Religion and Memory Entwined: The Role of Religious Groups in Holocaust Remembering. The Case of Ukraine

Religion and Memory Entwined : The Role of Religious Groups in Holocaust Remembering. The Case of Ukraine

In religious studies there is a rich discussion on how social memory can be used for understanding social dimension of religion, how religious communities are constructed through memory, how religions remember, so to say (Hervieu-Leger 2000; Assmann 2006). In my presentation, I want to discuss how religion can be used for better understanding of how social remembrance functions.Based on the analysis of interviews, participant observations, and published sources I want to see how different religious groups – Jewish, Christian (Orthodox and Catholic), Protestant – work for establishing the remembrance of the Holocaust in Ukraine. I want to see what it means for each of the group to engage in the memory work, what this participation brings for shaping the memory as well as for self-understanding and functioning of the group. My empirical material shows that religion opens the ways for building trans- and inter-national memory networks. These networks actively engage in local contexts and through a process of negotiations and adjustments create memory projects that reflect both global and local features. More concretely, I was tracing the work of Jewish memory actors from the USA and Protestant memory actors from Germany who worked on the projects of Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine. In these concrete cases, I was also looking into how local Jewish, Christian and Protestant communities were engaged in this work.

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