For almost forty years, the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) has produced an annual Holocaust memorial ceremony in New York City. I first attended one of their events in 1981 at Temple Emanu-El on the upper east side. I do not remember the specifics of the program or the keynote speakers, or the prayers. What I remember is the experience of standing quietly in a crowd, lost in memory, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in late spring. There was a transit strike in the city and the subways were not running so I had to bicycle uptown fifty blocks. I was unable to get into the sanctuary which accommodates only 2500. I stood outside, together with thousands of other people gathered in the sidestreets which were blocked off for the occasion. We stood together, listening to the service broadcast over loud speakers. Around me, the faces, bodies, and heavily accented voices spoke of a world of experience and memories that I could not enter yet I shared this day with them, and this day I would remember. Public commemoration of the Holocaust is the ceremonial expression of a collective search for meaning in the past that in turn creates its own memories. Public events, in Pierre Nora's (1989) terms, are "lieux de memoires," material, functional and symbolic sites, crystallizing and transmitting memories from one generation to the next.

In 1989 I began to work part time in WAGRO's offices participating in the daily functions of the organization, which included preparations for their annual memorial ceremony. I had approached Mr. Meed, president of WAGRO, for an interview as part of my doctoral research on commemoration of the Holocaust in New York city. He, in turn, asked me if I could help them in the office. In this paper I present a history and analysis of WAGRO's public annual memorial ceremony. I examine the event on both diachronic and synchronic levels; any one of their performances is part of a cumulative process, an evolving performance, while the structure has become relatively stable and predictable. And I explore, what role does this ceremony play for the community that performs it? Or, put another way, what is being performed through this ceremony?

Collective Memory

Numerous scholars in a variety of disciplines have examined the relationship between memory and social identity. Maurice Halbwachs introduced the notion of a "collective memory" that emerges only in the presence of others within a social framework such as the family, the school, the synagogue, the military, or the state:

It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories (Halbwachs 1992:23).

Similarly, Bar-On's (1995) study of the transmission of Holocaust memories examines how social identity is formed through dialogues that occur within the family, the peer group, and meetings with the significant "other" of one's social, cultural context. No child is born into a vacuum, Arlene Cahn-Gordon reminds us in her sudy of self-disclosure among Holocaust survivors. The parents' war experiences are an important amd pervasive part of children of survivors' experience because their parents' words are the children's experience (Cahn-Gordon 1989:29). Self-disclosure, the acknowledgement of experience to oneself and others, includes two processes: the symbolizing of experience through verbal or nonverbal representations, and the naming of experience by linking internalized representations to words.

Public events, such as a ceremony, constitute a "public symbol system" (Ortner 1973) that is the source from which a community discovers, rediscovers, and transforms their own culture "generation after generation." Through their structure, public events can induce action, knowledge and experience (Handelman 1990:16). Ceremony performs a "collective autobiography" that Paul Connerton (1989) suggests serves to remind participants of a shared identity. Cultural, communal memory is sedimented or amassed in the body, performed through more or less ritual interactions, inscribed through prescribed bodily behaviors and postures (Connerton 1989). Formulating rules, rearranging time and space, creates a special world that Schechner (1988) notes is not gratuitous but a vital part of human life.

In Jewish tradition, the injunction to "remember" is a religious imperative that Yerushalmi (1982) notes has been "crucial to Israel's faith and to its very existence" (1982:8). Rabbinic rites of remembrance effectively "conjure up" a "community of generations" (Scholem 1965:121). Yet Zerubavel (1986) reminds us that while recurrence helps to preserve an overall sense of continuity, it is diversity that revives and adjusts the memories of the past, providing flexibility of interpretation and meaning within a culture. The formation of memory in Jewish tradition is effected through a multiplicity and diversity of commemorative modes such as reading a tale, participating in a memorial service, making a pilgrimage, or celebrating a holiday. WAGRO's ceremony is a form of civic pageantry (Citron 1989), rooted in East European Jewish culture. It is heir to a tradition of mass funerals in the Jewish community, both in Eastern Europe and in New York City, rituals of "collective affirmation" that extended the boundaries of private grief to "embrace the kinship of community and nationality" (Goren 1994:270).

Mass public funerals (both in Europe and the US), negotiated between religious orthodoxy and the secular, leftist, Yiddish labor movements (Goren 1994:270). In the United States, such public events also served as immigrant rituals of acculturation. Prior to World War II, mass public funerals revolved around the memory of great rabbis, writers, or political leaders. During World War II, in response to Nazi abuses, this tradition gave way to mass memorial protest meetings, days of mourning, work stoppage, and economic boycott. With the end of the war, the mass memorial became a post- war response to the massive losses and trauma that we now call the "Holocaust." The Holocaust memorial is an "integrating ritual" that has borrowed selectively from various traditions (Goren 1994:229) and it is a reparative response that is simultaneously psychological and sociopolitical (Danieli 1992, 1994).

Memorials, Monuments, and Museums

WAGRO was formed in 1963, initially the brain child Jack Eisner and fellow survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. By the late 1970s their memorial service was attracting an audience of over twenty thousand, primarily survivors and their families living in the New York metropolitan area. Since then, the audience has leveled off to approximately six thousand, still primarily survivors and their families, which now include grandchildren. Keynote speakers include public figures important to the political and cultural life of the American Jewish community. Menachem Begin spoke twice during his term as Prime Minister of Israel. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of liberation in 1945, President Clinton was the keynote speaker at Madison Square Garden's Paramount Theater. In a study of ethnic acculturation and renewal in Israel, Weingrod (1990) views memorial occasions as statements of communal interest, celebration, and power that "bristle with social and political implications" (Weingrod 1990:81):

When chains of migration or immigration propel persons to different lands, and as they subsequently become organized in their new country as an ethnic group, cultural and political processes often intersect in the creation of new or newly revived communal celebrations. Typically these are public occasions during which members of a particular country or place-of-origin group join together (Weingrod 1990: 81-82).

