In David Grossman's “Land of There”

This chapter examines a pedagogical and artistic process that took place at the Emunah Efrata Academic College of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 2023–2024. Conducted with students of art and education, the project explored the esthetic and ethical challenges of engaging with Holocaust memory through creative practice, particularly when direct generational ties to the trauma are absent. Focusing on mask and puppet theater, this chapter considers how such forms can serve as spaces for grappling with inherited trauma and violence, historical or contemporary. The first section questions whether memory can truly be “created,” suggesting instead that memory emerges through sustained dialogue with powerful works of art and through communal, relational processes. The second section follows a workshop in which students collaboratively adapted David Grossman’s Momik (from See Under: Love ) into a visual and embodied performance. Drawing on insights from Martin Buber and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the authors reflect on how shared creative labor can cultivate empathy, agency, and ethical responsibility, and on the potential of esthetic education to bridge between historical memory and the urgencies of the present.