Claiming the Dead: Israeli Postmortem Citizenship for Holocaust Victims, 1950–1955

Abstract: This article examines the Israeli initiative in the 1950s to confer postmortem citizenship upon Holocaust victims. This commemoration initiative, which became a clause in the law establishing Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Center, failed. Jewish communities in the diaspora refused to make their dead an endowment to the State of Israel. Tracing the history of this extraordinary idea and the various discussions about it, I show that it was not merely a national Holocaust commemoration initiative, but a transnational legal, political and moral debate between a new nation-state and its diaspora regarding the terms and boundaries of a new national citizenship.