COLUMN ONE : New Edge to a Raw Memory : Israelis are debating the Holocaust as never before. The interest is fueled by access to camps in Eastern Europe and disquieting comparisons at home.

JERUSALEM —  During his tour of Nazi death camps in Poland, Aharon Renaan found things much as he expected.

He had read about the cramped bunkhouses for Jewish prisoners, the stark horror of the gas chambers and the cruel efficiency of the crematories. Everyone in Israel is educated about these things. Not a few know about them from experience.

So what Renaan, a high school principal, saw was nothing new. But what he felt was almost indescribable for him and somehow--despite years of reading and hearing about the Holocaust--surprising.

“It was like a shock treatment. There was no time to breathe, to talk. My views of the Holocaust did not change. I had seen plenty of pictures and films,” he said. “But the emotions. . . . “

Renaan’s pilgrimage is only one of a variety of ways in which Israelis are paying new attention to the experience of the Holocaust, the collective extermination of 6 million European Jews by the Nazis in World War II. Underlying some of this interest is a burgeoning debate over the position of the Holocaust in Jewish history, the Jewish consciousness and the grim list of world horrors.

During the past summer, the debate reached a boil as controversy mounted over the presence of a Roman Catholic convent on the grounds of Auschwitz, the huge death camp in Poland. Jewish protesters at the site complained that Christians were trying to “steal” the Holocaust and obscure the responsibility of their flock for the killings.

In response, some Jewish commentators argued that militant Jews had made a fetish of the Holocaust by treating it as an exclusive property, something not to be mentioned in the same breath with tragedies visited on other peoples.

The convent issue encompassed some of the hottest questions in the debate: Is the Holocaust unique? Who has the right to interpret and memorialize the terrible events? In the ironic shorthand of the debate, who owns the Holocaust?

“People are probing limits that were once out of bounds politically and maybe psychologically,” said Harry Wall, a representative of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in Jerusalem.

Recently, Shalmi Barmor, the director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, commented to reporters: “We are no longer running to ask ‘What does it mean?’ We are awakening to the event itself.”

The Auschwitz controversy was not the only factor igniting the current explosion of interest; there were commemorations last month of the 50th anniversary of the start of the war; the new accessibility of Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe to Israeli travel; a proliferation of Holocaust memorials and museums abroad, notably in the United States, and a common need to probe the lessons of the Holocaust as they apply to Israel’s response to the Arab uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The increasing interest in the Holocaust is fueled by new generations of Jews. Some, like Renaan, personally return to the sites of the Holocaust. Others investigate it through film, literature and song.

A pair of Israeli rock ‘n’ roll singers recently released an album and made a documentary film about relations among themselves and their parents who survived the Holocaust and the mark the event left on them all. Another movie, “The Summer of Avia,” relates the fact-based story of a woman who fought the Nazis in Europe and who, after the war, came to Israel and became mentally ill. The role is played by the woman’s real-life daughter.

Renaan, 42, traveled to Poland with a group of 180 Israelis, some adults, some students, some religious Jews, some secular. Thousands of Israelis have taken such tours over the past few years as Communist Bloc countries eased travel restrictions for Israelis.

After his return, he and a fellow school principal, Ariella Zeevi, described their visit as inspiring, disorienting and ultimately unsettling.

Their tour was guided by Holocaust survivors whose vivid tales fascinated the travelers. One had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto as a boy. Another recalled the slaying of her teen-age boyfriend at a work camp. The Polish caretaker of a synagogue said he had posed as a German to escape expulsion from Warsaw.

“I spoke excellent German,” he said.

There were moments of wrenching discovery. One traveler stumbled upon the grave of a grandfather at the weed-filled Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. Two women on the tour chatted and determined that they had lived in the same Auschwitz dormitory. Another expressed disappointment at finding that her parents’ house in Warsaw exists no more.

Bits of detail brought home the special horror of the concentration camps: carefully catalogued receipts for delivery of the poisonous Zyklon B gas for the death chambers; printed explanations above the dissecting table about the extraction of gold teeth from the dead; the countless hats and shoes once worn by the inmates; seven tons of ashes from the crematory at Maidanek.

