The outbreak of the corona pandemic has serious effects on Holocaust commemoration. Many commemorative institutions (national institutions, memorial museums, memorials) responded to the restrictions with an intensification of digital commemoration activities on a variety of social media platforms, and with constricted on-site commemoration events. Our study focuses on new hybrid forms of commemoration ceremonies in memorials, memorial museums, and state institutions, which were and still are developed in 2020/21.
The pandemic affected commemoration ceremonies that are annually hold from January 27 (liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, International Holocaust Remembrance Day) to April/May, including Yom HaShoah (27 Nissan). Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in spring 2020, many commemorative institutions and memorial sites had to cancel originally planned commemoration ceremonies due to the COVID-19 restrictions, and instead intensified digital activities that changed existing commemorative practices.

We just published our online survey, which collects information on the challenges posed on Holocaust commemoration by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of commemorative institutions worldwide, we are trying to understand how the pandemic is changing Holocaust remembrance days and how they are celebrated during COVID-19. If you want to participate in the survey, please contact the project coordinator: Tom Divon (HUJI). 

Our research project is based on the presumption that the new virtual commemoration practices are by no means just a "substitute solution" and differ from previous media communication of traditional commemoration (as it has already been the case in the past, for example with TV broadcasts of liberation ceremonies in Auschwitz Birkenau or at the Mauthausen Memorial).Instead, the virtual formats and the related new media platforms require a fundamental redesign of memorial acts. Thus, our analysis focuses on new hybrid forms of commemoration at memorials, memorial museums, and state institutions.

A project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences/ IKT Institute for Culture Studies and History of Theater and the Hebrew University Jerusalem/European Forum

More information: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ikt/forschung/orte-des-gedaechtnisses-erinnerungsraeume/holocaust-remembrance-in-times-of-covid-19