|
Teaching our teenagers how to live:
Strippers in the shadow of the Holocaust
Zur Nachricht "Nach KZ-Besichtigung
Stripper bestellt"
ein Kommentar aus haArez
Jerusalem (AFP) Auf einer Klassenfahrt nach Polen
haben sich israelische Schüler zwischen den Besuchen deutscher
Konzetrationslager Stripper ins Hotel kommen lassen. Die Schulleitung des
Gymnasiums Ofek bestätigte den Vorfall, der in Israel großes Aufsehen
erregte.
Die etwa 60 Gymnasiasten hielten sich nach diesen Angaben
vor zwei Wochen in Polen auf. Einige Jungen bestellten sich eine Stripperin
ins Hotel. Daraufhin wollten die Mädchen ihnen nicht nachstehen und buchten
einen Mann, der sich für sie auszog. Der Direktor des Gymnasiums kündigte
eine Bestrafung der Schüler an, die aus verschiedenen galiläischen Kibuzim
(Nord-Israel) kommen.
By Avirama Golan
"For the past 12 years we have been sending youth
delegations to Poland," declare officials of the Education Ministry, "and we
have never before encountered an incident in which a stripper has been
invited to appear in a hotel room. The youths who participate in these
delegations are given a thorough briefing before their departure." According
to the ministry, the students of the Ofek high school who invited the
strippers to their hotel rooms traveled to Poland in a privately run program
that did not receive the ministry's official sanction. But why all the fuss?
The link between the Holocaust on the one hand and sex and kitsch on the
other has already been documented in both literature and cinema. Even the
circular letter issued by the director-general of the Education Ministry
that warns students what not to do is an eye-opener: Apparently, thousands
of Israeli high-school students who travel to Poland go wild, scream at the
top of their lungs in public places, indulge themselves in various forms of
entertainment and, at times, show no restraint whatsoever.Oded Cohen, the
ministry official in charge of the delegations to Poland, has recently
published an article titled "The journey to Poland as the apex of a
national, educational and social process." In the article, he explains that
the high school trips to Poland have three main goals: "First, to learn
about the spiritual and cultural richness of Jewish life in pre-war Poland,
and about its scope and vitality. Second, to experience and to attempt to
understand the profound significance of both the extermination of the
European Jews and the destruction of their entire community. Third, to
experience and to attempt to understand both the moral abyss that the
Holocaust represents and the ultimate in dehumanization, as expressed
through Nazi atrocities."
Cohen quotes from a study by Ronen Friedman titled, "Israelis and the
Holocaust: Youth delegations to Poland in the 1990s." According to Friedman,
Israeli Jewish teenagers view the traumatic past of the Jewish people as an
integral part of both their national history and national consciousness.
This perception exists at various levels: personal, communal, national and
religious.
Although 17-year-old Israeli Jews have not yet fully
developed their own personal identity, they are already being asked to
define their national and cultural identity in an extremely severe form. Do
they have the necessary historical knowledge, human perspective and
emotional capacity that adult Jews use when they are forced to handle the
psychological confrontation with the wall of death, the torture cells and
the gas chambers? Is this brutal, voyeuristic exposure to atrocity in a
place where humanity reached the very depths of depravity the most effective
tool - or, in fact, the only tool - that can be used to enable Jewish youth
to develop their personal and national identity in an Israel that has
already marked a half-century of independence?
The officials of the Education Ministry obviously think so. "Most of the
teenage participants in these delegations," notes Cohen, "believe that the
experience of journeying to Poland played a key role in the formation of
their Jewish identity and gave unique significance to their compulsory
military service in the Israel Defense Forces and to the fact that they are
citizens of the State of Israel."
There is a danger here in this extreme delimiting of the parameters of
Israeli Jewish identity. Civics teachers complain that high-school seniors,
especially those who have made the journey to Poland, view the State of
Israel as being the direct product of the Holocaust. Apparently, the Polish
strippers primarily exposed the confusion and dilemmas of our Education
Ministry, which prefers sending students off to Poland over teaching the
students what it means to be an Israeli Jew in the present era.
In the 1950s, Holocaust studies in Israeli schools consisted, on one hand,
of depictions of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and, on the other, of tagging
Holocaust victims as "sheep taken to the slaughterhouse." In the 1990s,
Israeli teachers are no longer able to justify Zionism, and thus the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising is erased as a value. Instead, the Israeli educational
system sings the praises and admires the beauty of Diaspora existence.
One must ask, however, if the Diaspora was so wonderful and the Jewish
community in Poland so stunningly creative, what possible claim to
legitimacy does Zionism possess? After all, Zionism always insisted that the
social structure of the Jewish community in the Diaspora was disastrous and
that it must be abandoned in favor of a normative society. Except for
ultra-Orthodox Jews, no one misses the tiny Jewish village in Poland that
existed in the mud of poverty.
Concerning the "remnants" of "glorious" Poland, Matetyahu Mintz, who has
studied Polish Jewry and who was himself part of that Jewish community,
argues that all that remains of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw is a cemetery.
In order to view the last remnants of the ghetto's wall, you have to enter
the heart of a crowded neighborhood. Each year, these remnants are visited
by the 3,600 Israeli Jewish high school students whom the Education Ministry
has chosen to participate in the "delegations to Poland" program.
The remnants are also visited by thousands of other Israeli Jewish teenagers
who travel to Poland within the context of tours organized by individual
high schools. For the price of $1,040, these youths are exposed to the
dubious experience of coming into close, abrasive contact with the enraged
residents of this crowded neighborhood. On the one hand, there are the proud
Israeli Jewish teenagers, waving the Israeli flag, while on the other there
are the Polish day-laborers who respond to the visitors with anti-Semitic
sentiments. (In fact, the encounter with the Poles dulls in comparison to
the confrontation with the Germans.)
Thus, in addition to being taught to long for the Diaspora of the past, the
students who visit Poland are taught to develop the xenophobic sense that
"the whole world is against us, the Jews." Is this the foundation on which
they must build their lives in a country that is an occupier of another
nation's land and which still has not learned how to live in peace with its
neighbors?
As we try to transform Israel into a sane and civic nation, it would be far
better to stop investing millions of dollars in these organized tours to
Poland and to instead channel these funds into tours of the places in which
Israeli society lives today. I am not, of course, advocating that we
dispense with the courses given at Massua or at other outstanding
educational centers. But if the Education Ministry is afraid that our youth
might be deprived of "values" if they are not sent to Poland as "delegates,"
maybe the ministry's officials should start thinking about values such as
social solidarity, knowledge of and respect for the law, and so forth.
Perhaps the Polish strippers have served to remind us what the instinctual
needs of our youths are. Instead of teaching them about death, perhaps we
should be teaching our teenagers how to live.
haGalil 23-11-99
|
