1 Maria Piekarska
Faculty of “Artes Liberales”
University of Warsaw
Summary of the doctoral dissertation
Title of the dissertation: Forest as a space of commemoration in Jewish-Israeli memory culture
The aim of the dissertation
Modern Israeli forests are outcomes of mass afforestation efforts executed in unfavourable natural conditions by the Jewish National Fund (the JNF), following a set of socioeconomic, ideological and political Zionist motivations. At the same time, planting trees in Mandatory Palestine and later in the state of Israel was linked with the intention of commemorating specific individuals or groups. Donated by Jews from Israel and the Diaspora alike, trees, groves, and forests were – and are – attributed with mnemonic character, forming a repeatable pattern of commemoration in Jewish-Israeli memory culture.
The existing academic analyses of Israeli forests are focused on symbolism and symbolic violence that accompanied the early plantings, with little examples of forest mnemonic features. Such an approach puts forests in a closed category of a Zionist artefact, without much substance outside the ideological frames. In particular lost here becomes the individual agency of those who decide to commemorate in forests, and the more-than-human agency as a component of this commemorative practice. Moreover, much has changed in recent decades, and the patterns of Israeli forest commemorations developed beyond the initial stereotypical mechanisms. The proposed thesis addresses these gaps and offers a contemporary take on this locally grounded phenomenon of “green” memory.
The aim of the thesis is to analyse the role that forest spaces hold in the Jewish-Israeli memory culture. The focus of research is forests in the state of Israel, both those planted with commemorative intention, and those that have become a repository of material commemorations during their lifetime. This phenomenon is placed in the broader context of roles that the natural environment holds in memory practices – as a carrier of symbolic meanings and as an acting element of the memorial space. The conducted analysis then combines the culturally grounded symbolism of forest with its materiality as a living ecosystem undergoing constant changes.
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The opening hypothesis is that despite the contemporary weakening of the Zionist ideology in the sociocultural life of Jewish-Israeli society, forests continue to hold a particular role in Jewish-Israeli memory culture as spaces where commemorative practices take regular place. In order to verify, deepen, and define reasons for this assumption, the thesis addresses the following questions: how do Israeli forests function as spaces of commemoration? How do they differ from “standard” commemorative sites? What effects do the commemorative vehicles introduced on forest grounds induce? How does the natural environment act as a part of such commemorations, both symbolically and materially? Who uses forests as spaces of commemoration? What values do forest commemorations promote? Do the contemporary ones re-invent their original Zionist meanings?
The value of the proposed thesis results from the dual perspective that considers Israeli forests as both an innate element of the local memory culture, as well as a repeated form of organic commemoration. Using such an approach highlights the specificity of this Israeli phenomenon, deeply rooted in the local environmental imaginary and memory culture, while also providing more universal insights into the possible mnemonic functions of forests. The particular Jewish-Israeli context is then located in a broader reflection on the nexus of nature and memory.
Methods and sources
The theoretical framework selected for the thesis acknowledges the different levels and dimensions of memory culture, and tracks the interrelated material-symbolic character of commemorations. Special attention is given to the distinct character of commemorations using organic matter (environmental memorials), as well as the varying interpretations of the environment present in different cultures (environmental hermeneutics). The original study is based on mixed sources and methods aiming at cross-checking of the obtained material, with an emphasis on the repeated fieldwork in Israel. The applied combination allows for a contemporary diagnosis of the role of forests in Jewish-Israeli memory culture.
The basis of the research was fieldwork conducted on the grounds of Israeli forests in the years 2017, 2019-2020 and 2021-2022. Direct experience of their spaces, including walkover surveys and site observations focused on physical commemorations, which resulted in production of field notes and photographs, was a necessary step that allowed for posing further questions around the observed tropes. Whenever the opportunity arose, observations of the forest visitors behaviour were made, as well as brief exchanges about their forest experiences. With that, on the basis of simultaneity of research practices, two bodies of
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methods were used. Firstly, archival research on the creation and functioning of early memorial forests was conducted. This included analysis of the JNF administrative documents and promotional materials, photographs and archival newspaper coverage, found respectively in the Central Zionist Archives, the JNF Photo Archive, and the National Library of Israel.
