The Responsibility to Remember – Remember Responsibly: Hitkansut, A Ritual Gathering for Yom HaShoah

by Michal Govrin

June 21, 2025

A Personal Note 

I am a woman and mother who lives in Jerusalem. I am also the daughter of a survivor. On arriving in Israel in 1948, my mother, Rina Govrin (Regina Rega Poser Laub), underwent plastic surgery to remove the number tattooed on her arm at Auschwitz. As a child, I did not know that my mother “was in the Holocaust,” that she had survived murderous aktions (attacks and roundups) in the Krakow ghetto; the concentration camps at Płaszów, Auschwitz, and Birkenau; and the “death march” to Bergen-Belsen. Nor did I know that she was saved thanks to the willpower of ten women who called themselves the Zehnerschaft (she was the only nonreligious woman among nine ultra-Orthodox women). My mother never told me about the murder of her first husband; about how she ran after the lorry with children from the Kinderheim (children’s “home”) at Płaszów, among whom was her eight-year-old son on his way to the gas chambers; nor about how her friends held her back. I also did not know that after the liberation she commanded the “Bricha” (the Illegal Escape) in the British zone of Germany, part of a movement responsible for smuggling hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe to Mediterranean ports on their clandestine escape route to Palestine. My mother kept her silence. She refused to be a victim. But the emotional scars of her story were burned into me. Vague negative images during childhood, outlines of horror and struggle, of weakness and guilt, of the power of survival and Eros: zones of pre-memory that become the deep foundations of story, of myth. Twenty years after her death, I could no longer run from the duty to give voice to the silenced memory, to “remember” that which I had never lived. After years of denial, what had been seared into me demanded to be exposed. 

Memorial ceremonies for the Shoah were already held in the ghettos in Europe and in North Africa during the Shoah itself. They were held in the displaced persons’ camps after the war, later became part of Israeli and Jewish public identity, and, in Israel and elsewhere, gained the status of official ceremonies. Such ceremonies usually combine historical descriptions, testimonies, song, and prayer. As time passes and the generation of survivors, perpetrators, or standers-by dwindles, the function of memorial ceremonies changes as the place and time of the events become more remote. The transmission of memory influences and is influenced by the changing social and political circumstances in each location. “There is a fundamental difference between the transmission of individual trauma and that of collective trauma. Personal experience, and my many encounters with Holocaust survivors, suggest that a traumatized individual has little control over the multiple ways in which his or her experience is transmitted . . . Whereas the transmission of individual trauma usually takes place within a relatively closed emotional field, mainly that of parent and child, the transmission of collective trauma responds to a very different dynamic, which depends entirely on the social function it fulfills.” [Aharon Appelfeld, Public lecture at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Oct 10, 2013]

Most forms of Shoah remembrance focus on trauma—exposing, describing, and documenting the trauma, and transmitting it to the next generations. Collective memory focuses mainly on preserving an open wound—stoking the memory of destruction and creating the means to transmit it. This sort of memory teaches moral lessons by exposing participants to the trauma and helping them experience it anew.

However, as the field of trauma care has repeatedly shown, reenacting a trauma merely destabilizes the fragile recovery process and serves only to return the victim to the paralyzing experience. The mission that we set for ourselves in the framework of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Transmitted Memory and Fiction research group was:

How to change the way memory is transmitted? How to help Israeli society to recover from the ongoing impact of the wound of the Shoah, fed by the preservation and transmission of the trauma? How to transform the trauma from “a negative and incomprehensible occurrence to a positive and empowering principle of action for the community”?

The work of the Transmitted Memory and Fiction research group encouraged us to shape a different kind of ceremony for transmitting the memory of the Shoah. The members of the group emphasized the struggle for human dignity even in the midst of despair and devastation.

Christian-Western versus Jewish Remembrance

Too little attention has been paid to the way Western and Christian consciousness have deeply shaped our memory of the Shoah—beginning with the term “Holocaust” itself, an expression from the Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible meaning “a whole-burnt sacrifice.” This term reveals a fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism. Judaism emphasizes the biblical story of the binding of Isaac, wherein Abraham ultimately refuses to sacrifice his son and instead offers a ram. The impulse to sacrifice was blocked, and in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 89b) Abraham’s very attempt to offer his son is described as an act of Satan. In Judaism, unlike early Christianity, martyrology never became an accepted norm. Christianity is based on the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, wherein God sacrifices his son, whose suffering and death atone for the sins of believers. An extreme example of this meaning of the term Holocaust can be found in the comments of the Bishop of Lyon, who claimed that the death of one and a half million Jewish children during the Shoah purifies the prayers of the believers.

Shoah remembrance ceremonies, including those held in Israel, continue to sear this traumatic Shoah memory into each new generation. The term “Holocaust” was first used in our context by François Mauriac, the Catholic writer, in his introduction to the French version of Elie Wiesel’s Night. Years later, Claude Lanzmann, the director of the film Shoah, waged a passionate battle to replace the term Holocaust with Shoah

The Responsibility to Remember – Remember Responsibly

During the Shoah, Jews did not see themselves as martyrs—as holy sacrifices. Nor did they regard their suffering as bearing witness to holiness, rather they fought for their spirit and their lives, in the face of destruction, inspiring awe for the human spirit. And yet most Shoah memorial sites foreground the Nazi extermination apparatus and the suffering of the victims. The museum at Auschwitz emphasizes the details of the industrial slaughter rather than the prisoners’ fight against physical and spiritual erasure.

The Holocaust theme was used to appeal to the conscience of the Western-Christian world in order to secure diplomatic, military, and economic support for Israel.