In the United States, commemoration of the Holocaust is complicated by memories of three intersecting histories: the heroism and suffering of immigrant survivors, the fragmentation of pre-war American Jewish establishment, and the indifference of the United States government (and by extension the non-Jewish public) to the plight of European Jews during World War II.

In contrast to Israel, where state-sponsored commemoration of the Holocaust was introduced in the early 1950s soon after the formation of the state, Holocaust memory in the United States was not observed on a national level until 1978. Until recently, Holocaust memory in the United States was shaped by the initiative of a few key groups and individuals of no political prominence. Holocaust memory occurred sporadically in American public culture during the 1950s (Shandler 1993), within the American Jewish community, and among Jewish survivors. In the early 1980s, the US government legislated official "Days of Remembrance," shaping memory of the Holocaust to contemporary needs and circumstances of American culture and politics. In 1988, the first official guide to organizing Holocaust commemorations was issued by the US Department of Defense in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (Office of the Secretary of Defense 1988). Today a ceremony is held every spring in the Capital Rotunda. The US Army Band performs ghetto songs in Yiddish. How did all this come about?

Intersecting Histories

The American Jewish pre-war community was extraordinarily heterogeneous, marked by ethnic sub-divisions, acrimonious ideological battles, and competing social visions (Goren 1986). Their protests against with Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and subsequent efforts throughout World War II constitute a history of failed ritual responses. Because New York City was the center of Jewish political life, memorials, pageants, and protest rallies were held at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall. Numerous scholars have examined the problematic relationship between the American Jewish community, the United States government, and the general climate of anti-semitism in the American public during this time (Citron 1989; Lookstein 1985; Wyman 1984; Feingold 1970).

In the years after liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe in 1945, hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors lived in displaced persons camps. For them, "remembrance" served to mourn the past, define the present, and shape the future. Under the protection of the Americans and the British, survivors looked for family and friends, gathered documentation and testimony, and organized memorial meetings that brought together political, military, religious, and artistic leaders (Schwarz 1953). In particular they resisted repatriation and fought for the right to leave Europe (Mankowitz 1988, Zweig 1987). By 1952, most Jewish survivors in Europe had emigrated to either Israel or North America. It is therefore in these two places that most Holocaust remembrance occurs today.

Approximately 140,000 Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust came to North America (Dinnerstein 1982; Helmreich 1992), primarily to New York and Los Angeles. Most survivors arrived with no capital, very little education, few social connections, and no political clout. They were isolated within the Jewish community, a minority within a minority that carried stories of victimization and survival, helplessness and heroism. To their fellow American Jews, who had been neither victims or heroes, the survivors, unlike earlier immigrant generations, were a reminder of both the American dream, and of "America's failure to serve as a haven in the hour of greatest need" (Berenbaum 1990:9). During the first two decades following World War II, survivors were urged to forget their past and become a part of their new home and culture. Often they were stigmatized and a "conspiracy of silence" compounded their own difficulties at reintegration into society (Danieli 1984). Psychologists note that the inability to share their grief inflicted a "second wound" (Danieli 1984; Klein 1968; Symonds 1980).

Most scholars agree that the capture of Adolf Eichmann by the Israelis in 1960, and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem in 1961 prompted a process of public debate, testimony, education and commemoration of the Holocaust that continues to this day. A traditional symbol system emerged in response to the external threats of the Six-Day War in 1967, the Kippur War in 1973, and the struggle for Soviet Jewry during the 1970s. During the seven year period from 1967-1974, the Holocaust became a central part of Jewish collective consciousness (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983; Roskies 1984; Garber and Zuckerman 1989:203; Berenbaum 1990:4; Segev 1993; Young 1993) and the notion "From Holocaust to Rebirth" has become a central construct of a new post-war, politically organized American Jewish "polity" wherein "rebirth" refers to Israel as a source of "prideful identification" (Woocher 1986:51). This construct has become a "key symbol" (Ortner 1973:1343) that elaborates, formulates and summarizes relationships, tensions, and complementarities within the American Jewish community today.

The Only Shining Thing

The original call for a memorial to the Holocaust in New York City was first articulated in 1946 by A.R. Lerner, a Polish Jew who fled Vienna in 1938. In 1947, the City of New York donated a plot of land in Riverside Park near 83rd Street to that purpose (Young 1993). Three attempts to build there during the 1950s failed and twelve years passed before a group of survivors living in New York City organized to pick up the cause. They came together to form the "Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization" (WAGRO), dedicated specifically and solely to education and memorialization of the Holocaust. The new organization entered a relatively crowded field of Jewish organizations, some of whom had been commemorating the Holocaust since the war years.

WAGRO was the inspiration of Jack Eisner, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Majdanek concentration camp. When I interviewed him in Israel, in 1991, he recalled that when he came to the United States in 1949, he was a bitter twenty-two year old who wanted to forget his war traumas:

In the United States, when I arrived, to talk about the Holocaust was an embarrassment. Who wanted to hear about it? The non-Jews for sure not and even the Jews didn't want to hear about it (personal communication 1991).

His feelings changed in 1960 when he visited Israel for the first time (because he "just couldn't believe it existed") and was moved to confront his past. In particular, Eisner was inspired by fellow Warsaw Ghetto survivors who had created Kibbutz Lochamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz). On his way home, he revisited the site of the destroyed ghetto in Warsaw and returned to New York determined to build a memorial to the Holocaust.

