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Whoever thought up the humorous truism "nostalgia is a thing of the past" obviously didn't live to see the retro era take off. This year's Independence Day will, no doubt, be celebrated with the usual all-out plastic hammer and silly-string spray attacks, but there will also be a generous number of events with a decidedly "yesteryear" slant to them.
One of the main items in this year's Independence Day program is the grandly titled exhibition "Glory and Splendor - the State's First Ceremonies" at Tel Aviv's Eretz Yisrael Museum. While such a definitive project is an event of no little prestige, anyone organizing an exhibition of this nature must, presumably, also be capable of tiptoeing through a potential political minefield.
How, for instance, does the curator decide on the exhibits which offer an accurate picture of how things really were during the first decade of Israel's existence? Then, there is the perspective of time and political interpretations of the way things were run back then. It can't be easy putting together a collection of such important memorabilia.
"Yes, it's quite a responsibility to put on something like 'Glory and Splendor,'" says exhibition curator Batya Donner. "But, you know, current research on the first years of the state is mostly based on 'secular' tools, research means designed to break down the so-called 'holy' phenomena. In those days there really was a sense of holiness about the rituals and all things official."
If anyone knows about such matters, it's Donner. She put on a similar exhibition, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in 1989 called "Living with the Dream," which focused on the application of the Zionist dream between the 1930s and the end of the 1960s.
"Glory and Splendor" houses over 300 items covering a wide range of Independence Day ceremonial activities and, as Donner explains, it is a sort of "exhibition within an exhibition."
"Most of the exhibits are photographs. But it is less about showing the actual ceremonies and more about the way in which the events were documented. When you look at the photographs you see the same images time and time again. You see torches being lit, soldiers marching or standing to attention in honor guards.
"The photographers created stereotypes...