Journal of Historical Geography, 26, 3 (2000) 449–465

doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0238, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Negotiating memory and identity: the HydePark Holocaust Memorial, London

Steven Cooke

In 1983, 38 years after the end of World War II, Britain gained its first public memorialdedicated solely to victims of the Holocaust: the Hyde Park Holocaust MemorialGarden. Organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, this campaign revealedthe ways that memorialization of the Holocaust in Britain during the 1980s was crosscut with issues of identity, memory and history. In attempting to restore the ‘biography’of the memorial, this paper examines the way the memorial’s relationship with itspotential locations is important in the making of meaning and shows how debates overthe perceived appropriateness of the sites were structured by, and in turn structure,various discourses concerning Anglo-Jewish identity. 2000 Academic Press

Introduction

A Holocaust Memorial Garden was dedicated on June 24, 1983, with a small ceremonyin Hyde Park. Organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews (hereafter Board ofDeputies) who ran the campaign for the memorial, it was thus not until 38 years afterthe end of World War II that Britain gained its first public memorial dedicated solelyto the victims of the Holocaust. Speaking after the ceremony, Labour MP GrevilleJanner, President of the Board of Deputies, and the main driving force behind thecampaign, suggested that the memorial would “blend into the park and into the livesand memories of Britain’s people, Jews and non-Jews alike” and also that it would be“not only a reminder of past tragedy, but a flare of warning for the future, to extremistswho would destroy the Jewish community”.[1] The dissonance between the view thatthe memorial will “blend” into the landscape and the wish that it will be a “flare ofwarning” is indicative of the tension that existed within Anglo-Jewish Holocaustmemorialization during this period: between the strategic framework of assimilationthat the Anglo-Jewish elite have historically adopted and the desire to remember andmourn the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Geography and memorial landscapes

Monuments and memorials are important symbolic sites in the articulation of nationalidentity. They can give a focal point around which a vision of national identity can beforged, tied up with a sense of a shared past, pointing to a shared present and future.They are part of the meanings passed down from generation to generation in traditions,institutions and rituals: social and cultural practises whose purpose or effect is therepresentation of the past and the perpetuation of its memory. These are rooted in

4490305–7488/00/070449+17 $35.00/0 2000 Academic Press

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what Nora has termed lieux de memoire, or mnemonic sites, “where memory crystallisesand secretes itself”.[2] Hussyen suggests that monuments should not be seen as permanentor concrete, either in their materiality, their symbolics, or their memory. They can betoppled in times of social and political change, while others stand simply as figures orforgetting, their original purpose eroded by the passage of time. New meanings areascribed to the monument as different people bring different experiences and differentmemories to a memorial site. Memorials can also be viewed as a site of resistance toa particular viewpoint, a focus for disrupting identity as well as shaping it.[3] They aresites of contestation, terrain over which various actors employ symbolic capital to inan attempt to control meaning.

The relationship between identity and representation in the landscape is not simplya mirror image. A memorial site will not just be the representation of a particularworldview, but rather the result of complex negotiations and compromises. Johnsonexamined the heroic histories that monuments helped to create in celebrating thecentenary of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, suggesting

Monuments were not just decorative appendages erected to beautify cities and town,and their location within public space was not historical accident. They representedself-conscious attempts to solicit public participation in the politics of the day.[4]

Within a burgeoning literature on the way that monuments form an important com-ponent in the symbolic landscape of national, religious, class and gendered identities,[5]

there is a growing body of literature that can be identified within geography on theway that war and has been memorialized. The work of Heffernan on World War Imemorialization, and Morris on the construction of Englishness in World War Icemeteries have done much to bring the production and consumption of memoriallandscapes of war to the fore.[6]

Informing much geographical work on memorialization is Young’s groundbreakingwork on the biography of Holocaust landscapes. This is closely associated with Samuels’“biography of landscape”, an attempt to investigate “the who behind the image andfacts of landscape”.[7] This process is an examination of the people, events, andmotivations, often conflicting, which caused the memorial to be constructed. As Youngsuggests,

[a]s an inert piece of stone, the monument keeps its own past a tightly held secret,gesturing away from its own history to the events and meanings we bring to it in ourvisits.[8]

In contrast to such work within geography on the memorialization of war, there is anabsence of studies into the Holocaust mnemonic sites within human geography. Indeed,Cole and Smith have argued that “[p]erhaps the most remarkable blank-spot ingeographical research concerns the Holocaust”.[9] Cole and Smith, Charlesworth, andClarke, Doel and McDonough are significant exceptions to the seeming reluctancewithin academic geography to tackle the subject.[10]

Anglo-Jewish communities

With significant exceptions, the majority of attempts at Holocaust memorialization inBritain have come from the Jewish community. As Young has argued, “the creator ofmemorial texts necessarily reconstruct historical events, and so reflect as much theirown understanding and experience as the actual events they would preserve”.[11] Thus,

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the ontological framework of the Anglo-Jewish community is important in under-standing such attempts. However, although it is common to talk about the Anglo-Jewish community, Jewish people in Britain do not form a single, homogeneous groupbut are dissected along lines of class, gender, religion, and sexuality.[12] This heterogeneityis a result of a long history of differentiated immigration, different life experiences andalso to the oppositional way in which identities are made and remade.[13] Identities areformed through symbolic systems of representation and are part of the “continuous‘play’ of history, culture and power” through which we position ourselves and arepositioned within narratives of the past.[14] These identities have a direct or indirectinfluence upon Holocaust memorialization.[15] The campaign for a Holocaust memorialby the Board of Deputies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which resulted in theHyde Park memorial, is structured by the particular historical relationship between theBoard of Deputies—as the Anglo-Jewish ‘elite’—and the British State. This revolvesaround the negotiation between conceptions of ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Britishness’ withinthe assimilationist framework of British society. The starting point for this is that inorder to avoid antisemitism, the Jewish population must avoid attention as Jews.However, as Cooper and Morrison have argued:

[T]he freedom has a price. In that very gratitude of many Jews in this country is afeeling of otherness. Of not belonging. Of not quite being accepted. The hurt isaggravated by the fact that the very condition of the freedom is to keep quiet, notexpress the pain, not to be rude to the hosts. So the wound festers. . . . We have keptout heads down because it helped us survive. The problem for many Jews in Britainnow . . . is that we find it difficult to acknowledge when times have changed.[16]