WAGRO was incorporated in 1963 in the State of New York as a non-profit, membership organization, run by an elected executive committee. The founding executive committee of WAGRO were all participants of the ghetto resistance, and many had been in the same concentration camps. They were an active, successful group of individuals with various resources that they donated to the new undertaking. Backers, sympathizers, and honorary sponsors included a list of prominent community members in business, the arts, and politics. Their first event was a gala concert on May 12, 1963, titled a "Salute to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes on the 20th Anniversary of the Historic Uprising." It took place at Carnegie Hall, a major center of cultural life in New York, and a site that had been repeatedly used for memorial meetings, protests, and calls for memorials.

WAGRO's initial statement of purpose called for "a proper memorial-monument in....the home of over 2,000,000 Jews, which would for all times stand as a symbol of Jewish Martyrdom and Resistance in Europe during World War II" (The WAGRO Bulletin, (1)1, Oct.-Nov. 1968). Commemorative meetings and social events were held as a base from which to realize this goal. Eisner recalls that attitudes toward the Holocaust in the 1960s prompted many to overemphasize the role of resistance. Survivors emphasized it in an attempt to preserve their dignity, enraged by the public debate that followed the Eichmann trial, in particular Hannah Arendt's political analysis and implications of Jewish passivity and complicity during the war (Arendt 1963):

The only shining thing that resembled something that the Jewish community and certainly the non-Jewish community in the United States [would pay attention to] was the Warsaw Ghetto. Why? Because it had resistance. In the 1960s, until the late 1970s, if you talked about the Warsaw Ghetto, you could get a hall, television would come, the radio, and some people would come. The rest were ashamed to say that they were survivors from a camp. To say I am from Auschwitz or from Majdanek or Bergen Belsen was an embarrassment. The Warsaw Ghetto was an ace. So that's why we were pushing the Warsaw Ghetto. This was the only thing that the public was buying (personal communication 1991).

For ten years from 1964-1974, WAGRO pursued efforts to build a physical monument in various locations throughout New York City. Two major proposals failed due to political and economic obstacles within and without the Jewish community. In 1964 Natan Rapoport, a survivor of Warsaw, designed two 26 foot bronze scrolls with reliefs depicting scenes of martyrdom and resistance, for the original plot donated in Riverside Park. It was rejected by the New York City Arts Commission as too frightening and "excessively and unnecessarily large." But more importantly, they felt it represented a special interest group rather than American history. Scores of protest emerged from the Jewish community that underscored the role of Jews in American history, beginning with their arrival in 1654 to New Amsterdam. Of all the different ethnic, religious, or social groups in New York, Jews and Blacks were the most under-represented, they protested; the decision was "an affront to three million Jews in New York City," each of whom had a "deeply personal reason to mourn" (The Herald-News Report, December 28, 1965). In his study of Holocaust memorials in Europe, Israel, and the United States, James Young (1993) observes:

In a culture composed of immigrants, these survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto assumed that their "foreign" experiences would come to be regarded also as American, that as part of their European past, the Holocaust would become part of America's past. As a land of immigrants, the survivors had hoped, America would also be a land of immigrant memories..."foreign" only insofar as they transpired in other lands, but American in that they explained why immigrants had come to America in the first place (1993:292).

The second proposal was presented in 1967 by architect Louis Kahn of Philadelphia for Battery Park. Six glass piers of glass around a seventh central one, each ten by ten feet square and eleven feet high. The proposal was approved, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, with a target date for completion in April 1973. However, the project never came to fruition. In 1967 the Jewish community turned its focus to Israel after the Six Day War. In 1971 major resources were directed toward helping Soviet Jewry and in 1973 toward the Yom Kippur War. Finally, in 1974 when the architect Kahn unexpectedly died, all building plans were halted.

Frustrated by the lack progress in building a memorial, WAGRO revamped and reorganized their priorities. Benjamin Meed, who had organized the annual memorial services for many years, was appointed chairman of a "commemoration committee" and shifted WAGRO's focus from monument to ceremony as the primary site for memory and community. The ensuing success of this memorial ceremony, which clearly met a need for survivors and their families in the metropolitan area, was in large part due to the tenacity and vision of Mr. Meed and a dedicated executive committee who donated their time and resources for over thirty years.

A Midrash of Ritual

WAGRO schedules its event for the Sunday afternoon usually prior to "Yom Hashoah," the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. In an age where the identity of a people is defined by the nation-state, it chose to commemorate on this day which it was felt coincided with the observance of most Jews in the world yet the event was adapted to its particular diaspora circumstances. It remains a non-partisan event, performed primarily in English, held indoors. Therefore, participants do not interrupt work or school nor travel at night on public transportation in order to attend. The event is free and open to the public, financial contributions are encouraged, and large donors receive reserved seats.

Ceremony, as all performance, is ephemeral. It occurs in time and space. In Jewish tradition it is generally assumed that any space can become an acceptable place for prayer at specified sacred times, but that the reverse does not hold true. The Jewish calendar in particular, is an example of how the structuring of time into profane and sacred units has served to unify a people in response to loss or traumatic upheaval (Zerubavel 1981:105). I will briefly examine WAGRO's use of time in relation to Holocaust memory, something that has been examined at considerable length by numerous scholars (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983; Greenberg 1988; Handelman 1990; Young 1993). Then I will examine WAGRO's use of space.

The survivors who formed WAGRO could have chosen to hold their commemoration on a number of dates. They entered a relatively crowded field of Jewish organizations in New York City (Moore 1981), survivor organizations, and landsmanshaftn who commemorated the deportation of their home communities or countries of origin (Weisser 1985).

Since 1943, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had been commemorated on April 19 as a collective day of remembrance by non-Zionist Jewish Socialist, Communist, and Bundist labor organizations throughout the world. In New York City, the most prominent of these organizations are the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) and the Workmen's Circle (WC) who, to this day, commemorate on April 19 (Malmgreen 1991).

