Israel and the Holocaust: the shaping of remembrance in the first decade

In Palestine, as early as 1942, Mordechai Shenhavi proposed the construction of a memorial for the Jews who were being murdered in Europe. In August 1945 Zionist movement delegates meeting in London proposed the establishment of Yad Vashem; in 1947 it was decided that all the destroyed Jewish communities would be represented and that Jewish resistance would be stressed. Simultaneously, the Jewish National Fund began to plant the Martyrs' Forest, which was the first Holocaust memorial site. Discusses the debate over Yom Hashoah; the date of 27 Nissan, the last day of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was finally chosen in 1951. In the 1950s, remembrance of the Holocaust was politicized and the valor of resistance fighters was stressed. In the 1960s, partly as a result of the Eichmann trial, publications and educational activities began to stress the suffering of Holocaust victims.