One way in which the formations of the Anglo-Jewish community can be thought ofis using Jackson’s theory of ‘dual closure’.[17] The British State continually attempts tocreate and maintain a hegemony, attempting to make Jewish people and other immigrantsto Britain in their own image.[18] The Jewish elite, accepting the cultural norms of thedominant community, then assist this process by exerting power over both more recentJewish immigrants and others such as Jewish socialists. This process of assimilation isdirected at those who do not fit in with this world view, and who do not share similarsets of social, cultural, political and economic values as the Anglo-Jewish elite. AsCooper and Morrison have argued:

The British Jewish community deemed its relationship to the general society to begoverned by a form of contract, in reality informal but to the leading Jews having theforce of law. The terms of this contract were that the community was to forswear anynational qualities, and adhere to a definition of Jewishness as different only in itsreligious rituals and beliefs. In return, gentile society would award the Jews civicequality. As a result, the community felt that any deviation by them from this strictcontract . . . would result in British society likewise abrogating its side of the bargain,and removing the civic equality it had previously bestowed.[19]

A similar, though more nuanced, interpretation of this relationship gives the Jewishelite a more proactive role in the construction of their identity and their strategies forcoming to terms with living in Britain. Thus a ‘hard fought struggle’ for acceptancewithin wider British society was threatened by the appearance of a more distinctive‘other’, for example the culturally distinct Jews from Eastern Europe, who arrived inlarge numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century.[20] The Anglo-Jewishcommunal leadership attempted to inculcate both more recent Jewish immigration andthe Jewish working-class with their values in order to maintain and stabilize the socialstructure and their acceptance within British society, which they perceived as resting

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on adopting the social, cultural, economic and political traditions of middle-classBritons.

Attempts at public Holocaust memorialization in Britain have thus proved contentiousfor the Anglo-Jewish communal elite. If the dominant discourse of ‘keeping one’s headdown’ is pursued to its logical conclusion, nothing that disrupts the image of theassimilated Anglo-Jew can be attempted. From this perspective, public Holocaustmemorialization identifies Jews in other than religious terms, threatening, in the mindsof the Jewish elite, to negate the assimilationist contract with the British state. Thiscould be one reason why much Holocaust memorialization by the Anglo-Jewishcommunity has occurred within private religious Jewish spaces such as cemeteries andsynagogues.[21] The convoluted campaign which resulted in the Hyde Park Holocaustmemorial shows how these discourses combined with themes of the exclusivity of Britishwar memory and perceived dichotomies between Judaism and Christianity and whichresulted in a complex landscape of identity and memory.

“Di Kalleh is zu shoin . . .”[22]

On July 3, 1979, during a meeting of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture inGeneva, the prominent Holocaust Historian, Yehuda Bauer remarked that:

In Britain, nothing at all has been done, and there exists it appears, an opposition onthe part of the older generation in the Jewish community to introducing educationalprogrammes specifically on the Holocaust.

Greville Janner, recently elected President of the Board of Deputies, wrote to Baueron July 24, professing himself “amazed” at the remarks. He listed the achievements ofthe Yad Vashem Committee of the Board of Deputies (YVC hereafter), including thecollection of Holocaust survivor testimony, the publication of Gilbert’s schoolbook TheHolocaust, and future plans for “a national Holocaust Memorial in the centre ofLondon”.[23]

In fact, Janner had already started to rectify the absence of a physical memorialshortly after Bauer’s remarks. He had written to Michael Heseltine, then Secretary ofState for the Environment, on July 16 asking for a site in the Jewel House Gardensopposite the Victoria Tower of the House of Lords.

An interesting scene can be imagined when Janner and Heseltine first met about theproject. Heseltine saw the memorial as a ‘problem’ within the context of the discursiveframework of Anglo-Jewish identity and their relationship with the State: i.e. anymemorial seen as a ‘Jewish’ memorial would be desecrated because it was a Jewishmemorial.[24]

Despite agreeing to Janner’s proposition, Heseltine’s response was situated with thediscursive framework of the relationship between the British State and Anglo-Jewry.Rather than seeing potential desecration in terms of the desecrators’ intolerance ofdifference, Heseltine saw Anglo-Jewry’s insistence on remembering as the problem.Janner recalls that Heseltine asked him whether he knew that this project would be a“provocation” and inquired about the strategy that the Board of Deputies would takeif the memorial were damaged in any way. Janner’s reply was that he knew that it wasa provocative gesture and that if it were attacked, the Board of Deputies would followthe same strategy as ever when dealing with antisemitism: ignore it.[25]

In the author’s opinion a more appropriate place for a British Holocaust memorialthan the Jewel House Gardens would be hard to find. It would have been a provocative

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gesture, disrupting the imperial landscape of state and nation. The Holocaust monumentwould have made an uneasy backdrop for the television interviews of politicians thatare commonly carried out in this area at the present time. The thought of a ministerof state talking about (say) the 1996 Immigration Act is rather an interesting one tocontemplate with a Holocaust monument, even a restrained and simple one, loominglarge in the background.

However, the site was rejected by Heseltine, as it was considered “one of the fewremaining sites close to the Palace of Westminster which might provide a location fora Parliamentary or State memorial in the future”.[26] Two further sites were thensuggested by Heseltine in the letter. One site was in Whitehall and therefore “the closeproximity of the Cenotaph would, of course call for very simple, restrained treatment”.The second site was on the river frontage of Lambeth Palace towards Victoria Gardensand the Palace of Westminster, where “[t]he openness of the site should guard againstpossible defacement”.[27]

These two sites and the way in which Heseltine defined the appropriate memorialfor each summarized clearly the attitude of the State towards any Holocaust me-morialization in the UK. The distancing of the Holocaust from the official history ofBritish involvement in World War II is continued with the call for a ‘restrained’memorial near the Cenotaph that would not intrude upon this sacred national space.In the second of Heseltine’s suggestions, the conception of any confrontation withHolocaust memory as problematic necessitated a location suitable for public surveillance.