In 1946, survivors in the displaced persons camps of post-war Europe called for a collective day of mourning and thanksgiving on the 14th of Iyar (late spring) that would commemorate their liberation. It went unheeded by the Jewish community at large (Mankowitz 1988).

In 1948 The Chief Rabbinate of Israel designated the 10th of Tevet on the Hebrew calendar (around December) as a day for collective remembrance by those who do not know the date of death of their family killed during the Holocaust (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983; Greenberg 1988; Young 1993).

Today, most Jewish communities observe Yom Hashoah, a remembrance day that was created by Israeli Knesset in 1952. This day falls on the 27th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, in the late spring. Its current form of observance in Israel was fixed, with a siren, in 1959. An "invented tradition" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), the date reflects both a modern nationalism and a traditional cosmology of the annual ceremonial cycle of Judaism (Handelman 1990:198-199). In fact, it emerged as a compromise between the religious and Zionist factions in the government. (Liebman & Don-Yehiya 1983:101).

The original call to commemorate the first day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943) violated religious prohibitions against mourning during Passover (as well as the whole month of Nisan). The first day of the Uprising was on the first day of Passover (15th of Nisan) in 1943. The 27th of Nisan is a compromise that was chosen because it falls within the period of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (although historically nothing in particular occurred on that date) yet not within Passover. Moreover, it precedes Israel's Memorial and Independence Days (3rd and 4th of Iyar) and was calculated that it "never falls on the Sabbath or on a Jewish holiday" and will therefore never conflict with the religious or secular calendars (WAGRO Archives 1975). In fact, its place on the contemporary Jewish calendar serves as a bridge between religious time and secular history. Sandwiched between Passover and Israel's Independence Day, the memory of the Holocaust serves as a conduit of meaning between old and new Jewish social realities (Young 1993:269). A modern collective midrash through ritual, it performs a master narrative that symbolizes a collective journey from exile, through the Holocaust, to modern Israel.

The Power of Place

For ten years, WAGRO held their ceremony in hotels, cultural halls, and university auditoriums. They actively engaged American Jewish organizations, first as co-sponsors in building a monument and later to produce the ceremony. Local representatives entered their activities into the congressional record on a state and national level.

By 1972 WAGRO realized that their attempt to build a monument was stalemated. They turned to Temple Emanu-El, New York City's most prominent Reform synagogue for help in reviving interest in their cause:

we were simply terribly starved and desirous to reach the non- survivor population, to educate them. We did not consider the commemoration strictly as a place where you come and shed a tear, which is okay for the survivor. We wanted to start bringing in the young generation of Jews, and non-Jews. We believed that the prestige that this institution carried would be helpful and it did help (Jack Eisner, personal communication 1991).

The role of the synagogue, in American Jewish identity (Goren 1970:46), was a key to WAGRO's success. The building itself is a symbol of communal aspirations, needs, and ceremonial rhythm of the community (Tuan 1977, 1993). Temple Emanu-El sits on the corner of 65th Street, facing Fifth Avenue, New York City's most prestigious public route, dotted by museums of high culture. The Avenue travels up the east side of Central Park and is used to celebrate ethnicity, thank the U.S. for a good life, and reinforce collective identity (Kelton 1985). It hosts the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade, the oldest civic parade in the United States, and more recently the Israel Day Parade. For twelve years, WAGRO held their ceremonies in Temple Emanu- El, renewing the arrangements on an annual basis. During this time they formed a "United Commemoration Committee" that grew to seventy two sponsors listed on the program each year. For seven years, WEVD radio broadcast the ceremony live, narrated by Judah Shapiro. It is said that those listening at home would rise and join the prayers (transcript of WEVD radio broadcast 1979). As attendance outgrew the capacity of the synagogue and its adjoining auditoriums, the event was broadcast over loudspeakers to the street and a grand-stand was set up on the sidewalk flanking Central Park to face the synagogue. Thousands more stood in the side streets that were blocked off for the occasion. By 1980 attendance had grown as high as 25,000.

In 1985, the commemoration moved away from Temple Emanu-El, to a variety of secular, cultural spaces, the most prominent of which have been Avery Fisher (a concert hall), The Javitz Center (a convention hall), and the Paramount Theater at Madison Square Garden (a space separate from the stadium). A major reason for the move was that the Orthodox community began to ask to participate in the commemoration but refused to attend a Reform institution. The move into a secular space symbolized, to many, a shift away from ethnic particularity and insularity represented by the synagogue as place.

Simultaneous to this move was a shift in public attitudes toward the Holocaust that emerged from a shifting memorial landscape within American politics and public culture. Since the late 1970s, American collective memory had been attempting to come to terms with the Vietnam war and the Vietnam veteran as victim of governmental policy which resulted, among other things, in a memorial to Vietnam War veterans that was unveiled in 1981 in Washington D.C. (Marling and Silberman 1987:13).

In 1979 President Carter had created a President's Commission on the Holocaust, with plans for a memorial museum on the Holocaust and a wave of activities concerning Holocaust education and commemoration began to move out into American society at large. The US government and military created ceremonies. Governors were encouraged to observe the day in their respective states. Curricula for teaching the Holocaust was introduced into the highschools. In some states, the utility bills even reminded people to observe Holocaust Remembrance Day! A new self-consciousness and self-awareness arose among survivors across the United States. In 1981, Ernest Michelle called for the first International Gathering of Holocaust Survivors to meet in Israel. This gave birth to the American Gathering/Federation of Holocaust Survivors, spearheaded by Benjamin Meed, which serves survivors on a national level and supported plans for a national Holocaust Memorial Museum. This new organization grew out of WAGRO and till today the two organizations share offices in midtown Manhattan. It became WAGRO's main sponsor for the commemoration in New York City.

