Study: Grief Israelis feel on Holocaust Remembrance Day can help ease political rifts
Hebrew University social psychologists find that periodic national days of mourning and commemoration can serve the important purpose of reducing ideological antagonism
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
A new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem indicates that the sadness we feel on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) serves a positive political purpose.
The collective grief Jewish Israelis feel can mitigate the polarization and increase the cohesion in our society — at least temporarily, it says.
The peer-reviewed study, published in February in Political Psychology, looked at affective polarization, which is the tendency to dislike, distrust and maintain hostile attitudes toward supporters of other political parties or ideologies.
“Affective polarization is one of the great risks that we face as a society in Israel, and also worldwide,” said Dr. Tamar Gur, who led the study under the guidance of Professor Eran Halperin when she was a PhD candidate in political psychology.
“We can even see violence between different political groups among Israeli Jews. They are all Jews, and yet they go at each other’s throats so viciously. Affective polarization is something that is really harmful and dangerous and it’s getting worse with time,” added Gur, who is now doing a post-doc at the Adelson School of Entrepreneurship at Reichman University.
During her studies at the Hebrew University, Gur researched sadness in-depth and saw we are not as extreme in our views toward members of out-groups — people not in the group to which we belong — when we are sad.
She wanted to see if the same held within our Israeli Jewish group. Would people’s feelings of sadness make rightists a little less rightist and leftists a little less leftist? Would they at least be kinder to one another?
“Memorial days are such a good opportunity to look at this. Society created these days for people to remember that they’re a part of the same group, share their sadness, and maintain a feeling of togetherness,” Gur said.
Gur chose to focus on Holocaust Remembrance Day rather than other memorial days or solemn days on the Jewish calendar.
When asked by The Times of Israel why she did not look at Israeli Memorial Day, which is a national day of collective grief among almost all Jewish Israelis, Gur explained that it involved too many intervening factors. While the main feelings on Holocaust Remembrance Day are sadness and grief, Memorial Day also involves elements such as heroism, as well as individual, family, group and national pride.
“Memorial Day is also so closely related to Independence Day, which comes the very next day and involves so much joy,” she said.
The longitudinal study on Holocaust Remembrance Day, conducted in the spring of 2022, involved 517 participants who answered questionnaires several days before, during, and a few days after Holocaust Remembrance Day. Some questions asked about how “warm” or “cool” the participants felt about their political or ideological in-group and out-group within Israel. Other questions asked participants to comment on how much they were feeling various emotions, including sadness.
In applying statistical calculations to the responses, Gur and her team found that during Holocaust Remembrance Day, people felt it was more normative to feel sadness. They believed they were expected to feel sadness, leading them to feel more of the emotion.
“We discovered that this sadness led them to be less negative or have more warmth toward the out-group,” Gur said.
“But we must keep in mind that this is a partial mediation. Sadness is not the only factor but it is one of the mechanisms [for this mitigation of antagonism],” she added.
The study found that some of what was seen on Holocaust Remembrance Day lasted, and some did not. While the overall feeling of sadness dissipated as days passed and people returned to their normal routines, some of the reduction in affective polarization remained.
The study points to the beneficial role that national and communal days of mourning and commemoration — and their attendant sadness and grief — placed at various points throughout the year play in maintaining social cohesion.
However, Gur cautioned that despite the consensus among just about all Israeli Jews about the sacredness of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the non-Jewish Israeli population for the most part does not identify with it.
“Since Israel has a Jewish majority, Holocaust Remembrance Day leads to cohesion. But memorial days in various countries around the world can elicit ambivalent responses from some people. Memorial days can alienate groups instead of strengthening the society’s fabric,” Gur noted.
Gur said she could not predict what would happen emotion-wise among Israelis this year during this period of remembrance, in the shadow of the collective trauma of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.
“I don’t have a basis to know what’s going to happen, because this year is so unlike any other. The mix of emotions may be much more complex than we have seen before,” she said.
However, she did observe something similar to the Holocaust Remembrance Day phenomenon demonstrated by her study in the aftermath of October 7.
“Right after October 7, we saw that coming together through sadness, but then, as time goes on, we see the effect has weakened… The unity that was very strong after October 7 is sort of crumbling,” Gur said.
“In terms of what to expect this coming week [with Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day], it is hard to predict. All kinds of emotions are running so high right now,” she said.