Janner accepted the Whitehall site, announcing the project at a Board of Deputies’meeting in October 1979. At the meeting he stated that he had written to the Secretaryof State for the Environment “on behalf of the Board and the Community . . . [who]offered us the finest and most profoundly appropriate site in Britain for that purpose—inWhitehall, almost immediately opposite the Cenotaph”.[28] In the address Janner echoedHeseltine about the need for restraint being so close to the Cenotaph but also highlightedthe need for educational projects. This was possibly an attempt to placate the YVC,who wanted an educational institution to perpetuate Holocaust memory, and whoseideological differences as to the best way to memorialize the Holocaust will be examinedbelow.

The discursive mimicry employed by Janner can be viewed on two levels. It may bean indication that those involved with planning the memorial were adopting thedominant discourse in order to get the memorial that they wanted. In other words,Janner agreed with Heseltine’s wish for a “simple” and “restrained” monument in orderto obtain, at the cost of compromise, a mnemonic site dedicated to the Holocaust.However, this echoing can also be viewed as consistent with the historic strategy of theAnglo-Jewish elite of avoiding attention as Jews outlined above.

Johnson, writing about the conjunction of interests that attempted to memorializethe centenary of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, maintained that:

it is evident that at particular historical moments one vision can acquire hegemonicstatus, albeit momentarily, even when the processes involved in such a creation aremultivocal and fragmented.[29]

In the case of the Whitehall memorial, Janner tried to produce such a hegemony byannouncing the creation of a formal committee, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation(HMF), to oversee the project. The HMF comprised of a number of high profile peoplefrom both the Jewish and non-Jewish community including Sir Sigmund Sternberg, thechair of the committee, and the Rt Hon. Merlyn Rees MP, former Home Secretary.

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Given the historic ambivalence and often hostility of the part of some Christian groupsto Holocaust memorialization, he also attempted to secure the formal co-sponsorshipof the memorial from the Council of Christians and Jews (hereafter CCJ).[30] However,reaction to the public announcement of the memorial campaign highlighted the prob-lematic nature of creating such a consensus.

The reaction of the British press to the announcement of the Whitehall Memorialproject was muted. The Guardian reported that “the Board of Deputies of British Jews[was] to erect its own cenotaph in Whitehall as a monument to victims of Nazioppression”.[31] The reply to counteract the perceived impression of the memorial as aJewish one was swift. The Venerable Carlyle Witton-Davis, a member of the HMF andalso the vice president of the CCJ, wrote to The Guardian stating that

The proposal for a new war memorial in London is not to commemorate simply thesix million Jews who met their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers [sic], but also the fivemillion who suffered a similar horror but who belonged to other faiths.[32]

The Daily Telegraph reported that at a lunch to mark the launch of the proposal,Heseltine was asked by members of the Board of Deputies whether any money wouldbe coming from Government to support the memorial. Heseltine replied “No. If amemorial like this cannot attract enough private support it is not worth erecting in thefirst place”. He was “warmly applauded” by the people at the lunch.[33] The JC reporteda “London Memorial for the 11 million people, including six million Jews, who perishedin the Holocaust is to be erected on a site opposite the Cenotaph in Whitehall”, alongwith a picture of the proposed site of the “simple and restrained memorial”.

Other reactions reflected the wide range of opinion on the Holocaust Memorial,from complete support to complete condemnation. Two representatives of the Women’sCampaign for Soviet Jewry organization were “delighted to read the report [in the JC]of the memorial. . .. We hope that it will remind all who pass of the martyrs who diedat that time”.[34] The “lunatic fringe” also had their say, with both Janner and the CCJreceiving postcards from a W.J. Whitehead, accusing them of

cynical exploitation of the non-mainstream population in Germany, 40 plus years ago,to promote racist, violent Zionism now. (Witness ‘Israeli’ policies.) (sic). . . The worldneeds peace; please dissociate yourself from these selfish gimmicks.[35]

At a time when anti-Israeli sentiment was running high, the surprising thing withrespect to public reaction to the announcement of the memorial is not that it promptedsuch a response, but that there was so little reaction, either for or against the memorial.Again, this is an indication of British society’s interest in the Holocaust at that time.

Meanwhile a number of rows were brewing behind the scenes that would ultimatelylead to the break-up of the alliance that came together for the memorial. The formationof the HMF had been announced at the October 1979 meeting of the Board of Deputiesat which the Venerable Carlyle Witton-Davies, a member of the executive council ofthe CCJ, gave his full support to the project. In addition, individual members of theCCJ were supporters of the memorial and were members of the HMF. However, theannouncement of the proposed memorial was made without any prior formal con-sultation with the CCJ and its various committees. The CCJ was described as being ina state of “embarrassment and disarray because a public announcement was madebefore any discussion had taken place in any of our committees” and as an organizationfound itself “committed to something that [it could not] fully support”.[36] The CCJ

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was “deeply and conscientiously divided, not only among Christians but among membersof the Jewish community”.[37]

This can be understood within the context of the CCJ’s principal rational. Althoughduring the 1970s and 1980s the range of CCJ activities continued to expand and involveprojects that would promote interfaith understanding, its main concern was, as it hadbeen at its founding in the 1950s, the combating of antisemitism. However, the set ofdiscourses that maintained that any public articulation of the Jewish particularity ofthe Holocaust would inevitably lead to a rise in antisemitism continued. This attitudewas common among the senior officials of the CCJ and this made the organization’sinvolvement with the campaign problematic. The memorial in Whitehall, publiclyunderstood as a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, would, according tothis discursive framework, promote antisemitism. The campaign therefore conflictedwith the central aim of the organization, which was to fight antisemitism.

Internal conflicts were also present within the Board of Deputies. These centred on themost appropriate way to memorialize the Holocaust in order to ensure its continuedmemory. In ideological terms, there was a split between those who wanted a physicalmemorial, and those who wanted a ‘living memorial’ in the form of an educational resourcesuch as a museum. Although not exclusively so, this was a debate between the HMF thatwas set up for the purpose of erecting the memorial and the YVC who had been workingin the field of Holocaust education for a number of years.[38]

One member of the YVC at that time suggests that Janner set up the HMF almostwithout realising that the YVC had been working on memorializing the Holocaust forsome time albeit in a different way. Although this can hardly be the case, it does showthe depth of feeling within the YVC who reacted with “consternation” when they heardthe HMF was being formed.[39] It also shows the lack of a consensus on this issue.Although the YVC had proposed a memorial to the ‘Martyrs of the Holocaust’, themain ideological thrust of the committee was educational including the funding of afellowship at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies at Yarnton Manorrather than physical memorials per se.[40] The suspension of YVC funding initiatives inFebruary 1980 at the personal request of Greville Janner to help the HMF with itsunsuccessful funding drive further aggravated the differences.