WAGRO was created in order to establish a permanent memorial to the Holocaust in the United States. When they were not initially successful they shifted their focus from memorial to ceremony, carefully choosing the places in which they staged their events for public exposure and media coverage until they achieved their goal. The Holocaust Memorial Museum opened up in 1993, thirty years after WAGRO first issued their call for a memorial. Since then, the Jewish community in New York City has created a Holocaust museum (Saidel 1996) at a site not far from where WAGRO had once proposed the Louis Kahn memorial in Battery Park, facing the Statue of Liberty, that most American of symbols. Today, this memorial museum co-sponsor WAGRO's annual memorial ceremony.

Ceremony, Commemoration, and Community

In order to better understand the role of ceremony in shaping memory and social identity it is important to examine the structure of the event more closely. Ceremonies do not pass on memories. They do, however, create new memories of being together. Like all public events, WAGRO's commemoration is a culturally designed event that interrelates themes of existence with a certainty and coherence that is normally obscured in everyday life (Handelman 1990:15). It summarizes, condenses, and magnifies social knowledge through its use of space, the presentation of symbols, and the organization of behavior. It is an example of what Barbara Meyerhoff (1984) terms "secular ritual drama" whose symbolic components signify the "relevant collectivities and the social matrix" in which the an event occurs (Meyerhoff 1984:158-160; Moore and Meyerhoff 1977). As commemoration chairman and president of WAGRO, Benjamin Meed's main concern was: "what effect have we made on the world?"

No matter if people forget all the speeches--what people remember is the atmosphere that is created. I watched out tremendously for the level of dignified, orderly behavior of the people. In Temple Emanu-El I could easily create the atmosphere. Thousands of people come in, but the minute I walked over to the microphone and I said the first word, it got quiet.

By inviting high officials I also got proper coverage. None of them came to us voluntarily. [We had to] invite them, create an atmosphere. The bigger the official we brought, the bigger the coverage for us. That's how it began to spread (personal communication 1990).

Civic ceremony uses aesthetic means to display a version of society intended by its makers. In contrast to events such as a trial, carnival, pilgrimage, the classroom, or therapeutic setting, it does not effect social change or "make order" during the actual time period of the performance itself. Civic ceremony is an "event- that-presents" in Handelman's terms (1990:8,41), characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state. Any actions that result from ceremonial events occur mainly at the interface of the event and social order (Handelman 1990:41).

Until recently, WAGRO's stage remained relatively empty of people, a space "reserved for the dead." At Temple Emanu-El "center stage" was filled with a six-branched menorah and large yellow star in front of the Torah ark, framed by banks of memorial candles. Program participants sat in the front pews facing the "stage." They got up to speak from lecterns on either side. When the ceremony moved out of Temple Emanu-El, some members of the executive committee suggested that program participants could now sit on stage "without it looking bad" (WAGRO Archive, minutes of the executive committee, 1989). Others became angry and indignant:

Begin came to our commemoration. Dayan came to our commemoration, and they were sitting in the audience. They weren't sitting on the stage! And here, [our executives], they have to sit there. Who wants to see them ? Who are they ? Okay, the Vice President came. I understand the Vice President has to sit on top. [But] if you would tell him to sit down, he would sit down. It's only that they wanted to show off who we are (personal communication 1993).

What does it mean to "show off who we are"? And why is it self-understood that "Okay, the Vice President....has to sit on top"? In order to understand the changes this event has gone through and their meanings I will examine the basic structure of the ceremony, followed by case material from 1993 on the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Forty Years of Rehearsal

Although the ceremony has undergone changes over the years, the basic structure for the WAGRO's commemoration has remained stabile. The original guidelines prescribed a simplicity, restraint and modesty characteristic of most religious memorial services. The frontal focus represents a hierarchic conception of the event that is characteristic of civic events. There is some movement and ambiguity between the audience and program participants. A continuity sheet from 1966 explains there should be no dias, program participants should sit in the first row of the audience, and there should be no applause:

As the lights go off, the Cantor begins to sing Ani Maamin, in a low tone, accompanied by music. The singing should be the background music for the lighting of the "yarzeit" candles. The candles should be arranged on a long table with several elevations (WAGRO archives 1966).

Ideally, the event is scheduled to run for one hour and a half. In practice, the commemoration is run by a sense of "event time." A set sequence of steps are completed regardless how long they take (Schechner 1988). The ceremony has never exceeded three hours.

The event requires a full day's work of preparation. Some of the executive committee arrive as early as 6 am with coffee and bagels for union hands, police, and security personnel. After a security sweep, the stage is prepared. Outside, a line begins to form. Tickets are required to get in, but seating is on a first come, first serve basis (festival seating). The doors open two hours in advance of the ceremony. After the ceremony, the stage is dismantled immediately. People socialize briefly outside in the late afternoon sun. A summary of the event is published in American Gathering's newspaper "Together" that appears in the following weeks.

Preparations for next year's event begin immediately, as decisions about renting a hall need to done almost a year in advance. Thus, organizing this event alone requires and ongoing annual cycle of activity and interactions with society at large. In looking back on their years of work, Meed reflected in 1991, "we have had forty years of rehearsal," evoking the Biblical image of wandering through the desert. What, one may ask, have they been rehearsing?

Symbolic Anchors

WAGRO's ceremony is composed of four main symbolic acts: speeches, candlelighting, music and prayer. Sacred elements alternate with more secular aspects and lend their authority to the event (Meyerhoff 1984:58). The music includes the national anthems of Israel and the United States, Jewish prayer, and "ghetto songs" (songs sung or created in the ghettos, camps, and among resistance fighters). The speeches vary each year but repeat certain themes and inevitably draw lessons from the Holocaust to the present.

