‘Witnesses in uniform’: are Israeli defense forces officers in favor of their soldiers visiting Holocaust heritage sites in Poland?

ABSTRACT

The present exploratory qualitative study focuses on a unique heritage tourism experience – ‘Witnesses in Uniform’ – a journey to death camps and concentration camps in Poland for IDF (Israel Defense Forces) personnel. The results are based on 4 open interviews with the journey’s initiators followed by 24 semi-structured interviews with career officers (commissioned and non-commissioned). The findings indicate that the officers conceptualize the journey as a reward for their subordinates’ outstanding behavior, expecting this heritage tourist experience to affect both their functioning within the military as well as their overall involvement within civic society. The study highlights the use of heritage tourism as a tool for human-resource management, and adds a richer understanding of the role of heritage tourism in todays’ world.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• heritage tourism
• dark tourism
• Holocaust
• human-resource management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tali Applboim-Hazan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her theses focus on the ‘Journey to Poland’ as a tool for managing human resources in business and public organizations in view of the Managerial-Functionalistic and Neo-institutional theories.

Yaniv Poria is an Associate Professor at the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University. Prof. Poria holds a B.A. in Tourism and hospitality Management from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1997) and a PhD (2001) from the School of Management Studies for the Service Sector in Surrey University, Guildford.