Although there were some in the committee who supported the idea of a memorial,many felt that it would be a financial threat to the educational work that the YVCwere involved in. An indication of this is the motion put forward by the chair at theApril 1980 meeting of the YVC. At this time the HMF still had no official confirmationof the site for the memorial and was still awaiting Charitable Trust status. The motionwas to the effect that “if by October there is no clearer indication of how or when themoney will materialise, then we should re-commence our own fund-raising”. The motionwas carried unanimously. The committee was also reminded by one of its membersthat “it is our function to educate and teach the Holocaust not to concern ourselveswith the memorial”.[41]

The forming of a separate committee by Janner may have been the result of arealization that for the project to have any chance of succeeding, a number of actorshad to be assembled with enough political and symbolic capital to ‘sell’ the idea to theGovernment and to the Jewish community. The national profile of the YVC was low,whereas a number of members of the HMF were household names, including a formerHome Secretary. To legitimate further the claim for a memorial it was also felt necessaryto have the backing of the presidents of the CCJ: the Archbishop of Canterbury, theChief Rabbi, the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the

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Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council and the Catholic Archbishop ofWestminster.

However, as well as being presidents of the CCJ, the Archbishop of Canterbury,along with the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and theModerator of the Free Church Federal Council, were also presidents of anotherorganization called the British Council of Churches (BCC). The hope that majorChristian figures in Britain including the Archbishop of Canterbury would give theirsupport to the memorial and attend the dedication ultimately failed due to a numberof pressures and ideological conflicts that were present in the BCC. First, the memorialwas seen as a “rallying point for the forces of good and the forces of evil”.[42] It wastherefore feared that neo-fascist activity that was prevalent in the UK at that timewould use the memorial as a focus. Also the geo-political context in the Middle Eastcannot be ignored. The BCC was at that time a constituent part of the World Councilof Churches (WCC) and was therefore allied to the Middle East Council of Churches.The BCC at that time had “a problem with Zionism”.[43] The continued political unrestin the Middle East with the Israeli–Arab conflict either covertly or overtly ongoingmeant that the advisory group of the BCC did not want to embarrass their presidentsby advising them to be involved with a project that they could not support for ideologicalreasons. There is some indication that Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterburyat that time, had sympathies with the call for a memorial. However, the refusal of theBCC in March 1980 to give their backing to the project was couched in terms of theneed for reconciliation and the “healing of the European psyche” and implicitly thatthe Holocaust memorial would hinder that reconciliation.

There were also indications that sections of the Christian community were beginningto think in terms of their own ‘guilty history’ about the treatment of the Jews inEurope.[44] In the same letter suggesting that the Holocaust memorial would damagethe reconciliation of Europe was also an admission that “there is no lack of shameamong us at the appalling atrocities committed so recently in the midst of what wasonce described with pride as European civilisation”.[45] It could be suggested thereforethat another reason why the BCC refused their support was the desire not to have thisrole exposed by the questions that a memorial would necessarily provoke.[46]

With the benefit of hindsight, Janner believes that the Holocaust Memorial projectwould have stood a greater chance of success if he had not announced the memorialat such an early stage.[47] With the project in its infancy, it gave oppositional forcesfrom both within and without the Jewish community to disrupt this hegemony andconstruct a counter argument as to why the Whitehall site was not an appropriate placefor remembering the Holocaust. Such opposition came from a number of differentsources but all were concerned overtly with the desecration of sacred space. This tookthe form of the argument that any memorial to the Holocaust would immediately bedestroyed or damaged in some way by neo-fascists and would also “open the floodgates” to other memorials in Whitehall. The centrality of the Cenotaph and the heroicversion of British history in World War II were also perceived to be damaged by theirassociation with a Holocaust Memorial and other memorials that were thought boundto follow.[48]

The dilution of sacred memorial space

The Whitehall Cenotaph has long been recognized as one of the defining mnemonicsites of British war memory.[49] Designed by Sir Edward Lutyens, a temporary wooden

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structure was placed in Whitehall in 1919, as part of the Victory Parade to mark theend of World War II. The increasing number of wreathes that accumulated at the baseof the memorial testified to its growing importance in the minds of the British public.It was declared “the only monument in London which passers-by naturally and of theirown accord salute”.[50]

From its very inception, however, the Cenotaph was also part of the construction ofthe memory of the Great War in ‘racial’ terms. As Kushner has argued, the 1919Victory parade was an exclusive space of white remembrance of the war, interesting“for those who were not allowed to take part”.[51] Black troops were not included inthe parade, but the exclusive nature of the remembrance ritual was not just limited toskin colour. The victory march route through South London was chosen above onethrough the East End as this area, the Cabinet suggested, was populated by “foreigners”,i.e. Jews, who were represented in contemporary discourses as disloyal and subversive.[52]

Understanding the centrality of the Cenotaph to British war memory and itsconstruction as an exclusive space is crucial in understanding the reactions to theproposal to build a Holocaust memorial nearby. During the debates surrounding theproposal for a Holocaust monument in Whitehall, the relationship between the Jewishfate and the British war dead was called into question. Identification on national ratherthan religious grounds is clearly shown by one prominent Jewish member of the CCJwho “objected very much to there being anything facing the Cenotaph, which is thememorial to the fallen of our country in World Wars One and Two” (emphasis added).A prominent Christian member threatened to resign if the memorial was placed “nextto the Cenotaph (which after all, commemorates all British subjects regardless of Creedwho died in the war) . . . [it was] bound to cause some offence”.[53]

Although not divided strictly along religious lines the refusal of the BCC to give itsbacking to the project fuelled frustration among members of the HMF. The need forconsensus was so great that one member of the HMF recommended scrapping thephysical memorial unless unequivocal support from the Presidents of the CCJ wasforthcoming. With the BCC’s refusal to sanction the memorial and therefore theArchbishop of Canterbury receiving contradictory advice from the BCC and CCJ, thedecision was taken that in order to avoid any embarrassment to the Archbishop ofCanterbury and to the other presidents, the CCJ should withdraw its formal co-sponsorship of the HMF. In any case, permission for the memorial to be situatedwithin Whitehall was withdrawn by the Government in December 1980, ostensibly forsecurity reasons.[54] At that time it was announced that the Government was offering asite in one of the Royal Parks for the establishment of a ‘garden of remembrance’.

