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This paper analyzes redemptive narratives constructed by Mashhadi Jewish immigrants through oral histories, memoirs, and life stories collected across generations. It examines how conceptions of religion, community, and family shaped their meaning-making around migration challenges. The first case study examines Malka Aharonoff's lamentation reconstructed from religious redemption across generations into a Zionist narrative. The second analyzes Esther Amini's published memoir, which reconciles her story with that of her immigrant parents through narrative, demonstrating its role across generations with gender as the focal point. The later cases of Aharon Namdar and Mehran Bassal present individual oral histories, capturing major migration waves from Iran, playing out the differing import and expression given to Zionism and to religion by different immigrants. The study explores how selective appropriation and cultural translation occurred between generations. It sheds light on ideological and cultural frameworks underlying immigrant perspective. By comparing narratives emphasizing collective redemption versus individual experiences, it offers insights into identity formation and the role of memory in immigrant communities dispersing over time. By demonstrating narrative's therapeutic role in processing dislocation across generations, the study sheds light on cultural transmission and identity formation within dispersed immigrant communities. It offers a fresh perspective on their migration experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I look at the presentation of the Holocaust in the Israel Museum Jerusalem (IMJ) from its inception with special regard to the permanent exhibition after its refurbishment in 2010. It provides us with a "text" on Jewish identity of importance commensurate with the respect that the Israel Museum commands within the Jewish-Israeli cultural scene. I will do so by closely reading the presentation of the Holocaust within Israeli wider discourse on the Holocaust and its changing place in the formation of the Jewish Israeli civil religion; the IMJ both reflecting and aiming to influence toward a secular humanistic version of the state's civil religion. Before the 2010 refurbishment, the Holocaust was presented by very few temporary exhibitions that presented the Holocaust within a framework of a universalist version of Zionism. After 2010 the Holocaust was represented at the IMJ as Yom Ha-Shoah (Holocaust Day), in a central position that ties it to both traditional and secular holy days as a vital link within Israel's civil religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to chart the influence of communal heritage and social history on the absorption of the Mashhadi community in Israel during the 1950s, with a special focus on its women. The central argument is that the status of Mashhadi women continued to be shaped by their past membership in a crypto-faith community. Interviews with Mashhadi women who immigrated to Israel during the 1950s suggest that this heritage was the basis for two contradictory patterns of absorption. Their close-knit ethnic communal ties would continue in Israel-as they have indeed been sustained in other lands of immigration. At the same time, their vision of Israel as the land of ultimate redemption allowed for the dissolution of the underground community and for individual assimilation into the wider Jewish-Israeli society. These women echo a yearning for past communal warmth and mutual help while expressing a deep satisfaction in taking part in the process of redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]