School ceremonies for Yitzhak Rabin: social construction of civil religion in Israeli schools.

ON 4 NOVEMBER 1995, PRIME MINISTER RABIN was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a religious right-wing law student, while attending a mass rally in support of the peace process with the Palestinians. Many saw this act as the culmination of months of virulent political attacks on Rabin and his policy. The assassination shocked the Israeli people. In response to this tragedy, followers of Rabin proposed the institution of Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin as a way to memorialize his contribution to Israeli society and to inculcate their civil religious ideology.

One of the central questions in discussions about civil religion in modern societies is to what extent a state can enact and institutionalize shared values and moral order through such agencies as schools. (1) It has been suggested that, if we study a case in which there has been an attempt to modify civil religion, we can examine the roles that schools play in its social definition. (2) The addition of the Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin to the national holidays in the Israeli civil religious calendar is such a case.

This paper presents a qualitative study of the social construction of civil religion in observances of Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin in State General and State Religious secondary schools. Three questions are explored: (a) What social construction of cultural identity is being passed on by the Rabin ceremony to the younger generation through state schools, and how does the younger generation relate to it? (b) Do schools simply transmit a consensual civil religion, or are they arenas in which different groups struggle to define the content of civil religion? and (c) Do schools play a unifying integrative role in a diverse society, or do they play a differentiating role, intensifying social cleavage in society and marginalizing sub-groups? These questions were raised immediately after the assassination of Rabin, when many attributed the roots of the assassination to the State religious educational institutions that allegedly inculcated rebellion and opposition to the democratic regime and the peace process.

There is little research of the relation of school ceremonies and rituals to civil religion. More studies have been conducted in Israel than elsewhere; however, most of these have primarily used a "consensual" lens to highlight the important role schools play in inculcating civil religion. Moreover, these studies have not investigated the ways in which individuals or groups experience these observances. (3)

Using the additional lens of critical theory, this study examines the similarities and differences in content, symbols, and form of school ceremonies marking Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin and the reactions of students and teachers to these ceremonies. (4) In order to place these observances in perspective, I compare their content and impact with those of school ceremonies and rituals held in the same year to commemorate the Holocaust, and examine the extent to which these two different memorial days articulate common symbolic meanings of civil religion and have similar impacts on adolescents and sub-groups in Israeli society.