The ceremony opens with women lighting clusters of memorial candles, accompanied by the song "Ani Ma'amin." They are followed by speakers from the local community, adult members of the second and third generation (children and grandchildren of survivors), and sometimes an artistic reading. Midway through the event, the tone changes. A procession of children enter, accompanied by the song "Moishelekh and Shloimelekh." They light a large yellow Star of David. This is followed by the lighting of six candles by six survivors, each accompanied by a child of survivors. A cantor sings "El Mole Rachamim" (the prayer for the dead). The hall stands to recite "Kaddish Bezibur" (public recitation of the mourner's prayer). Following this is the keynote speaker, usually a prominent figure from outside the local community. The ceremony closes with a collective resolution, messages from the president of Israel and the United States, and everyone stands for a moment of silence. It ends with everyone standing, singing "Zog Nit Keyn Mol," the Partisan Hymn in Yiddish. This song concludes with the line "mir zeynen do" (we are here).

Symbolically, the ceremony orders three levels of experience in the present, past, and future (usually in that order). These create a beginning, middle, and end to the performance narrative . The ceremony opens in the present, with representation of the local community, memorial candles lit by survivors, introductory remarks delivered by WAGRO executives, and local officials such as the mayor. The middle of the ceremony focuses on the past, lighting a six branched menorah accompanied by traditional prayers. The end of the ceremony projects into the future with reference to powers outside the local community and a keynote address by a prominent guest speaker. The beginning, middle and end all present aspects of the "lived-in world" (Handelman 1990) that are of contemporary concern to the Jewish community in New York City. These can be grouped into four parallel texts:

============================================================
CEREMONY:      TEXT 1         TEXT 2    TEXT 3    TEXT 4

beginning:     present        local     family    diaspora

middle:        past           murdered  religion  Holocaust

end:           future         world     state     Israel
============================================================

Viewed horizontally, the ceremony groups together the symbolism of each text according so that the beginning signifies the present, the family, the local community, the diaspora. The middle evokes the past, religion, the murdered community, the Holocaust. The end of the ceremony points to the future, the state, the world community, Israel.

Seen vertically, Text 1 moves from the present to the future. Text 2 moves from the local sphere of experience to the level of world politics. Text 3 represents three levels of collective life (the family, the synagogue, and the state). Text 4 evokes the Zionist master commemorative narrative that leads from the Diaspora, through the Holocaust, to Israel.

One could imagine a fifth text that moves simply from absence to presence, from loss to survival, and is performed by a shift in focus from the stage to the audience:

==================================================================
CEREMONY:      TEXT 5         SYMBOLIC ANCHORS

beginning:     Absence        Focus on stage
               Loss           Memorial candles and song
                              Six candles and prayer

end:           Presence       Focus on audience
               Survival       Collective singing: Partisan Hymn
==================================================================

This fifth text opens with the song "Ani Maamin" and memorial candlelighting. It progresses through the lighting of six candles with prayer, and concludes with the audience standing, singing of the Partisan Hymn that ends on the refrain "we are here!" The distance between the beginning and end of the ceremony reflects the distance between loss and survival, past and present, home and state, local Jewish community and national American identity, Diaspora and Israel. And as with most ritual texts, none of the above end with a sense of absence or loss, but rather with an affirmation of life.

Meaning accrues through the use of symbols that point outside the frame of the commemoration and create links to other Jewish traditions and customs. When asked to describe her role at the ceremony in 1993, Gizela Adamsky, a woman candlelighter, explained "we're going to memorialize our lived ones that don't have a grave." This view of the ceremony as a replacement for mourning is quite common. Lighting candles points to rituals of mourning that most survivors in fact have never been able to perform (Handelman 1990:50-52). Slyomovics (1993:380) reminds us that the correct order of the two mourning injunctions in Jewish tradition is first to bury and then remember. In the absence of real graves, the memorial book, the commemoration, the monument and the "synagogue-cemetery-memorial house" have emerged as symbolic substitutes (Danieli 1994; Kugelmass and Boyarin 1983; Poplack 1981; Slyomovics 1993, Young 1993). Survivors often describe themselves as carrying "internal graveyards" (Danieli 1992). Others literally share their own graves marking their own headstones with a plaque or dedication in memory of the unburied. The American Gathering sells markers that identify the graves of survivors.

Lighting candles is a device for storing and holding much information and emotion. It is a multivocal polysymbol that links the behaviors of many Jewish holidays such as Shabbat, Chanukah and Passover, some of them also commemorative (Fredman 1981; Yerushalmi 1982). Candlelighting occurs in the form of memorial candles and as part of a six branched menorah developed for the ceremony. Three forms of candlelighting have evolved over time, performed by three generations in various combinations: survivors only, children only, and combinations of survivors with children. The presence of several generations symbolizes temporal continuity (Meyerhoff 1984:59) and the family as the primary anchor of memory. This is clear in the way the event opens, with women lighting candles, an image that evokes rituals of the home, in particular the sabbath. The fact that they are survivors only (in early versions of the event the gender was not relevant), symbolizes that aspect of memory that cannot be shared.

Many of the symbols in the ceremony have layers of association, overt and implied meanings. The procession of young children symbolize murdered children, lost youth and hope for a future. The symbol of a wall that appears on the WAGRO logo and on the program, simultaneously represents the ghetto wall and implies the Western wall, a symbol of both mourning and hope. The yellow star symbolizes the star worn by Jews in Europe and evokes associations to the State of Israel, the golden light of candles, and "Jerusalem of Gold." The number six is a key symbol (Ortner 1973:1343) that has emerged in different forms -- six million, six candles, six sides of a star. Six is a symbol of the Star of David, and modern Israel, and yet the six branched menorah also represents loss, since it is missing one of the branches of the traditional Jewish menorah.

