Traumatic Realism and Exhibition Design at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1953

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1953, the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz in Israel opened a new permanent Holocaust exhibition. Housed in the kibbutz’s museum, known as the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the exhibition was intended not just to serve the kibbutz population, most of whom were Holocaust survivors, but also to materialize their testimonies for the Israeli public in the then-absence of a national Holocaust museum in Israel. The exhibition at the Ghetto Fighters’ House found a form for early Holocaust memory in a dizzying, non-chronological exhibition that displayed controversial, even taboo, subjects through unflinching and unresolved realism. The young artist couple commissioned to design the exhibition, Hannah and Naftali Bezem, worked intensively for months, combing over photographs, ephemera, and other documents that would make up the bulk of the exhibition that opened on the tenth anniversary ceremony of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Bezems’ belief that, beyond its didactic potential, an exhibition must serve as a model of artistic activism to mobilize its viewers resulted in an unrelenting depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust through displays of photographic documentation, artifacts, artworks, and their own murals. This article argues that the content and design of the 1953 exhibition both served as a call to action to memorialize the Holocaust in Israel in the 1950s, and reflected the post-traumatic state of the kibbutz audience as well as the designers themselves, particularly after Naftali learned that his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz. Through this exhibition, the Ghetto Fighters’ House touched on the limits of Holocaust representation akin to what scholar Michael Rothberg has defined as traumatic realism.