The cemetery in Holon was chosen for the tour because it is a unique and extensive site where hundreds of memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust are concentrated. Each monument represents a town or city, an entire community with traditions, institutions, culture, and stories that have been erased, thus enabling a direct encounter with the dimensions of loss and the Jewish world that has disappeared. This concentration makes the cemetery a rare place where one can deeply contemplate the question of the collective memory of the Jewish people and the relationship between community, roots, and identity.
The tour invites visitors on a journey of discovery into the world of European communities before the Holocaust, exploring Jewish life in the Diaspora, historical processes, and the meaning of community. The tour is structured around an active methodology: it combines an introduction to the stories of several communities commemorated at the site, small group research work, and a group ceremony. Throughout the tour, questions of identity, connection, belonging, and continuity are examined, and it ends with a personal and meaningful connection to memory, reflecting on the connection between the distant past and our world today.
Tour objectives:
- Deepening our understanding of Jewish communities in Europe before the Holocaust, recognizing their spiritual and social richness and the depth of loss caused by the Holocaust.
- Commemorating the Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, while understanding our role in continuing the story and preserving the historical and cultural continuity of the Jewish people.
- Dealing with the importance of memory, confronting its place in society, fighting against forgetting and denial, and the responsibility of the younger generation to preserve memory and ensure its continuity.
*What is required for the activity: הגעה עצמאית לאתרי הסיור; תדרוך מקדים למשתתפים להגיע עם כובע, מים ונעלי הליכה
