A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERStaken the form of rethinking the meaning of a Jewish covenant with God in the context
of a set of theologico-political perspectives that is sometimes referred to as ‘‘Holocaust
theology.’’ This literature has implications for a religious legitimization of the testimonial
role of the Israeli state, entitling it to exceptional political loyalties because it bears witness
to (and serves to prevent a repetition of) an exceptional history of victimization. The
writings of authors such as Irving Greenberg, Elie Wiesel, and Emil Fackenheim, grant
this legitimization to Israel by affirming a connection, not only historical but also theolog-
ical and ethical, between the Shoah as paradigm of the suffering and quasi-annihilation
of Jews as a testimonial community, on the one hand, and the creation of the state of
Israel, on the other. After the Shoah, supporting the Zionist project is to these authors
the ‘‘614th commandment’’ for Jews, as Fackenheim put it,^46 one that has as much reli-
gious value as the other 613 because it is the only way to ensure the survival of the chosen
people in a history from which God can be absent.
As authors such as Marc Ellis have noted, the influence of Holocaust theology on
Israeli Judaism, as well as on the discourse of the religious and even secular right in Israel,
has grown significantly since the 1970s. Beyond the basic notion that support for Israel
should be advocated as part and parcel of the Jewish imperative to bear witness to the
Shoah, neither such theology nor the religious and political discourses that echo it offer
univocal positions concerning how the Jewish state should best bear witness to the Shoah,
what kind of support it may rightly claim from world Jewry, and whether or not such
support may be conditional upon how it plays its testimonial role. In the history of insti-
tutions tasked with ‘‘creating the Israeli citizen,’’ the significance of the Shoah has also
been interpreted in different ways, and its presence in public discourse, identity narratives,
and socialization practices has not always been central. On the contrary, only since the
1970s has the Shoah become a prominent component of mainstream narratives of Jewish
Israeliness, and this process has continued through the 1980s and 1990s, partly in re-
sponse to significant emigration, which has led Zionist institutions to seek ways to reassert
the link between Israel as a Jewish state and the ever-present possibility of a repetition of
the Shoah. Today, a recrudescence of anti-Semitism in Europe and precarious security
conditions in Israel contribute to keeping the Shoah at the center of public discourse,
despite open debate concerning its historical significance and its implications for Israeli
politics and for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to Rabbi Ehud Bandel, a founding member of RHR and chair of the con-
servative movement in Israel, the centrality of Holocaust trauma to contemporary Israeli
identity cannot be stressed too much, but it does not amount to clear support for a
specific political project. The peculiar legacy of the Shoah rests in its unspeakable enor-
mity, which can only generate a call to ‘‘bear witness’’ and to ensure that ‘‘never again’’
will such horror be allowed. The specific ethical, political, and religious responses that
can be given to such interpellation vary, however, both in relation to Israeli politics and
for Jewish communities in other countries. In general, Bandel’s view is that a proper
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