In this lecture Amit Shrira (Professor and Clinical Psychologist at the Bar-Ilan University) gave an overview on the Multigenerational Manifestations of Holocaust Effects, current insights and future directions.

The multigenerational manifestations of Holocaust effects have been investigated in hundreds of studies across six decades. Nevertheless, until today these manifestations remained a phenomenon in dispute. Some scholars propose that suffering related to ancestral trauma lingers across generations born after the Holocaust, while others maintain that signs of the Holocaust trauma are negligible or virtually non-existent in descendants of survivors.

In view of the conflicting literature, the first part of the talk will include a brief integrative overview of the evidence regarding the effects of the Holocaust in descendants of survivors distilling the major insights derived from existing literature. Amit Shrira will highlight the dialectical condition of survivors and their descendants, in which vulnerability and resilience are interwoven. Thus, although most survivors and their descendants exhibit relatively normal functioning, vulnerability may also appear in certain families due to various factors and under specific situations.

The lecture was part of the project “Hakara – encountering transgenerational transmission of trauma” in 2021.