Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations With the Genocide Dead

Abstract

Despite the scholarship on continuing bonds with the dead and the critique of pathologizing paradigms in trauma theory, little is known of the engagement between trauma descendants and relatives who perished prior to their birth. A sample of 55 Holocaust descendants was recruited in Israel to participate in semistructured ethnographic interviews. Descendants reported on the normalized presence of and engagement with the dead and the restoration of previously “discontinued” bonds. Findings were consistent with the scholarship on the therapeutic role of continuing bonds and with meta-analyses normalizing descendant psychosocial legacies. Jewish-Israeli paradigms of memory facilitated therapeutic bonds with the dead.

Acknowledgments

I thank Rob Whitely for his critical assistance and Laurence Kirmayer for our thought-provoking conversations. I also thank James Werth and the anonymous reviewers for their comments that greatly enriched the article. I express my gratitude to the descendants for allowing me to share in their memories.