The memorial now became solely a Board of Deputies initiative but the internaldebates over the appropriate way to memorialize the Holocaust prompted the formationof an even smaller group allied to Janner within the Jewish community. The chair ofthe Holocaust Memorial Committee (HMC)—as it was now known—was ArnoldMorris, a man who, according to Janner, provided most of the money and believedthat an odd number was required for any committee and that three was too many!The architect commissioned to design the garden was Richard Seifert, the internationallyrenowned architect and designer of, inter alia, the National Westminster Tower inLondon.[55]

On March 22, 1983, Neil MacFarlane, Environment Under-Secretary, announced inthe House of Commons that there would be such a memorial next to an area calledthe Dell near the eastern edge of the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park. The Daily Telegraphreported that a “memorial garden to the 11 million victims of the Nazi holocaust willbe created”. This time, however, although the garden was purportedly to remember all

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Figure 1. The Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial Garden.

11 million victims it would be a Jewish initiative with the “few thousand pounds” thatthe memorial would cost being provided by “prominent British Jews”.[56]

The issue of an appropriate inscription for the memorial provoked a dilemma forMorris, Janner and Seifert. The official discourse surrounding the memorial representedit as a memorial to all the victims of the Holocaust. However, the tensions betweenthis and the private convictions of many within the Jewish community as to thespecificity of the Jewish experience was reflected in the lack of a figure to number thedead on the memorial. Janner himself believes that the Hyde Park Garden is a memorialto the victims of the Holocaust in the sense that the Jewish community understandsthe Holocaust: i.e. to the six million Jewish victims. The deliberate lack of a figure,however, leaves the memorial’s memory ambiguous, ready to be given meaning by therituals that have come to define it as a Jewish space.[57]

The definition of the mnemonic site as Jewish is also signified by the inscription onthe largest memorial stone. The words ‘Holocaust Memorial Garden’ are carved intothe face along with a verse from Lamentations in both Hebrew and English: “For theseI weep, streams of tears flow from my eyes because of the destruction of my people”(Figure 1).

Blending into the landscape: the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Garden

The ambiguity over who the memorial referenced continued during the dedicationceremony. The Government’s view and the official public discourse were that thememorial was to “commemorate the victims of all faiths” and this was reiterated atthe ceremony by Mr Patrick Jenkin, the newly appointed Secretary of State for theEnvironment. The delicate balance between the particularity of the Jewish Holocaustand the universal message was asserted, though, when he acknowledged that “[i]t isfitting that the Board should take the lead in this memorial” (emphasis added). It could

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only be ‘fitting’ if he considered that the Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaustand thus Jewish specificity within Holocaust memory was maintained. The delicatebalancing act to portray the Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial Garden as a monumentto all victims of the Holocaust, whilst at the same time maintaining the Jews as theprimary victims, was compromised, however, by a report in the JC. This described theHyde Park memorial as bringing Britain in line with other European capitals where“memorials to the six million victims of the Holocaust have existed for years”. [emphasisadded][58]

A number of continuing themes run through the public and private communicationon the dedication service. Underpinning the memory of the Holocaust at this time wasan understanding of the particularity of the Jewish experience as the primary victimsof the Holocaust. This proved problematic for the main actors within the campaignfor the monument, all leading Anglo-Jews, who were operating within a strategicframework of assimilation and non-particularity. The continuing references to theblending in of the memorial garden with the Hyde Park landscape is indicative of thesetensions. Arnold Morris, the chair of the appeals committee, wrote in the promotionalbooklet commemorating the dedication ceremony that “[t]his simple modest project—blending into the area of park land much used and enjoyed by the public—will serveas a dignified and permanent reminder of vast and devastating past tragedy”. GrevilleJanner in a speech at the luncheon after the dedication ceremony suggested that thememorial will “blend into the park and into the lives and memories of Britain’s people,Jews and non-Jews alike”. However, elsewhere in the same speech, the memorial wasalso supposed to “cry out to all those who love their liberty”, and would be “not onlya reminder of past tragedy, but a flare of warning for the future, to extremists whowould destroy the Jewish community”.[59]

Many of these discourses were echoed in the reaction to the dedication ceremonywhich was mainly couched in terms of the visibility of the memorial and how appropriateit was for the purpose of memorializing (on the whole) the Jewish Holocaust. A G.N.Leigh wrote to Janner after the service to congratulate him on the success of the event.

It was a most moving experience at Hyde Park today, and those present could not havefailed to have been moved by the emotions of those who were attending. The gardenlooked beautiful and tranquil with the memorial stone itself beautifully set into itsnatural surroundings.[60]

However more typical of those who wrote to the JC was another, who, although“deeply moved” by the ceremony, wondered

if people passing by next week, next year and next century will understand that therock commemorates the heinous murder of six million Jews by the Nazis in the war of1939–45. . .. [the inscription will only] serve to remind those who know already, will notinform the uninformed.

In replying to this, Greville Janner seemingly deliberately missed the point hoping toavoid continuation of the debate, repeating that “soon, when the turf has been giventime to settle, the fence will be down and the site will blend into the park”.[61]

Letters were also received from some that felt that the aesthetics of the memorialwere inappropriate for such a theme. One suggested that, “[w]ith due respect to Mr.Seifert [the architect], I cannot help feeling that an artist who passed through Auschwitzmight have added something that his memorial is lacking”. Another felt more strongly,

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thinking that the memorial was “unworthy”, comparing the memorial garden un-favourably to the Cavalry Memorial also in Hyde Park, with its “simple but dignifiedbrass epitaph”. When it came to the memorial for

millions of my Jewish heritage who suffered horrors beyond human endurance, I wasashamed for British Jewry. Who had the audacity to stick up a huge ugly stone, witha few ill-written words that could hardly be seen to be read?