Secondly, semi-structured interviews were conducted on more recently established forest commemorations, as well as the contemporary policies and attitudes. Interviewees were the JNF representatives in charge of landscape architecture, forest management and commemorations, as well as initiators or architects of selected sites. Also, contemporary promotional materials and media coverage were tracked.
Structure of the dissertation
The thesis opens with an Introduction providing the aims of the research. The first chapter delineates the current state of the art and provides the theoretical foundation of the analysis. Here, the core concepts of the thesis are conceptualized, and the description of the methodology and sources is provided. In the second chapter, I provide the historical and socio-political context of Israeli forests, highlighting continuities from which memorial forests emerged in the newly developing Jewish settlement and state.
In the third chapter, the two largest memorial forests of collective character of the early statehood, the Defenders Forest and the Martyrs Forest, are examined as environmental memorials, using organic substance as both the symbolic and the building component. In the fourth chapter I address the most common commemoration found on the Israeli forest grounds, the standardized name-bearing stones. With their large number and enduring material presence, I follow practical, symbolic and material concerns that their omnipresence generated over time. The fifth chapter considers the ambiguous bond between two functions of Israeli forests, that is, commemoration and recreation. Departing from an overview of the local recreation-memorial merger, I focus on its particular form, that is memorial trails, in particular their influence on the social, material and mental dimensions of memory culture.
The thesis ends with Conclusions that summarize the earlier chapters and address the research questions posed in the Introduction. In the following Postscript, foreseen as a supplement delineating future research prospects, I look at the Jewish-Israeli commemorative practices on the grounds of the Łopuchowo Forest in Poland.
Conclusions
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The conducted analysis proved that the forest in Israel is an intrinsic element of the local memory culture. While the act of commemorative tree planting introduced during the Yishuv period have been deduced from the redemptive narratives of Zionism, its ritualized character and the resulting amalgamation of the individual into the communal related to the preceding mechanisms of Jewish diasporic memory. Trees, collectively planted-in-memory as gardens, groves, and forests, became a ready to be used remembrance template for varying occasions, both at the individual/private and communal/public levels. Still, memorial planting was immediately involved in the utilitarian state-building narrative, often dissolving their commemorative intentions within the communal framework. Tracing the origins and early stages of the Defenders and the Martyrs Forests in Chapter 3 provided examples of these blurred lines between the individual need of commemorating and the communal evocation of ideologized life in the newly established Jewish state.
At the same time, the analysed forests evoked nature-based symbolism of not only clear Zionist character, i.a. renewing the Jewish bond with the land and making it bloom, but also that relating to the innate features of vegetative commemorations – resilience and continued life that goes against the past destruction and loss. Moreover, with trees presented as “green candles” or “statues”, their unruly organic vitality introduced tension between the expected permanence of a memorial and the actual impermanence that a forest embodies. The forest-planted-as-a-memorial is not a finite physical object but a dynamic process: it reaches its intended shape after a long time from the moment of ceremonial planting, when paradoxically, the memory of the monument itself often disappears. These commemorations then are set not only in the "social" time, requiring immediate results, but also in the
"ecological" time, unhurried, though constant, aimed at long-term effects.
The analysis conducted in Chapter 3 revealed an important quality that forests hold in the Jewish-Israeli memory culture. With the creation of a forest in Israel, a certain space is created, deemed suitable for subsequent memorial devices – a “repository” for new commemorations. Therefore, a forest acts locally as a space of remembrance not due to the significance of trees planted for memory as “green monuments,” or due to their symbolic Zionist provenance, but because of the forest space as such. It shows how in the Israeli case not only “forest-planted-as-a-memorial” can hold commemorative importance, but any forest can gain such a role through the introduction of subsequent commemorative vehicles.
Moreover, Israeli forests are recognized in the local context as appropriate “environments” for remembrance; memorial additions to their grounds are not unusual and are not considered ill- suited in this organic setting.
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Forest therefore serves as an important space for the material dimension of Jewish- Israeli memory culture, accepting to its grounds consequent memorial artefacts. This character of forest growing as an organic-memorial assemblage can be seen as a narrative advantage.
