Memorial Pilgrimage or Death Tourism? A Jewish Perspective

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

The promotion of and attraction to sites of violent death has been called by various names: “thanatourism” (based on the Greek root Thanatos, which is a personification of death), dark tourism, death tourism, grief tourism, trauma tourism, to name the most frequently used terms. In his seminal article, A. V. Seaton defines thanatourism as “travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death, which may, to a varying degree be activated by the person-specific features of those whose deaths are its focal objects.” See A. V. Seaton, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 240.

John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism (London: Continuum, 2000), 3.

See Brigitte Sion, “European Jewish Museums at a Turning Point,” Contact 17, no. 3 (Summer 2016).

Brigitte Sion, “A Survey of Jewish Museums in Europe” (London: Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, 2016), http://rothschildfoundation.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Jewish-Museums-in-Europe-Report.pdf.

See Failedmessiah.com.

See Jüdisches Museum Franken in Schwabach application.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brigitte Sion

Brigitte Sion, a guest researcher at the Global Studies Institute, University of Geneva, Switzerland, is an international expert on memorial sites, commemorative practices, death tourism, and historical museums particularly in Europe, Argentina, and Cambodia. Sion is the author of Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires: Balancing Memory, Architecture and Tourism, and editor of Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscapes.