Appointing Eitam threatens the future of Yad Vashem - opinion
Yad Vashem's staff includes people of diverse political, religious and social positions. And yet, it has never taken sides.
By YEHUDA BAUER, HAVI DREIFUSS, GUY MIRONEFFI EITAM’S worldview on history could also seriously damage Yad Vashem’s status and its ability to advance Holocaust research and commemoration.(photo credit: YOSSI ZELIGER/FLASH90)
The reports that Minister Ze’ev Elkin intends to nominate Efraim (Effi) Eitam to be chairman of Yad Vashem’s Directorate, to succeed the very successful 27-year tenure of Avner Shalev, are deeply disturbing.Eitam, a former high-ranking IDF officer with a well-deserved reputation for bravery, MK and minister, is obviously a politician and a political nominee. A person who is identified mainly as a politician of whatever hue is unsuited for the job. Yad Vashem never had a politician as its head, because it deals with the Holocaust, which has both Jewish and universal implications, in commemoration, education, and research.Yad Vashem has never taken any political position and its staff includes people of diverse political, religious and social positions. And yet, Yad Vashem has never taken sides. It has managed to keep out of this completely. This is not the time to break this tradition by nominating a political figure as its chairman.Moreover, Eitam has not retracted his past questionable statements, in which he described Israeli-Arabs as a threat similar to cancer, raised the option of expulsion of the majority of Arabs from Judea and Samaria in a future war, and considered future removal of Israeli-Arabs from the political system. A person advocating inequality and undemocratic views cannot be the head of an institution that commemorates the unprecedented genocide and the mass murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.Eitam’s worldview regarding history could also seriously damage Yad Vashem’s status and its ability to advance Holocaust research and commemoration. His understandings concerning what he calls blurred historical, cultural and national concepts, might mark Yad Vashem as being similar to some Eastern European institutions, which refer to history according to political trends and not as documented and researched.An Eitam’s Yad Vashem will be shunned, we can say with certainty, by academics and institutions, Jewish and non-Jewish, from all over the Western world. Many of them have already reacted, and we support our colleagues, here and abroad, among them the foremost experts on the Holocaust.If Eitam is nevertheless nominated, we will not resign from Yad Vashem, but will continue our professional work, free from politics, committed solely to the memory of the Holocaust and its commemoration.The prospect of this nomination has already caused damage. Were it to take place, it would be absolutely devastating and diminish Yad Vashem’s internationally acclaimed position as the premier repository of knowledge, research and education on the Holocaust.We call on the government to nominate a respected, nonpolitical, figure, who has a relevant connection to the subject of the Holocaust.Yehuda Bauer is professor (emeritus) of Holocaust studies, academic adviser to Yad Vashem and a member of the Israel Academy of Science. Havi Dreifuss is a Jewish history professor at Tel Aviv University and head of Yad Vashem’s center on the Holocaust in Poland. Guy Miron is vice president for academic affairs at the Open University of Israel and head of Yad Vashem’s center for research on the Holocaust in Germany.
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