The “changeability” of forests as repositories for new commemorations makes them easier to adapt to the present shape of memory culture. These material additions also highlight the bottom-up initiative that is prevalent in forest commemorations, serving as spaces for individual performances of memory.
As Chapter 4 showed, the appearance of name-bearing stones was the constitutive moment for designing the forest as a space of commemoration, providing reasons for further memorial performances on its grounds. Stone then was an antidote to the impermanent character of forest as a memorial, a “stable” interpretation in the “unstable” memorial environment. Stones’ all-presence simultaneously created all-encompassing absences, of those whose names they mention, as well as those who initiated their construction and never returned. Being left on forest grounds for years, stones go through processes of destruction from both human and nonhuman factors: making it possible for the “abandoned” memory to depart, and another one to arrive.
Yet this “transformative in time” potential of a forest, able to let go of memory that is no longer supported by social practices, is not used, due to decision to duplicate all decaying stones on the new commemorative walls located at the central entrances of forests. Yet, as the example of Memorial Site for Czechoslovakian Jews shows, it is possible to address the maintenance of the stones in a way that acknowledges forest’s temporality; the shape of the introduced wall that fades into the soil, as well as its foreseen disintegration in time, signals the willingness to let human memory fade in time.
However, the evocation of the “curated decay” in the context of name-bearing stones in Israeli forests revealed the dangers of such progressive policies in terms of memorial processes. Comparison of the “stony regimes of care” – that of Jewish name-bearing stones being actively preserved and Palestinian stone ruins deliberately left to decay – shows how these intentional and unintentional memory carriers coexist side by side, constituting two separate forest-memorial landscapes. Leaving commemorations to fade away in the organic processes of decomposition then, though originating from the contemporary posthumanist reflection, evokes the power dimensions of the forest memorial practices, indispensable in the Israeli context. Any consideration of a forest planted in Israel must then relate to the physical
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and symbolic violence that occurred at some of the forest sites, previously settled by Palestinian villages.
Similarly, the analysis of memorial trails in Chapter 5 showed that the potential to
“transform the narrative” of a forest is not used either. Their example did prove how the forest acts as a space capable of accommodating new stories and introducing them into the prevailing memorial order. However, they did not offer examples of new additions that would intentionally disrupt or challenge the predominant codes that shape collective remembering in a community. Instead, the practice of walking the land used for remembrance immediately evokes the unavoidable associations with the Zionist values of knowing and loving the land.
The resulting reification of meta-narratives acts against the “open” narrative quality of a forest. Central here seems to be the role of the Jewish National Fund as the caretaker of Israeli forests; it is the JNF that decides what will materialize on forest grounds, and so it takes care of the inclusion of stories appropriate for the existing socio-political order. As such, the potential of forest as a tool of change in memory culture remains unfulfilled; instead, forests serve as stabilizers of the mental dimension of memory culture.
The analysis conducted in Chapter 5 showed also how the recreational-memorial sites in forests are not about the “living” of the organic, but about the “living” of the human.
Despite the seemingly contradictory character, the two interpretations of forest as a space of commemoration and recreation coincide well, highlighting one of the cores of Jewish-Israeli memory culture: its dedication to the ongoing life. Forests, encompassing recreational sites established in-memory-of, serve as sites of gatherings that celebrate the communal life in particular time and space. Therefore, forests fulfilled their original ambitions, openly expressed at the commemorative planting ceremonies in the early state: creating living spaces for future generations.
In the thesis, I have demonstrated how the contexts of forests in Israel are many and interwoven. The interpretation proposed in this thesis, that is, forest as a space of commemoration, constantly corresponds with other interpretations: ecological, socio-political, recreational. In this web of correlations, the varying levels of memory culture reflected in forests are easily omitted among the predominant critical voices that see forests solely as artefacts – or maybe more so, ecofacts – of the Zionist ideology. Going beyond this immediate association, the thesis contributed a record of the relationship between forest and memory characteristic for Jewish-Israeli context, and provided possible universal contexts to be used for other examples of environmental memory.
