Museum Transformations

The power held by holocaust museums to affect current political equilibriums thus makes them projects with prospective consequences rather than merely retrospective institutions. 4Thus, when the paradigm of the holocaust museum is newly harnessed to tell the history of a community, we should ask: What sort of intervention is this museum expected to make? What forces initiate the project and carry it through to completion? And under what circumstances is a community able to make a trauma museum for itself, and under what circumstances is this a desire that must be thwarted?

In this chapter, I ask these questions of two institutions that have arisen in India which are inspired by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust Memorial complex in Jerusalem. The first institution that I consider is the Khalsa Heritage Complex, built in the Sikh pilgrimage center of Anandpur Sahib in Punjab. This spectacular museum was intended as a memorial to a history of Sikh suffering. But, as we shall see, when the institution finally came into being, it delivered a message that was the exact opposite of the one that was originally intended. The second institution I shall consider here is the Tibet Museum, constructed by the Tibetan government-in-exile in the small Himalayan town of Dharamsala. In scale, budget, appearance, and ambition, this museum could hardly be more different from the Khalsa Heritage Complex. Yet, through very different circuits and circumstances, this museum too is umbilically connected to Yad Vashem. As we follow the different trajectories taken by these two museums, we will see the circumstances in which a difficult memory becomes possible, or a difficult amnesia becomes a necessity.

Parkash Singh Badal wept. Surrounded by hundreds of flickering flames of candles, listening to a soft voice intoning the names of the children murdered in the Holocaust, seeing their faces in blown-up photographs that loomed out of the darkness, Parkash Singh Badal, chief minister of the north Indian state of Punjab, wept as he stood in the gallery of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial in Yad Vashem.

The year was 1998. Badal and his retinue were visiting Jerusalem on the world tour they had undertaken to seek inspiration for a monument they needed to build in Punjab the following year, for 1999 would be the tercentenary of an important event in Sikh history. On April 13, 1699, the tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind, had instituted a baptism ritual through which his followers became the Khalsa (Pure) ones. From then on, they were to bear the five distinctive signs of Sikhism on their bodies, including their turbans and unshorn hair; they were also to follow a regimen of prayer and a prescribed code of conduct. With the institution of this rite, Sikhism ceased to be a Hindu sect and emerged as a distinct religion. In many ways then, 1699 was the foundational moment for Sikhism, and its tercentenary called for a special celebration in the religion’s epicenter in Punjab.

Among other projects to mark the anniversary, Parkash Singh Badal announced that he would build an ajooba (literally, a wonder or a spectacle) in Anandpur Sahib, the town in which the Khalsa was founded, and which was now a major Sikh pilgrimage site. To understand what such a monument could be, Badal and his entourage embarked on an extensive tour of museums and monuments dedicated to the histories of various communities. Now in Jerusalem Mr. Badal had found what he sought. Emerging from the emotionally charged display in the subterranean chamber of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial, Mr. Badal is reported to have asked: “Who made this? Just as the Jews have suffered, so have the Sikhs. We need a memorial like this for our community” (MacFarquhar 2003, 44) Within two days of his visit to Yad Vashem, Mr. Badal had met the architect of the Children’s Memorial and tasked him with constructing a similar memorial complex in India for the Sikhs (Dvir 2012).

The creator of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial whom Badal met in Jerusalem was the famous Israeli-Canadian architect, Moshe Safdie. Hailed as a prodigy at the age of 26 for his revolutionary Montreal housing complex Habitat 67, in the years since, Safdie’s stature has only grown and he has designed dozens of museums, libraries, opera houses, national monuments, and seats of government across three continents. His major public commissions in Canada make him something of a national architect for his adoptive country, but he may equally be regarded as the national architect of Israel, the country of his birth. There, Safdie was entrusted with the design for the Ben Gurion International Airport and the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, as well as an entire planned city called Modi’in. He was asked to draw up a controversial, and now discarded, “Safdie plan” for the future expansion of Jerusalem; when the former no man’s land between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors of the Holy City became available, it was Safdie who designed the luxury residential complex that was built upon it. However, Safdie’s definitive work in Israel, and perhaps in his career, was the clutch of projects he undertook for the Yad Vashem Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Israel’s official Holocaust Memorial complex in Jerusalem.

Yad Vashem, which was founded almost immediately after the founding of Israel, occupies an entire hillside in Jerusalem. The complex includes a synagogue, a hall of remembrance, archives, museums, and memorial groves. The multiplicity of buildings accommodate diverse memories, honoring the heroes of the Warsaw uprising as much as the victims of Bergen-Belsen; Jewish combatants as much as the “Righteous among Gentiles” who aided Jews during the years of the Reich. Today, however, the many memorials of Yad Vashem are dominated by a bravura museum building by Moshe Safdie that ranks among the most spectacular late-twentieth-century museum buildings alongside Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin.

Safdie’s Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, which opened in 2005, tunnels into the earth to excavate a series of galleries that are linked by a 650 foot long central corridor or “spine.” Only this spine thrusts out of the ground, appearing like a “knife edge across the landscape” (Safdie 2006, 94). Inside the building, this spine is experienced as a sky-lit passage of soaring height which visitors cross and recross in their progress through the dark and subterranean galleries of the museum. The last of these galleries is the dramatic Hall of Names – a circular gallery whose walls are lined with cabinets that hold Yad Vashem’s archive of information dedicated to the six million victims of the Holocaust. In this gallery the ceiling shoots up to the sky in a 30 foot high cone lined with photographs of the dead; below, a reciprocal cone, deep and inky-black, burrows into the bedrock, in honor of the victims whose names will never be known. Then visitors re-enter the central spine and take in its final flourish as it broadens into a terrace that is dramatically cantilevered over a magnificent view of the hills of Jerusalem. After the long, deep, and dark path through the galleries that recount the grim history of the Holocaust, the emergence into this preternatural degree of brightness and elevation is like an out-of-body experience. Spread at the visitors’ feet, the land of Israel is offered not as a place but as a vision, one that fulfills the epigraph from the Book of Ezekiel engraved onto the museum’s entryway: “I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil” (Ezekiel 37:14).

It is hard to miss the symbolism of the museum’s pathway that takes us through the horrors of the Holocaust, and delivers us unto Jerusalem. That a Holocaust museum should conclude by presenting Israel as a necessary refuge for the Jewish community is not unusual (indeed it is routine); what is extraordinary here is Safdie’s capacity to restate this trope so eloquently through purely architectural elements of space, height, darkness, light, and siting. The Holocaust History Museum underlines Safdie’s great ability to turn architecture into narrative.