THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

and member of the myriad committees and organizations, I received periodic reportson the media coverage of the issues. The world media never stopped discussingthese issues. Everything was covered from all possible angles: Switzerland andGermany, the Jews and money, banks and the war industry, the property and fundsof Eastern European Jews, the Shoah economy, and so on endlessly. In contrast, theIsraeli media was almost silent, which is a paradox considering the recent overreportingof the Shoah in our lives. More than one senior journalists told us: drop thesubject. I remember a bold headline in a major daily: “Burg—Leave the SwissAlone.” Even when the negotiations with the Swiss banks concluded, the Israeli presscoverage remained thin, and much of it expressed hostility to the givers and thereceiving survivors. Looking back now, the Israeli media treated the subject bylooking at it from behind, from the past. There was a feeling that the negotiations onJewish property were revealing something of the ordinary life of the European Jews,the human, natural and normal. The Jews saved kopecks and crowns, marks andzlotys and deposited them for a rainy day. Not the heroic, pioneering Jews, but thesimple folk. Restitution negotiations involved an examination of the life of theprosperous and wonderful Jewry until the days of its eradication; a glance back atJewish normalcy that was not explicitly Zionist, and even anti-Zionist, opposing thegathering of the Jews into one place. The Israeli press coverage of the 1990s wasconsistent with that of embryonic Israel during the Shoah: it continued to showjudgmental skepticism of everything that was from the Shoah. Because the moneyand the property belonged to the Shoah and its Jews, not to Israel and the ghettorebels, recipients were treated as if they were looting German army soldiers and SSofficers that we had just defeated in battle. The small details of money and propertydid not align with the myths of weapons, struggle, uprising and heroism. An Israeliofficer would not loot, would he?In time, reality overcame the Israeli public’s aversion. Retrospectively we canclearly see that the 1990s were a decade of transition from the mythology of theearly state to the obsessive journeys to the scenes of crime. It was a more universalJewish decade, and much less so Israeli or Zionist.The two emotions wrestle inside us, and we are confused. Heroes or persecuted?Resistance fighters or perished victims? Slaughtering shepherds or bound lambs?Disoriented and lost. Every hiker knows the basic rule of navigation: If you lose yourway, do not persist in your error. Go back to the last point of certainty and restartyour course. Somewhere between the over-heroism of then and the over-Shoahism