And there was the suffocating, subjective unease that the travelers were in enemy territory. Are the spanking-new monuments marking Holocaust atrocities a reflection of national condolence to the Jews or merely bait for tourist dollars? Did the band at the hotel play the Broadway tune “If I Were a Rich Man” as a sincere greeting or a kitschy put-down? What did the gawking kids who popped up at every site think of the prayerful ceremonies and the unfurlings of the Israeli flag?

By the end of the tour, the travelers were weary and tense. They pondered whether such tours should be encouraged for students, whether the trauma would be too great. That debate remained unresolved; it came down to the issue of what message young people--or for that matter anyone--might take from such a trip. They look for fertile intellectual ground in which to sow the painful emotions provoked by their visit.

“We must see what the Holocaust means for us now. We have to decide what are the lessons of the Holocaust,” Renaan said.

The most common lesson taken from the tragedy has been to ensure that such a disaster not happen again.

“The feelings of persecution are never very far from the surface in Israel,” noted Wall of the Anti-Defamation League.

But beyond this basic conclusion, interpretations of the meaning of the Holocaust abound.

In Israel, official views of the Holocaust have changed over time. Founders of the state tried to put the Holocaust behind the Jews. To them, it was a symbol of defeat. Jews, they vowed, would never again go to the slaughter like lambs.

Instead, the Zionist pioneers tried to instill in immigrants the self-image of a new Jew--tough, self-reliant, the heir to a new land. The Holocaust could not be visited on such a strengthened being.

But early Zionist ideals withered over time, bound as they were with socialist ideology and a rigidity of thought that many Israelis eventually rejected.

The Likud Party, which first took over the government in 1977 and has held or shared power ever since, adapted Holocaust terminology to its nationalist views and methods of handling relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

The two Likud prime ministers, Menachem Begin and now Yitzhak Shamir, have evoked the Holocaust to deflect criticism, especially from the outside world but also sometimes from within.

Shamir equates Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with Adolf Hitler. Palestinians are solely dedicated to the extermination of the Jews, Shamir says. Jews who support the cause of Palestinian independence, in his phrase, “support the worst enemies of the Jewish people.”

During the 22 months of the Arab uprising, Palestinians have stepped up use of Holocaust terminology to describe their fate at the hands of the Israelis. It is common to hear Arabs, as they chafe under military occupation, compare Israeli troops to Nazis.

Some Israeli citizens themselves have become uncomfortable with military practices that harken back to styles of Nazi repression. Israelis are quick to dismiss any attempt at symmetry between the Holocaust and current events, but the parallels are upsetting nonetheless: deportations, confiscation of property, the midnight visits of troops battering down doors, jailings without trial, the issuance of special identification cards to restrict entry from the teeming Gaza Strip into Israel, the instances of troops abusing prisoners with the excuse of following orders and the shooting down in the streets of rebellious Arabs, sometimes armed with stones or gasoline bombs, sometimes unarmed.

Educator Zeevi, choosing her words carefully so as not to evoke disproportionate comparisons, advised: “We have to learn not to turn from being the oppressed into being the oppressor,” and added, “The uprising and the Holocaust cannot be compared, but there are elements common to both.”

As time distances the world from the Holocaust, Jewish commentators have become concerned that it will fade from consciousness or come to be seen as only one of many grim episodes in a barbaric century. But establishing the proper place of the Holocaust in history is the subject of intense debate.

Some experts set out to foster the notion of the Holocaust as a unique event that must be viewed apart from the ravages visited on other peoples at other times. In their minds, Jews were killed because they were Jews, and the goal was to erase Jews from the Earth, a campaign without precedent.

“It didn’t matter if you were a Jew eating bacon on the Sabbath,” said Aharon Renaan. “You were a target for persecution because you were Jewish.”

The defense of the unique nature of the Holocaust lay behind some of the outcry over the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. It was viewed not only as a religious desecration--the large cross erected at the building offended many Jews--but also as an underhanded attempt to gloss over the special horror of the Holocaust.

