Camp survivor critical of Israel’s use of Holocaust
‘Existential angst’ a result of politics
Professor Yehuda Elkana, who has died at age 78, was a historian and philosopher of science and a controversial critic of the “Holocaust industry” and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Elkana was a survivor of Auschwitz, so when, in 1988, he published an article in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on “The Need to Forget,” few could question his credentials.
Here called that he had been transported to Auschwitz as a boy of 10 and, after the camp was liberated, spent some time in a Russian “liberation camp,” where he encountered Germans, Austrians, Croats, Ukrainians, Hungarians and Russians, as well as fellow Jews. Later he concluded that “there was not much difference in the conduct of many of the people I encountered. … It was clear to me that what happened in Germany could happen anywhere and to any people.”
Moving to Israel after the war, Elkana experienced profound unease with the way in which the Holocaust was being manipulated by governments of right and left to craft an atavistic Jewish national identity. He became convinced that the motives behind Israel’s uncompromising approach to the Palestinians was “a profound existential ‘angst’ fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim.”
While all societies needed a collective mythology (and Elkana was critical of those in Germany who want to “close the chapter” of the Holocaust), “any philosophy of life nurtured solely or mostly by the Holocaust leads to disastrous consequences.”
In a later interview Elkana spelled out his fears for where this philosophy was leading Israel: “We are heading toward turning 100 million Arabs into a terrorist army against us: the whole Arab world! The United States wants to support rational, moderate Arabs. And ration- al, moderate Arabs will tolerate Israel’s occupation of Arab land less and less. So what is there to look forward to if we go on this way?”
Yehuda Elkana was born to Hungarian-Jewish parents at Subotica, in what was then Yugoslavia, on June 16, 1934.
In 1944 the family moved to Szeged in Hungary where, later that year, they were rounded up and transported to Auschwitz. They survived by sheer accident. As they were being lined up for the gas chambers, SS guards pulled them out of the line and sent them in a train with other Jews to clean up Allied bomb damage in Austrian cities. They made it to Israel in 1948.
After studying mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he took a PhD in the philosophy of science at Brandeis University in the United States and taught at Harvard for a year. .
He returned to Israel as chairman of the department of the history and philosophy of science at the Hebrew University.
From 1969 to 1993 Elkana was founder-director of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, which works to reduce tensions among the different groups in Israeli society and challenge taboos.
After retiring in 2009 he went on to oversee an international program aimed at reforming undergraduate curricula. He was the coauthor, with Hannes Klopper, of The University in the 21st Century: Teaching at the Dawn of the Digital Age (2011).
In 1960 he married Yehudit Keren, who became a prominent Israeli peace campaigner. She survives him with their two daughters and two sons.