WAGRO's emphasis on the symbol six intensified in the 1980s when Benjamin Meed was appointed to the US Holocaust Memorial Council and participated in debates on the issue of uniqueness versus universalization of the Holocaust (Linenthal 1995:27). At this time, WAGRO designed a yellow star to be filled with memorial candles by children. Since the mid-1980s, WAGRO distributes stickers with the slogan "Remember 6,000,000" (in Hebrew, Yiddish, English) that they request people place on their lapel when they attend the commemoration. The number six is the symbol that accompanies the key scenario or master narrative "from Holocaust to rebirth." It links the past to the future, the Holocaust to Israel. It is the vigilant reminder of the particularity of the Jewish experience during World War II. Semiotically, the whole ceremony moves from Holocaust to survival, from absence to presence, from the past to the future, from local community to the world at large. This echoes the master narrative central to all Holocaust commemorations: from diaspora, through the Holocaust, to Israel. While Israel plays an important symbolic role in WAGRO's ceremony, it is not the lived experience of most of those who participate in the event. The Israeli anthem opens the event, alongside the American anthem but Israeli dignitaries, which are a standard feature of the ceremony, speak at the end of the event. They are distanced from the symbols of family and home that occur at the beginning.

The evolution of this event over the decades echoes the semiotics of the event. Over time, it has moved from being a survivors' ritual, to include their children, the American Jewish community, and finally the American public at large. This evolution reflects the survivors' process of integration into American society. Survivors may remember another time and place, but they are with us as they do so. Based on my conversations with participants at the ceremony, for many of the survivors, the ceremony is an occasion to both mourn and express their new-found American identity. As Benjamin Meed has articulated so many times at the ceremony:

[We] have rebuilt lives, raised families and became integral parts of our communities in this nation and around the world...[We] are grateful to be part of this great democracy...and for the freedom and opportunity to rebuild our lives for ourselves, for our children and grandchildren, for its support of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and for helping us, creating an atmosphere for remembering the Holocaust (1993 Annual Memorial Ceremony)

They have performed themselves becoming American.

For the children of survivors, the ceremony is an opportunity to express loyalty to their parents, what is often referred to as "passing on the legacy." It is possible that the need for mass ceremonies will change as American identity becomes anchored in the family of survivors in their localized communities.

We Are Here

1993 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising honored by the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The commemoration took place at the Paramount Theater at Madison Square Garden. The stage, awash in soft lighting of pink-purple, yellow-white hues, was full of people. Program participants sat in six rows of purple chairs along the front of the stage, facing the audience. In front of them to the left, was a large six branched candelabra.

Center stage was a lectern, and jutting out from center stage into the audience, was a large yellow Star of David with the word "remember" inscribed in its center, in Hebrew, Yiddish and English. Behind the participants was a piano, flanked on either side by six banks of memorial candles. Along the back of the stage were three rows of an adult and children's choir. A large white banner with red and black lettering ran the full width of the stage. In Yiddish, it proclaimed "evik velen mir gedenken unzer 6 million kedoshim," and in English "we will never forget our six million martyrs."

The program lasted three hours, moderated by actor Theodore Bikel as Master of Ceremonies. Vice-President Al Gore was the keynote speaker. The audience of approximately six thousand, was composed of survivors, their children and grandchildren, people who had not come for many years, and some first time attenders, including non-Jews. About one to two thousand people were not able to get in due to limited space and tight security measures. The ceremony opened with the presentation of colors by the units of the United States Army who had liberated Nazi camps in Europe. With military pomp and circumstance, they marched solemnly down, through the audience, from the back of the theater to the front accompanied by the US Army Band. The women candlelighters, who in previous years had opened the ceremony with a somber, pensive tone, were completely superseded by this dramatic opening. Their memorial candles were barely visible above the heads of everyone seated on stage. By the end of the ceremony, with the lighting of the six-branched menorah and children's star in center stage front, the program participants were framed by flickering candles on all sides. One audience member observed appreciatively:

you just didn't know where to look first. The entire vision, the entire picture, the panorama of all that fire, little fires, little pin points, and the reflection of the gold color, or the softness, it gave everything a kind of a golden hue...the women...and the children of the survivors helping the father or the mother....these little children... passing the flames to each other in the glasses....it was a very exciting thing (Pearl Krupit, personal communication 1993).

The presence of so much life on stage echoed through the hall. The audience exclaimed, murmured, sang along, stood up, clapped, and shushed each other back to silence. So much audience response tested the formal definition of the event and resulted in a conflict of frames (Goffman 1974). The master of ceremonies repeatedly reminded the audience that the event is a memorial and they should refrain from public outbursts or applause. One young woman who attended the event for the first time was distressed:

People started to clap...while others, with anxious panicky tones, yelled "No!!!" It felt terrible, both the need to be silent and the anxiety of people silencing each other (Payne, unpublished class report 1993).

Standing before a full hall, Benjamin Meed made an symbolic link between the approximately six thousand in the audience and the six million that were murdered.

Mr. Vice-President, we already know you as a strong advocate and faithful friend on issues important in the Jewish community. So in the moment I have, let me tell you about the six thousand people in this hall. Each person in effect represents a thousand Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, many perished with no one to remember them.

The first ten rows of the audience were flooded by a spill-over of light directed toward the Vice-President, who was the guest speaker at the event. A White House aid rushed out to place the Presidential seal onto the front of the podium. The press moved in. People rustled, began to clap. Mr. Meed motioned to quiet down the hall but his wife, Vladka Meed, who was also on stage, perceived the need to acknowledge the importance of the occasion and spontaneously stood up. The audience followed, hesitantly at first, rising in a staggered ripple that spread through the hall.

