Remember? Forget? What to Remember? What to Forget?

In late November 1942, the Jewish Agency Executive called a press conference and made the first-ever official announcement of the shocking truth: Nazi Germany was perpetrating a systematic, all-inclusive, industrial annihilation of European Jewry. Not a pogrom of the type all too common in Jewish history, but a Holocaust. From that moment began a long, convoluted, agonizing process of internalizing the Holocaust’s meanings; of living in its shadow, along with the scars engraved in the flesh and embedded in the consciousness. The article tries to analyze and evaluate the fortitude of presence of the Holocaust in the history and memory of the Israelis, and its possible evolution in the years to come. As well as the odds of Yehuda Elkana’s call from 1988, in what he defined as “a call in sake of life and life”, to FORGET. To be freed, finally from “the deep existential which is fed from a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Shoah.” “To stand for life, to divert ourselves for building our future and not to deal over and over in symbols, ceremonies and lessons drawn from the Holocaust.” To uproot, once and for all, “the ruling of the Historical Yizkor” on the everyday life of the Israelis.