The following week another visitor to the memorial after the dedication was “frustrated”with what she saw and demanded a plaque stating “[t]his Garden is a memorial to allvictims of the Holocaust”, and also in a stinging attack on the Board of Deputiessuggested that a fund should be set up for such a plaque “if the Board [of Deputies]can’t afford it”:

I realise that in a few years, when the garden is mature, it could look very beautiful,but by that time the memorial inscription will be even less visible than it is now. PossiblyMr Seifert, the architect, saw some deep symbolic meaning in the pile of rock, but hewill likely be the only one.[62]

Arnold Morris, the Chair of Holocaust Memorial Committee, replied that, whateverform the memorial had taken, it would not have pleased everybody but that “mostpeople who have visited it, regard it as worthy, dignified and especially in the setting,very beautiful”.[63]

This raises a further issue concerning Holocaust memorialization more generally: theseeming incongruity between a Holocaust monument located in a ‘beautiful gardensetting’ but which references a set of events and places which can be described as theanus mundi. In the case of Segal’s Holocaust monument in San Francisco, Young hassuggested that the relationship between monument and setting is “an ironic perversionof pastoral oft noted by [Holocaust] survivors”.[64] Segal himself maintained that the“contrast may in itself speak volumes—about the beauty of the world and the darkunderside of human nature”.[65] The outcome will not solely be a representation of“agony in paradise” but will have profound effects for the meaning of the monumentitself. Thus,

in such a context, the figures see to refer neither to their material, nor to themselves. . . instead, they are drawn outside themselves by the landscape, becoming less aboutthemselves than part of their surroundings.[66]

This is also true of the Hyde Park Memorial Garden. The monument, in both itsnaturalistic design and the way in which it is shrouded by birch trees, does ‘blend’ intothe environment.[67] Instead of being a stark reminder of past tragedy, the monumentbecomes a secluded secret garden. The “agony in paradise” within is the conflictsurrounding Anglo-Jewish identity, between ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Englishness’, and betweencommemoration of the Holocaust and a wish to keep the difficult issues raised by suchcommemoration hidden away from prying eyes.

The most telling reference to the memorial came from someone invited to attend thededication ceremony, but who was unable to locate the ceremony in Hyde Park thatday.

I received an invitation. . .to attend the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Garden.I searched for 30 minutes opposite Albert Gate, and Rotten Row which was the totalinformation given, without any success whatsoever in finding the site, and then gaveup. There were dozens like me, similarly searching.[68]

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The logical conclusion to a memorial that is designed to blend into the landscape isthat it should not be identifiable as itself. In other words the construction of the HydePark Holocaust Memorial Garden in terms of its material location and the discoursesarticulated by Janner, Morris and others at the time of its dedication, point to theconclusion that the memorial is meant not to be prominent. Within this, the form of thecentral arrangement of rocks is also crucial. Many believed that the stones came fromthe Death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, whereas it is actually granite from an unspecifiedlocation in the North of England. The use of this type of rock is significant on anumber of different levels. Granite was chosen as it is hard-wearing and thereforedifficult to damage. A further significance in choosing granite as opposed to (say) thePortland stone which is typical of monuments in the UK is that the memorial gardendoes not look like a typical British war monument, and its naturalistic form blends intothe landscape in a way that a carved monument of Portland Stone like the Cenotaphcan not.[69]

This memorial strategy is in contrast to that adopted by a number of artists inGermany, where many memorial designers seek to confront the viewer with their starkand imposing memorials. This is in part due to a need to reflect the memory of theGerman people as ‘perpetrators’, whereby the usual form of heroic sculpture is deemedinappropriate to memorialize the ‘crime’. The resultant ‘anti-monuments’ are a breakwith memorial tradition, designed both to reference loss as well as to continue discussionover the most appropriate way to memorialize the Holocaust.[70] The Vietnam Memorialin Washington achieves the same thing. It is a ‘scar’ on the landscape that will neverbe healed. The Hyde Park memorial is designed explicitly to deflect such discussion,becoming indistinct as it merges into the English landscape.

Conclusions: a secret garden

In reviewing the campaign by the Board of Deputies for a Holocaust memorial inLondon in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this paper has examined the ways in whichthe spatial construction of the memorial landscape structures, and is in turn structuredby, the contestation between memory and identity. It has highlighted the way in whichmemory of the Holocaust is mediated through the complex set of relationships betweenAnglo-Jewry and wider British society and has detailed the sometimes acrimoniousdebates over whether Britain needed a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and,if so, where the appropriate site for such a memorial might be. The Whitehall projectultimately failed because of the inability of the Board of Deputies to maintain thefragile hegemony of the idea for a monument near the Cenotaph. The failure of thishegemony was precipitated by the way in which memories of the Holocaust conflictedwith a number of discourses including the heroic and exclusive memory of Britain’srole in World War II and the supposed dichotomy between the perception of ‘Christian’forgiving and forgetting as opposed to ‘Jewish’ memory and revenge.

The relationship between Anglo-Jewish identity and Holocaust remembrance isnegotiated through the ambiguity that lies at the heart of the Holocaust MemorialGarden. The lack of a number of victims on the monument leaves it open to interpretationand reinterpretation through the ritual that use it as its focus.[71] Through these rituals,the monument is constructed as a private space of Jewish memory that is effectivelyhidden from the view of the (non-Jewish) passer by. What would have been a conspicuousmonument in a central site of British war memory, near the Cenotaph, became anunobtrusive and marginal monument in Hyde Park. The site only becomes distinct at

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certain points in the year when the garden is the focus of ritual. The result has been amemorial that has indeed, as Janner and Morris argued, ‘blended’ into the landscapeand points to the ontological framework of Anglo-Jewry as much as it does theHolocaust.

Department of GeographyUniversity of HullHull HU6 7RXUK

AcknowledgementsI am grateful to Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education for a fully fundedPh.D. studentship, during which time this research was undertaken, and to the Dudley StampMemorial Fund for financial assistance to visit the Holocaust landscapes of Poland. I also wishto thank Andrew Charlesworth, Caroline Mills and Tony Kushner for their help, support andcomments on earlier drafts.

