been subjected to instrumentalization, abuses, and attacks from a wide range of social, cultural, and political actors as never before. This talk explores the post-2010 shifts in approaches and their cultural significance.