The Guide with the Tourist Gaze: Jewish Heritage Travel to Poland

Abstract

Over the past three decades, travel to Poland for youth and young adults has become increasingly popular, to the extent that it is even seen as a “rite of passage”¹ for members of many Jewish communities. For these groups, the accompanying guides or educators are central to their educational experience. Based on a series of interviews with educational guides, this article sets out to understand the trips from the perspective of the guides. A deeper appreciation of the guiding experience—the guides’ goals and reflections—will enable a more holistic understanding of these trips.

Notes

¹ Term taken from Cohen and Noy (2006).

² In 1988 the Israeli Ministry of Tourism began offering a seven day trip to Holocaust-related sites in Poland. Participation has been increasing steadily. According to the Ministry of Tourism, between the years 2006–2010, approximately 114, 000, high school students made the journey.¹ In the Jewish diaspora, young students make this trip within various education and communal frameworks, the most notable being the annual March of the Living.¹ Organized educational programs have also been developed for Jewish adults, and organizations including the March of the Living have increasingly encouraged adult delegations to join the program. According to the March of the Living official website (http://motl.org/), over 200,000 people have participated in the March of the Living since Websites:its inception in 1988. http://cms.education.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/EDFB2F83-BA42-4706-A7D7-95638E02BB76/139930/Polin_takzir_sikum_f.pdf

³ It should be noted that the situations presented in this work relate to specific episodes or incidents, usually prominent or unusual moments, recalled by the guides as having impacted their guiding. There are, however, many other less dramatic moments which make up most of the guiding experience, and these also inform the guides’ responses. I would even suggest that these more usual and mundane “low moments,” are ones in which guides feel secure in their role as the guide. However, on every trip there are moments when their sense of mastery and position is challenged by survivors, participants, or other guides—including local Polish guides or Jewish educators working as guides, and they are called to look and experience the site in a different way. It is apparent from their interviews that there are some issues which remain unresolved for them educationally and which they are compelled to confront each time they visit the sites.

⁴ Rudolf Reder was one of the two survivors of Belzec and gave extensive testimony of the camp.

⁵ In contemporary liberal discourse, the Holocaust has been increasingly used as a symbol or icon of universalized suffering. While the universal messages of the Holocaust are the premise of many of these trips, seeking to empower students to confront and fight against contemporary prejudice and suffering, identification may lead to a lack of understanding of the event itself and flawed comparisons which reduce both historical events. David Lowenthal (2000) is critical of encouraging identification with historical events: “our hardest task as teachers is to keep antiquity accessible while emphasizing its ineffable strangeness. Such understanding requires not only empathy with the past but awareness of its unbridgeable difference. … Universals are historically trivial and reductive. Diversity constitutes the core of history” (p. 74).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Dr. Sharon Kangisser Cohen is the Academic Director of the Oral History Division of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. E-mail: [email protected]