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viii Abstract

After the war, Prager devoted his life to researching the missing
chapter of Haredi life under Nazi occupation and to the commemoration
of the Holocaust. He contributed considerably to the shaping of the
memory of this period within Israeli society in general, and within the
Haredi population in particular, focusing on educating the younger Haredi
generations. He viewed this as his greatest calling: ‘I was saved only so
as not to let the memory of the Holocaust be forgotten […] like everyone,
I was set aflame at the crematorium. It is not power that drives me. I am an
emissary of the public. I was saved so as not to let matters rest’.

This book seeks to fill this important missing chapter in the picture of
the coping of Israeli society with the Holocaust.

Tracing Prager’s worldview, ideas, and incessant work of over
four decades, this book examines the narrative he wished to bequeath
to future generations and explores the impact Prager made on various
social sectors of Israeli society.

The book presents an intellectual biography of how an educated,
Eastern-European Hasidic Jew coped with the horrors of the Holocaust
and reveals important chapters in the development of Israeli Holocaust
remembrance: early writing about the Holocaust, Haredi writing about
the Holocaust and the interwovenness of Haredi society in the general
development.

During his first two decades in Israel, Prager was a public figure
and journalist, whose essays appeared in newspapers Davar and
Davar LaYeladim. He was also a close friend of David Ben-Gurion,
later becoming his personal advisor during the Eichmann trial. He
eventually grew disappointed with the state’s attitude towards tradition
and religion, a matter which eventually drove him away from secular
society. This personal journey created the formation of an alternative
history – a Haredi historiography of the Holocaust. To that end, this
book also ventures into the alternative Haredi memory of the Holocaust,
a memory shaped in part by Prager himself and expressed through his
life’s work – the Haredi Yad Vashem: Ganzach Kiddush Hashem.