Israel's Official Religion Is Not Judaism; It's the Holocaust
Source: haaretz.com
Contrary to what people think, the official religion of Israel is not the Jewish religion. Israel is certainly the state of the Jewish people, but its dominant religion is the religion of the Holocaust. It’s a full-scale religion, with its own rituals and holidays, numberless martyrs and a central pilgrimage site: namely, Auschwitz. Above all, as befits an established religion, it has its heretics and those who have not yet seen the light and need to be converted.
The heretics are not necessarily those who deny the Holocaust – those transgressors are subject to the punishments prescribed in the law. The heretics might be families and ordinary people living among us who, when the siren on Israel’s Holocaust Day blares, make it a point not to stand to attention. Still, their heresy bothers them and they shout angrily that they don’t feel like standing at attention in memory of the Ashkenazim who perished, and that their suffering, too – that is, of the Mizrahim, the Jews from Arab lands – should also be commemorated.
All this is portrayed in the subversive and terrifically witty episode that opens the second season of the fine television comedy-drama series “Zagouri Empire,” created by Maor Zagouri, a talented young screenwriter and director from Be’er Sheva.
In the first season, we learned about the falafel stand that the Zagouri family inherited from the mother’s father, and about how they were not enthusiastic about continuing to run the business. In the second season’s opener we see the family sitting with sour faces (sourest of all is the elderly grandmother) in the living room opposite the television, which is turned off, as this is the eve of Holocaust Day, and all the regular broadcasts are preempted.
But contrary to what we might expect, this is not your usual scene of Moroccan folklore, which derides the “primitiveness” or the supposedly tempestuous and irascible temperament of that ethnic group’s members. What we have is a completely normal family (there are tensions between its members, but that only adds to the normality) that feels that it has to protect itself in the face of some sort of external oppression, whose coerciveness it objects to and tries to break free of, though without noticeable success.
That oppression is the Holocaust. More precisely: the need to feel automatic solidarity with believers in what can be called the religion of the Holocaust.
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Read the rest: haaretz.com
