Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation

7. Rituals of Remembrance in Jerusalem and Berlin: Museum Visiting as Pilgrimage and Performance

183 7 • RITUALS OF REMEMBRANCE IN JERUSALEM AND BERLIN Museum Visiting as Pilgrimage and Performance The traditional pilgrim has been the individual who embarks on a hajj to Mecca or who journeys to the banks of the Ganges River, the Dome of the Rock, or the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. Such travelers understand their journeys in religious terms, and it was this religious understanding that made their journeys “pilgrimages” rather than simply travel. This understanding has been broadened in recent years to include tourists and their journeys to places that deviate from traditional sites of pilgrimage . Ritual studies scholar Catherine Bell succinctly defines pilgrimage as an activity that possesses a “fundamental ritual pattern of transformation by means of a spatial, temporal, and psychological transition.”1 According to this definition, the moniker “pilgrim” might include an Israeli student who travels on a youth voyage to visit the death camps of Poland, a young Jew taking part in a Taglit Birthright Israel tour, a devoted Elvis fan who journeys to Graceland, a Trekkie who attends Star Trek conventions, or a veteran who participates in American Veterans’ motorcycle tours.2 To quote seventeenth-century English poet Abraham Cowley, “Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.” There is now a certain fluidity in the concept of pilgrimage, and pilgrims encompass many facets, as they undertake 184 Holocaust Memory Reframed journeys of spiritual, intellectual, and psychological significance and seek to transcend ordinary experience. One may even include museum visitors as pilgrims when certain conditions are met. This chapter mines the works of contemporary experts on pilgrimage, including Catherine Bell and Jonathan Z. Smith, to identify the criteria that help us understand Holocaust museums and exhibits as pilgrimage sites. In particular, this chapter examines the embodied and empirical aspects of visitors’ ritualized movement in time and space within Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum Berlin as well as the way in which museum visiting itself may function as a pilgrimage. This is an important exercise because visitors to Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum Berlin are encouraged to engage in certain ritual behaviors and to emerge from their experiences with a transformed identity or consciousness. These museums possess the power to initiate their visitors into a new sense of communal identity and to create a particular social self that resonates with their Holocaust narratives. One of the key criteria I have identified for determining whether or not a museum possesses ritual characteristics typical of sites of pilgrimage is a sacred quality that manifests itself spatially. This sacredness, however, as discussed by Smith in his seminal work, To Take Place, is not essentially but rather situationally significant. Smith argues that human attention and behavior imbue ritual objects and actions with sacred qualities: “A ritual object or action becomes sacred by having attention focused on it in a highly marked way. From such a point of view, there is nothing that is inherently sacred or profane. These are not substantive categories, but rather situational ones. Sacrality is, above all, a category of emplacement. . . . A sacred text is one that is used in a sacred place—nothing more is required.” According to Smith, it is human engagement in ritual action that creates the sacred.3 A second criterion is that the visitors’ experience of the museum possesses what Bell calls “ritual-like qualities.” Bell agrees with Smith’s approach to the sacred and adds two additional characteristics of ritualization . The first is that participants involved in a process of ritualization acknowledge that this process possesses a “special or privileged status” and “extra significance.” The second is that participants perceive that a “more embracing authoritative order,” characterized by greater “values and forces,” underlies their ritual experience.4 Yad Vashem exhibits this greater value in redemption through Zionism, while the Jewish Museum Rituals of Remembrance in Jerusalem and Berlin 185 Berlin celebrates the multicultural society with its religious and ethnic tolerance. A third criterion is the element of performance, which, as Bell points out, helps to effect “changes in people’s perceptions and interpretations.” An important part of the performative aspect of ritual has to do with framing—a concept first used by Gregory Bateson (1904–1980).5 A frame separates and distinguishes the sacred from the profane, and the transcendent from the concrete. Carol Duncan argues, for example, that like temples and shrines, museums are “carefully marked off” from surrounding spaces in a ceremonial way and...