Notes[1] See Yad Vashem (UK) Committee minutes (Hereafter YV(UK)C minutes), Board of Deputies

of British Jews, 27/6/83.[2] P. Nora, Between memory and history: les lieux de memoire, Representations 26 (1989) 7.[3] A. Hussyen, Monument and memory in a postmodern age. In J. E. Young, (Ed.), The Art

of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York 1994). For example see P. Voekel,Peeing on the palace: bodily resistance to Bourbon reforms in Mexico City, Journal ofHistorical Sociology 5 (1992) 183–208.

[4] N. C. Johnson, Sculpting heroic histories: celebrating the centenary of the 1798 rebellion inIreland, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19 (1994) 78–93.

[5] Among many examples are: D. Harvey Monument and myth, Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers 69 (1989) 362–81; J. Monk, Gender in the landscape: expression ofpower and meaning, in K. Anderson and F. Gale (Eds), Inventing Places: Studies in CulturalGeography (Melbourne 1992); N. C. Johnson, Cast in stone: monuments, geography andnationalism, Environment and Planning D; Society and Space 13 (1995) 51–65; and R. Peet,A sign taken for history: Daniel Shay’s memorial in Petersham, Massachusetts, Annals ofthe Association of American Geographers 86 (1996) 21–43.

[6] M. Heffernan, For ever England: The Western Front and the politics of remembrance inBritain, Ecumene 2/3 (1995) and M. S. Morris, Gardens ‘Forever England’: landscape,identity and the First World War British cemetaries on the Western Front, Ecumene 4 (1997)410–34.

[7] J. E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven 1993);M. Samuels, The biography of landscape, in D. M. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation ofOrdinary Landscapes (Oxford 1979) 53.

[8] Young, Texture of Memory, 14.[9] T. Cole and G. Smith, Ghettoization and the Holocaust: Budapest 1944, Journal of Historical

Geography 21 (1995) 300.[10] See also A. Charlesworth, Historical geographies of Shoah, Journal of Historical Geography

18 (1992) 464–9; A. Charlesworth, Contesting places of memory: the case of Auschwitz,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 (1994) 579–94, and D. Clarke et al., Thecritical geopolitics of extreme events: geography, Holocaust, media. Paper presented at the‘Critical Geographies III’ session of the AAG Conference, San Francisco (1994).

[11] J. E. Young, Interpreting literary testimony: a preface to rereading Holocaust diaries andmemoirs, New Literary History 18 (1986) 104.

[12] See H. Cooper and P. Morrison, A Sense of Belonging. Dilemmas of British Jewish Identity(London 1991); S. Brook, The Club. The Jews of Modern Britain (London, Sydney andAuckland 1989); J. Webber (Ed.), Jewish Identities in the New Europe (Oxford 1994); T.

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Kushner (Ed.), The Jewish Heritage in British History. Englishness and Jewishness (London1992).

[13] K. Woodward (Ed.), Identity and Difference (London 1997).[14] Ibid., 23.[15] See T. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History

(Oxford 1994).[16] Cooper and Morrison, op. cit., 63–4.[17] P. Jackson, Maps of Meaning (London 1989).[18] Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, op. cit.[19] Cooper and Morrison, op. cit., 72, emphasis added.[20] P. Johnson, A History of the Jews (London 1987).[21] However, this does not mean that every episode of memorialization will follow these

discursive formations. For example, the Szmul Zygielbojm memorial plaque campaignoriginated from within the Jewish Socialist Group and therefore was informed by particularideological positions, both with respect to who was being remembered and how this wasattempted.

[22] This is a Yiddish saying meaning literally “The Bride is too pretty” or that something istoo good to be true. Rabbi Hugo Gryn, personal communication (5/2/96).

[23] The Yad Vashem Committee of the Board of Deputies was set up in 1977 at the instigationof the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. The committee’s aims were extensive including,inter alia, to promote commemoration, education, research, and to collect testimony.Lewis to Board of Deputies 19/3/78 YV(UK) archives. The context of the planning andimplementation of the memorial was crucial. Although it is impossible to reconstruct exactlythe motivations and influences of the people involved, a number of events both withinHolocaust memorialization and in the wider political context cannot have failed to have animpact on those involved. The first and perhaps the most important is United States’President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust, inaugurated in 1978. In October1979, two weeks before Janner’s announcement of the HMF, Carter received the re-commendations of the Commission which were that a living memorial was to be set up inWashington at an estimated cost of US$50 million, together with the establishment of aday of remembrance. The apparent success of Holocaust memorialization in the USA wherethese moves gave State recognition to the victims of the Holocaust was in direct contrastto the many failed attempts in the UK.

[24] Janner, personal communication, 23/11/95.[25] Ibid. Contrary to this statement, Janner himself is perhaps an exception. He has been very

vocal on Jewish issues both during and since his time in Parliament, most notably throughhis role as chair of the Holocaust Education Trust on issues such as the repayment of goldstored in Swiss, American and British banks to Holocaust survivors (see JC throughoutMay and June 1997).

[26] See letter from Heseltine to Janner 20/9/79 YV(UK)C Archives. The site is occupied by asculpture by Henry Moore in bronze called ‘knife edge’. The exact timing of the placementof the sculpture in the Jewel House Garden is unknown, although it was completed in 1965and may well have been placed before the discussions surrounding the Holocaust Memorial.

[27] Ibid., emphasis added.[28] See Daily Telegraph, 23/10/79.[29] Johnson, Sculpting heroic Histories, 79.[30] The CCJ was founded in 1942 with the aims of combating all forms of discrimination and

the fostering of co-operation between Christians and Jews. See M. Braybrooke, Children ofOne God: A History of the Council of Christians and Jews (London 1991).

[31] Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 260: emphasis in Kushner.[32] The Guardian, Letters 24/10/79.[33] See Daily Telegraph, 23/10/79.[34] See JC, Letters 2/11/79.[35] In response to Whitehead’s postcard to them suggesting that the “ ‘political’ action [of

supporting a memorial] was ultra vires your ‘charity’ ”, the CCJ wrote asking the advice ofthe Board of Deputies as to the best way to handle it. The reply, “ignore completely”, isindicative of the response of the Anglo-Jewish community to the threat of antisemitism.Council for Christians and Jews Papers (hereafter CCJ papers) 9/85, file 2, Hartley Library,Southampton University.

