Midreshet Be'er

Together with Creating Memory, Midresher Be’er, pre-army preparatory seminary for young women has developed a Holocaust remembrance annual program. The basis of the program is engendering the creative process after exposure to the memory of the Holocaust in Israeli art and Hebrew poetry with an emphasis on the changing face of generational memory: symbolic versus direct expression, pathos versus antipathos, collective versus private narrative. The program chooses appropriate media for each student – theater, visual arts, creative writing, and Jewish exegesis. Students produce a personal/family narrative-based on a story or a family photo (emphasis on an Intergenerational narrative that involves a turning point or crisis and repair, not necessarily Holocaust related). To do so, they use guided imagination to renew existing Holocaust remembrance paradigms while sharpening the differences between the objective and subjective memory experience and finding a balance between remembering and repressing traumatic memory. The program becomes a multisensory creative experience in evoking memory via sound, smell, taste, and guided imagination inspired via object (i.e., family heirloom), imparting personal tools for writing about memory-avoiding cliches, literary oxymorons, and rhetorical expression (showing not telling).