Yad Vashem calls themselves the ‘World Holocaust Remembrance Center’. It was founded in 1953 in Israel. Professor Ben Zion Dinur, who became the first President/Chairman of the organization, was Minister of Education in Israel at the time. He not so willingly resigned several years later in 1959. Why? Because he was actually skeptical of the Holocaust survivor stories and this was problematic.
Israeli historian, Arielle Rein, had this to say about Dinur and his resignation:
“Likewise, these Jews engaged in a lengthy and acrimonious debate with Dinur on the roles to be played respectively by historians and witnesses. For survivor historians, the Shoah was a unique and incomparable event. Thus, it required a special methodology in which survivor testimonies had to take precedence because they had lived it. In their eyes, scientific study and analysis of these testimonies by professional historians could not do justice to such sources. As a result, they demanded of the institution that it adopt a publication policy completely based on witness testimony: newspapers, memoirs and correspondence. In opposition to them, Dinur maintained that research on the Shoah needed to take a rigorously scientific approach. He held that personal testimonies, while essential, are, in the eyes of the professional historian, who alone is trained and capable of evaluating them, nothing more than uncorroborated assertions, and only attain meaning after being vetted by [traditional] historical criticism. (…) Faced with growing opposition to his policy inside the Yad Vashem Institute as well as in a segment of Israeli popular opinion, which took sides with the survivor historians, Dinur resigned from office in 1959.”
After Yad Vashem’s regime change the stories of the survivors were free to be taken at face value and freed from the burden of critical analysis. Which makes me wonder why the Holocaust is the only historical event that needs protection from a ‘rigorously scientific approach’.
This story was obtained from Warren B. Routledge’s book, Elie Wiesel, Saint of the Holocaust—A Critical Biography (pages 187, 188).