Through a study of the most prominent Holocaust institutes in Israel – Yad Vashem, Lohamei Hagetaot, and Yad Mordechai – Chapter 5 demonstrates that Holocaust mnemonic rituals serve a defined political purpose, namely the justification of the need for a strong and independent Israeli state as the only viable way to hinder a recurrence of the Holocaust. The deliberate usage of teleological architecture at Yad Mordecai and Yad Vashem seeks to inspire a redemptive visitor experience through a regulated physical move from the exhibited darkness and catastrophe of Europe to the light and rebirth in Israel, the former destroyed; the latter victorious. The emphasis on a Jewish rebirth in the wake of the Holocaust in the institutes’ historical exhibits and in annual commemorative ceremonies prompts the merging of the dissonant categories of victim and victor, forming a metaphorical testimony to what Martin Jaffee described as “the victim-community” in which “the victim is always both victim and victor.” Beyond the overt minimization of the fate of non-Jewish victims and post-Holocaust diasporic Jewry, the Zionist panacea channeled at the memory sites demands a foregoing of the physical Palestinian history of the three sites themselves. As a result, visitors to the historic exhibits and participants in annual mnemonic rituals continue to take part in a cultural palimpsest as they are propelled to remember the physically superimposed Jewish watershed rather than the Nakba.

But where did the story of Jewish deportees fit into all this? Isaac Schneersohn, a Russian immigrant who had survived the war in hiding, emerged at the Liberation to found the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, which undertook to write the history of the genocide of the Jews. Schneersohn was also the moving force behind construction of a monument completed in 1956, the Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu, now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah. The object of all such efforts was at to evoke the specificity of Jewish suffering and to find a way to include Jews qua Jews in memorial events connected to the Deportation. Schneersohn had more success at this than is often appreciated.