The Memory of the Holocaust and Israel's Attitude Toward War Trauma, 1948–1973: The Collective vs. the Individual

Immediately after the Holocaust, while most of the survivors were waiting in the Displaced Persons Camps for a resolution of their status, the Zionist movement's leadership together with the survivors' leadership made an unconscious choice of addressing the Shoah as a collective catastrophe, which overrides individual calamity. This view led the newborn state to adopt almost solely the narrative and conceptualization of the Holocaust, disregarding individuals' suffering and emphasizing elements of national heroism, active resistance to collective danger, and the exclusive role of the nascent Jewish state in assuring a secure life for the Jewish collective. It was not until the 1980s that individual memories and narratives trickled into public consciousness through literature, film, and the media. Around the same period, a parallel process occurred concerning national attitudes toward war trauma. The earliest public acknowledgement of Combat Stress Reaction and war trauma emerged in Israel only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, shortly before the psychiatric community in the West acknowledged Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The article argues that there is a clear connection between the two processes, and that the primacy of securing the collective over rehabilitating the individual significantly affected both the memory of the Holocaust and the attitudes toward war trauma for many years. Focusing the Holocaust memory on the narrow aspect of persistent danger to the Jewish collective has significantly limited empathy toward war trauma casualties, as the two issues are based on similar social beliefs.