The implicit treatment of Auschwitz as just another war cemetery drew expressions of resentment.

“We’re talking about symbols,” said Wall. “The place not only evokes memories for those who were there, but it must remain a memorial for those who were slaughtered simply because they were Jews.

“The Holocaust should not be thrown into the hopper of history. It loses a tremendous amount of force.”

Wall also viewed the convent as an affront because of the unresolved controversy over whether the Vatican had done enough to curb the Holocaust. “The conflict brings out the recollection of the lack of activism by another Pope in another time,” he said.

Jewish critics see in the affair a trend that tends to diminish the injury done to Jewry in the Holocaust. Travelers Zeevi and Renaan noted that in Poland, most Holocaust sites lacked references to the fact that Jews were the main and often sole victims of the death camps. “Signs would say that lots of people were killed here,” said Zeevi. “Just people, not Jews.”

Theological tensions also erupted over the presence of the convent. Sergio Minerbi, a former Israeli diplomat, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that the Roman Catholic Church was bent on “Christianizing” the Holocaust.

Such suspicions were heightened by the reluctance of Pope John Paul II to enforce a two-year-old agreement between Polish prelates and Jewish leaders to remove the convent. But the Pope later said publicly that he believes the convent should be moved, and the Polish church hierarchy has agreed to do so.

Ownership of the idea of the Holocaust has become a topic of discussion, a point of tension not only between Jews and non-Jews but also among Jews themselves.

Some of the give-and-take has centered on the inclination to separate the Holocaust from the catalogue of other human disasters.

Recently, a controversy broke out over efforts of Jewish lobbying groups in Washington, with the backing of the Israeli Embassy, to get the Senate to reject a resolution declaring a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The day would commemorate the 1915 massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Turkey.

Turkey considers the resolution a slap in the face, linking it to Hitlerism, and prodded Israel to make the lobbying effort on its behalf. Turkey, a secular Islamic country, has full diplomatic relations with Israel.

That Jewish sensitivities about the Holocaust should be employed against another oppressed group’s commemoration of a past horror offended many observers here.

“Those who very justifiably appeal to the conscience of the world not to forget or downplay the Jewish Holocaust cannot demand that the genocide of another nation be played down for any reason whatsoever,” the Maariv newspaper commented. “Perhaps if the world had not remained silent about the murder of the Armenians, it would have been more difficult to murder six million Jews a quarter of a century later.”

Added Moshe Kohn, a columnist in the Jerusalem Post: “The Jewish lobbyists have not honored our people by supporting the efforts to deny the Armenians ‘their’ Holocaust.”

In Jewish debate, efforts to portray the Jewish Holocaust in concrete memorials were viewed not only as overly exclusive but idolatrous by some critics. In a series of articles published a few months ago in Tikkun, the liberal American Jewish magazine, contributors discussed, sometimes in acid tones, the style as well as substance of Holocaust remembrance.

Writer Phillip Lopate likened Yad Vashem to a “Disneyland park devoted to Jewish suffering.”

“What disturbs me finally is the exclusivity of the singular usage, the Holocaust, which seems to cut off the event from all others, and to diminish, if not demean, the mass slaughter of other people--or for that matter, previous tragedies in Jewish history,” he said.

In response, Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer wrote: “There is of course no contradiction at all between stating that anti-Semitism is a phenomenon that is larger or deeper than what we usually call “prejudice,” or that the Holocaust is unique . . . and identifying with “other” victims as well.”

BACKGROUND

As part of his plan to conquer the world, Adolf Hitler planned to wipe out the Jewish population--and he came close with the Holocaust. By the end of the war in 1945, the Nazis had killed about 6 million Jewish men, women and children--over two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. They also killed many members of other ethnic groups, especially Gypsies and Poles. Millions of Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps, where they were either worked to death or killed with poison gas. Those unable to work--the aged, the sick, many women and most children--were gassed. Doctors also performed cruel experiments on some prisoners. The Germans kept their actions as secret as possible, deceiving victims in many ways to prevent resistance.