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[36] Letter written by Jennings to Marcus [Braybrooke?], 30/10/79. CCJ Papers 9/85, file 2.[37] See Jennings to Morgan 29/9/80. CCJ Papers 9/85, file 1. The sanitized history also removes

any mention of the somewhat acrimonious departure of Peter Jennings, the ExecutiveDirector of the CCJ until 1981. See CCJ papers 9/117.

[38] For example in 1979, the same year as the formation of the HMF, a YVC memo detailedsuggested activities for the coming year, and forcefully reflects the ideological emphasis ofthe committee. Out of the four suggestions, three were of an educational nature and thefourth headed ‘memorial’ dealt with a campaign for the collection of pages of testimonyand only the “consideration of the creation of a permanent memorial to the Martyrs of theHolocaust to be sponsored and dedicated by the Board of Deputies on behalf of BritishJewry and if possible unveiled by HM the Queen” (emphasis added). Frank Green toYV(UK) members, YV(UK)C archives 14/3/79.

[39] Peter Jennings, personal communication, 11/12/95.[40] See YV(UK)C Minutes 14/3/79.[41] See YV(UK)C Minutes 30/4/80. See also letter from Janner to Reiss (chair of YVC) 1/7/83.[42] Peter Jennings, personal communication, 11/12/95.[43] Ibid.[44] Many authors, most notably R. L. Rubenstein and J. K. Roth in Approaches to Auschwitz.

The Legacy of the Holocaust (London 1987), have argued that one of the preconditions ofthe Holocaust was two thousand years of Christian anti-Judaism.

[45] See Witton-Davis to Jennings (11/6/80). The Archbishop was worried that the memorialwould be seen to be a political project. Also see letter from Rev. Harry O’Morton (GeneralSecretary of the BCC) to Canon Douglas Webster, (Chair of CCJ Executive Committee andMember of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation. (4/3/80) CCJ Papers 9/85, file 1.

[46] Such discourses over the supposed difference between Jewish ‘revenge’ and Christian‘forgiveness’ surfaced again almost ten years later during the campaign to change legislationon war crimes trials. The Times commented that “Britain is a Christian country. Its lawsenshrine principals of justice tempered with mercy, not vengeance”. The campaign was seenby many to be the work of an active pro-Israel (therefore Jewish) lobby group. One MPwarned the Home Secretary to be “extremely wary on this particular issue and take noteof the fact that the supporters of this particular proposal are motivated not by justice, butby the demands of propaganda”. The campaign also prompted unease by some among theJewish Establishment who, like those who protested against the Whitehall memorial project,thought that an assertion of perceived ‘Jewish issues’ such as the War Crimes campaignwould only cause antisemitism. See D. Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain became aRefuge for Nazi War Criminals (London 1992) 210.

[47] Janner, personal communication, 23/11/95.[48] However, it should be remembered that the Cenotaph site does not represent a monolithic

British wartime memory. Although the centrality of the Cenotaph in the memory of Britainat war is hard to dispute, the number of rituals in the form of marches that already at thattime used, and continue to use, the Cenotaph as the focal point indicates the contestednature of such memory. Integrating the Cenotaph into a ritual is an attempt to appropriatewider narratives of Britain at war into particular political projects, be they those of theNational Front, the Anglo-Jewish community or the Gay and Lesbian community in theUK.

[49] P. Curtis, The Whitehall Cenotaph: an accidental monument, Imperial War Museum Review9 (1994) 31–41.

[50] Ibid., 37.[51] T. Kushner, Anti-Monument: The Holocaust and British History Denial (Mimeo, n.d.).[52] The debates over the ownership of the Cenotaph continue well into the present. In 1981,

debates over the appropriateness of the dress of the then leader of the Labour Party, MichaelFoot, masked deeper issues over the conflict between his right to speak for the workingclass and the Tory vision of a national past. A further indication as to the exclusiveness ofBritish war memory is referenced by the annual Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen andWomen’s parade of Remembrance. This occurs a week after the ‘national’ RemembranceDay Service which is held on the Sunday after the November 11. This is because the ChiefRabbi cannot be an active participant of a religious ceremony that is not multi-faith. Theceremony on Remembrance Sunday is exclusively Christian.

[53] Rothschild to Jennings (22/4/80), and de Juluate to Rothschild. CCJ Papers 9/85, file 2.

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[54] Kushner The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 338, and Janner, personal com-munication, 23/11/95.

[55] There is continuity here between earlier memorial attempts by the Anglo-Jewish community.The architectural firm Seifert and Partners were also involved with the ‘Permanent Memorialto the Jewish Victims of Nazism’ initiative of the late 1960s under the chair of Sir (laterLord) Barnett Janner MP, Greville’s father. See S. Cooke, The hidden landscapes of theHolocaust (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol 1998).

[56] Daily Telegraph, 23/3/83 ‘Holocaust Memorial Approved’.[57] Janner, personal communication, 23/11/95. See also Cooke op. cit.[58] JC 1/7/83 ‘Holocaust Garden Dedicated’.[59] See YV(UK)C minutes 27/6/83.[60] Leigh to Janner 27/6/83. YV(UK)C archives.[61] See Janner to JC 15/7/83.[62] See Letters page, JC 5/8/83 and Baum to the JC 12/8/83.[63] See Morris to JC 12/8/83.[64] For a set of images of Segal’s monument at the Legion of Honour in San Francisco, see

Young Texture of Memory, 311–8.[65] Ibid., 317.[66] Ibid.[67] So much so that when I first went to try and find it, I spent two hours searching, and passed

by within ten meters of it twice before finding it.[68] See Ruben to Pinner 28/6/83, YVC(UK) archives. Pinner’s reply expressed his sorrow that

Mr Ruben had missed “the impressive ceremony of dedication”.[69] The material form of the memorial garden also situates it within a Jewish memorial context.

As Young has suggested of the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, a piling of stonescan reference the gal-ed, a witness heap of stones which is the first monument mentionedin Genesis. It also references the Jewish custom of placing small stones on graves and othermemorial spaces as an act of witness. See Young, Texture of Memory.

[70] Ibid.[71] The Yom Ha’shoah ceremony, organized by Jewish organizations annually in April until

1997, reproduced the monument as an exclusive space of Jewish memory and mourning.With the move of the service to the more easily controlled space of Logan Hall, themonument, already unobtrusive, could in time become unused and forgotten.