Gore's speech was unusually long (forty minutes). Fumbling with a yarmulke that kept slipping off his head, the Vice President recapped the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and facts of the Holocaust, proving he knew the topic. In conclusion, he noted that April 19 marks both the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the American Revolution in Lexington, Virginia in 1776, thereby symbolically equating these two histories into the collective, national, narrative of America.

The commemoration concluded with everyone on stage and in the audience standing for a moment of silence, a benediction, and the collective singing of the Partisan Hymn, accompanied by the U.S. Army Band, the Workmen's Circle Chorus and the Heschel School Choir. The words are printed in the program in Yiddish and transliterated, but not translated. The song ends with a triumphal refrain "mir zeynen do!" -- we are here. The Partisan Hymn, a remnant of the Bundist, Yiddish labor movement, is a symbol not only of resistance but of the viability of a (secular) Jewish culture in the Diaspora. What does it mean in 1993 to stand and sing the Partisan Hymn at the end of a Holocaust memorial meeting, closing with the phrase "we are here"? Who is where in 1993?

In the thirty years since WAGRO first announced that it wanted to build a memorial in the 1960s, its stage has evolved from a place reserved for the dead to a display of the living. This display is not simply to "show off who we are" or to allow the Vice President to sit "on top." Survivors, who have experienced devastating helplessness in their lives, are profoundly honored and moved by symbols of strength and feel legitimately empowered, as Americans, by the Vice President's presence. Many survivors in the U.S. remain overwhelmed that their experiences should be the "basis of a national memorial" (Linenthal 1995:25). As "America the Beautiful" played in the background, one survivor from Hungary, explained:

It's a wonderful thing that now they have the army band here included. It's a symbol that the American people are also concerned...

Another woman survivor explained:

We are attending those events since probably twenty years ago, since it began in Temple Emanu-El, and we never missed it and it's still very exciting because we always meet people that we know from way before, the times that we were together in concentration camps. Every year it's better I think. Better and bigger. I have many, many people here, what I was together, so what can I tell you [sigh], memories and excitement.

And a third added "we'll cry but we'll love it." Survivors in the United States have moved from being "greeners" (Meed 1975) (a marginal immigrant group) to active public participants in their communities. The memory of the Holocaust has become institutionalized in its American cultural and political contexts. For those of us who did not experience the Holocaust first hand, the ceremony may present an awkward juxtaposition of the here-and- now and then-and-there as real memories and our imagined stories (Weissman 1995) meet. James Young, in an analysis of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, asks what is being shared in the ritual instant when for two minutes a siren wails and people stand in silence:

The survivor remembers her experiences in Auschwitz, her lost family and friends, her lost past life...Am I to remember her life as well, as she has told it to me? And if so, do we indeed share memory, her memory, even if I know it only viariously? Or must I concentrate on my own experience of this period, which amounts to nothing more than its effects on me, my felt rage and desolation? (Young 1993:280)

Social frameworks such as the memorial meeting or a museum enable us to come together in order to speak and to listen to each other. People are the carriers of memory even when we have frames made of stone and glass. We are the ones who speak and it is in the presence of others, as Halbwachs notes, that we transmit images of ourselves and each other. Whereas "autobiographical" memory fades with the people who have shared events in history, "historical" memory is socially constructed through "collective frameworks" (Halbwachs 1990:40) to meet the needs of the present in any given epoch.

One characteristic of the Holocaust commemoration is the presence of dissonance between the ordinariness of the framework and the extra-ordinariness of the memories being commemorated. This can easily create a clash of frames, as illustrated in the case material presented above and raises a question of efficacy. What is being witnessed at such a ceremony?

Conclusions

Performative genres live "on the edge of volcanoes" Victor Turner has suggested (MacAloon 1984:14; Turner 1984:26). Similarly, Maurice Halbwachs (1990:25) notes that following periods of extraordinary upheaval, symbolic displays such as ceremonies are the hallmark of a return to "ordinary," "everyday" life. It is during such times that events of the past are recalled, transmitted by parents to children, commemorated through the generations. WAGRO's ceremony is not an insular event meant for survivors only, nor for Jews alone. It invites the American public to be partners in memory which as Halbwachs notes requires the presence of others. A voice needs a witness in order to be heard. The relationship between the roles of witness, survivor, and victim are both crucial and problematic as they get blurred in the process of shaping collective memory.

In contrast to Israel, where Holocaust survivors were thrown into the immediate task of building a new state and never formed a separate political voice (Yablonka 1991), survivors in the United States early on learned the art of organizing themselves as a special interest group to articulate their social identity and special needs. WAGRO's original goal to build a memorial monument was never realized. Instead, during the years that WAGRO performed its ceremony at Temple Emanu-El, it nurtured a sense of "place" that helped anchor the collective memory of the Holocaust within the American Jewish community. As a result, two important undertakings followed upon the heels of their efforts -- the Holocaust Memorial Museum which opened in Washington DC in 1993 and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Living Memorial to the Holocaust, which opened in 1997 in New York City.

For forty years following the end of World War II, in the absence of a permanent site for memory in New York City, it has been the survivors themselves and their families that have constituted a public memorial to the Holocaust. In the process, they have inscribed their history onto the plural face of America.

The process of these survivors' cultural and social adaptation to their new home in the New York City is reflected in their presence (the presence of the living) on WAGRO's stage. Sitting center stage is a statement of presence. Despite unresolved mourning and traumatic memory (which complicates and overshadows any normal process of acculturation and memorialization), and the challenge of raising new families, many survivors also find ways to pass on their memories.

To ability to bear witness, in the both senses of speaking and the ability to listen, is a gift that we give each other. Together we create a new space, a shared space, that in turn creates it own memories. Within this space we perform the awkward dance of listening and not listening, the telling and not telling of individual and collective stories.

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