The one-day seminar "Identity and Memory" took place at the Mandel Leadership Institute the day after the official Memorial Day for former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The purpose of the day was to discuss the links between personal memory and collective memory, their importance, and the memorialization of the murder and its impact on the different factions in Israeli society.

Personal memory, an autobiography, is a collection of one's life experiences, as opposed to collective memory which is knowledge about a society's past and its meaning, and the conclusions and lessons associated with this knowledge, which society then passes on to its children. Even though these are two different kinds of memory there is a reciprocal relationship between them.
 
In Israeli society, identity and memory are issues that are each dealt with separately but also together. An individual's personal memory is always anchored in social context and exists within the public, community and national spheres. Individual identity is also closely related to events that take place in social contexts and is partially constructed by other information sources such as tradition and historical events.

The seminar began with a lecture by Professor Emmanuel Sivan, Professor Emeritus of General History and the History of Islamic Nations at the Hebrew University. Prof. Sivan's work deals with the depths of collective memory and its implications on building a collective identity consciousness. His lecture focused on the mutual links, as well as the differences, between personal and collective memory and also touched on the complexity of designing a collective identity in the polarized Israeli society.

During the seminar there were also text workshops facilitated by Mandel faculty as well as workshops led by Mandel fellows that provided an opportunity to discuss issues such as: why man and society remember their past, what this memory provides and whether memory is also a burden that may prevent the individual and society from forging new paths.
 
The lecture given by Haim Gouri, an Israel prize winner, author and poet, included personal memories from his long acquaintance with Yitzhak Rabin – starting from their childhood at the School for Workers' Children in Tel Aviv, continuing through the Kadoori Agricultural School and later after they entered the public sphere. Gouri also provided insights about the breakdown of collective memory in Israeli society.

The seminar concluded with a panel discussion with the participation of Dr. Vered Vinitzky-Serussi, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun and Advocate Aryeh Barnea and moderated by Dr. Yehuda Ben-Dor. Dr. Vinitzky-Serussi, from the Sociology Department at the Hebrew University, focuses in her work on processes of memorialization and their importance in identity creation. Her research looks at memory and memorializing the murder of Rabin in Israeli society. Rabbi Bin-Nun is an educator and a public figure known as a sharp critic of political and religious extremism and of expressions of political violence within the national-religious community. Aryeh Barnea is an educator and director of educational institutions who deals with leadership for programs for value education.

During the panel discussion several important points that lend a different perspective on the Israeli reality were raised. One of the points was the need to focus the Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin on the murder itself and its implications on Israeli democracy, rather than focusing on Rabin's legacy, while also creating conditions that allow the Israeli public, with all of its diversity, to see this as a significant day. This concern is due to the fact that some of the designers of the memorial day focus on Rabin's heritage, which excludes large sections of Israeli society – the national-religious and Arab communities – from sharing in the memorialization. Some of the suggestions which were raised during the panel were the creation of a broad partnership to commemorate the day through joint activities of the state and state-religious school systems and also to try to incorporate the Arab community in the commemorations of the memorial day as a partner and as part of the fabric of life in Israel shared by Jews and Arabs.