ABSTRACT

On May 11, 1982, the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin presided over an elaborate ceremony in which the skeletal remains of nineteen persons were reburied on a cliff overlooking Nachal Chever, a remote spot in the Judean Desert. The bones were proclaimed to be remains of the followers of Bar Kochba, the heroic-yet-failed leader of the second century Jewish revolt against Roman rule, and they had been discovered in nearby caves twenty years earlier by Yigal Yadin, the celebrated Israeli archeologist. The event itself was entirely contrived, there was no way to really know whose bones had been reburied. To be sure, such re-designs are not without heated debate and contention, the ideology of 'Jews as victims' has its critics as well as supporters, and yet national memory and memorials may be continuously reshaped and presented anew.