The Jewish Model for Transmitting Memory

The Jewish tradition offers a different model of remembrance, as exemplified in the Passover Seder, which preserves and transmits the memory of slavery in Egypt.  As noted above, most forms of Shoah remembrance practiced today—ceremonies, marches, film screenings, lectures, live testimony—render the individual a passive, nameless member of the audience. In contrast, at the Passover Seder, all those dining at the table, young and old alike, play an active part. In every place, in every generation, every Jew is commanded “to see themselves as if they had left Egypt.” The slavery in Egypt and the decree that “every boy born should be cast into the Nile” brought the Jews to the brink of destruction. Yet the Seder transmits the memory of Egypt not as a trauma but as an ongoing struggle against slavery and subjugation. Here, evil does not become a source of fascination. The Passover Seder does not attempt to reconstruct the horrors of slavery or the dread of annihilation. Instead, the command to “remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt” establishes the social laws that will govern future generations, mandating the protection of weak and marginalized members of society. The Passover Seder does not make evil a source of fascination; it contemplates the past in order to act in the present.

The Passover Haggadah model for transmitting the memory of the Exodus from Egypt offers a promising form for transmitting the memory of the Shoah. This model shapes Shoah remembrance as the rehabilitation of trauma and as a continuing obligation to repair humanity and society. This ritual would foreground not the Nazi evil but rather the human struggle. It would focus not on the sanctity of victimhood but on the revelation of the humanity of the victims, the survivors, and the righteous non-Jews. This kind of Shoah memory would recall the humanity that shines out from the depths of inhumanity, that rare flame that flickers to life under the most extreme conditions. It would create an active memory and Tikkun, a means of both changing the world and undergoing transformation.

Memory and Responsibility: Designing the Yom HaShoah “Hitkansut” (Gathering)

Based on the conclusions of the Transmitted Memory and Fiction research group, I subsequently led another team in designing the Hitkansut Haggadah for ritually transmitting Shoah memory. This time, I invited philosophers and historians, artists and especially community leaders, religious and secular people, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews to join the writing team.

Cover page of the Hitkansut Book in Hebrew

The Responsibility to Remember – Remember Responsibly

Our team worked through a collaborative writing process, one that likely resembled the process the authors of the Passover Haggadah pursued as “they were reclining in Bnei Brak and telling of the Exodus from Egypt the entire night.” The result was a “Haggadah” that serves as a Yom HaShoah Seder and weaves together written passages, testimonies, conversation, prayer, group song, and moments of silence, thus integrating the diverse voices of Shoah memory into a powerful and transformative whole. When participants in the Hitkansut “bear witness,” they add their voices to those of survivors and thus transmit the memory of the Shoah from one generation to the next. We designed the Hitkansut Haggadah as a multivocal work with paratextual, Talmud-style pages—the words of victims and survivors, fighters and children, prayers and journal entries from all testimonies and viewpoints, including those of Righteous Among the Nations—all sit next to each other on the page.

Participants are encouraged to sing a piyyut or song from a pre-Shoah Jewish community. There are suggestions for additional readings and activities (Page 4 of Hitkansut Book in Hebrew)

The Responsibility to Remember – Remember Responsibly: Inculcating the Hitkansut

In 2015, the authors of the Haggadah led ten experimental circles of the Yom HaShoah Hitkansut. The Hitkansut Haggadah was developed at The Ritual Department at Shalom Hartman Institute as was a special version designed for use in schools. Diverse groups of Israelis—women and men, secular and religious, from all ethnic backgrounds and around the country—were exposed to the Hitkansut. Teachers held Hitkansut circles with their students, who added their own voices to the widening circle. Gatherings were held in synagogues and community centers, during visits to Poland, on campuses and in premilitary preparatory programs, in workplaces, and in private homes around the family table. Every year, the Hartman Institute holds Hitkansut circles for the general public in which strangers become partners in a shared fate. Youth movements in Jerusalem from across the spectrum of political views and sectors— from Ezra to Hashomer Hatzair—hold joint circles emphasizing their choice of partnership and calling for responsible memory. Thus, the memory of the Shoah became a force for uniting generations, sectors, communities, and faiths. Trial Hitkansut circles with delegations from Germany—from young people to members of the Bundestag—and with teachers from France and Greece naturally led to shifts in emphasis, but confirmed the potential to shape a circle of personal memory and commitment that transcends borders, despite the vast difference in the participants’ historical baggage. The translation and publication of the Hitkansut Haggadah into English and its dissemination raised challenges and drew in significant additional circles. In the same way, the translation of the Hitkansut Haggadah into French and Russian focuses, in each case, on the specific contexts and meanings of the Shoah for the participants.

Thousands of participants in Israel, North America, and around the world take part annually in transforming the memory of the Shoah into an obligation to the present and a hope for the future. By integrating “the responsibility to remember” with “remembering responsibly,” we can hope to join the struggle—in the here and now—against present-day incarnations of fascism and evil. In moments of personal or public distress, remembering the Shoah can offer a compass that guides and empowers us toward human dignity. The essence of memory is captured not in books but in the human consciousness—each person in his or her own way, each generation in its world. The Yom HaShoah Hitkansut and the Haggadah have created a new ceremony that invites every person to take part in shaping the living memory of the Shoah.

The above was excerpted and adapted from But There Was Love; Shaping the Memory of the Shoah, edited by Michal Govrin , Dana Freibach-Heifetz, Etty BenZaken and Raya Morag. De Gruyter, 2025.