Jewish History
Politics in the Yishuv and Israel
Virginia Morris Pollak
During World War II, sculptor Virginia Morris Pollak used her deep understanding of clay, plaster, and metal to revolutionize reconstructive surgery for wounded servicemen. This earned her a presidential citation, and she was later appointed to JFK’s Commission for the Employment of the Handicapped. Pollak also co-founded her own sculpture studio and chaired the Norfolk Fine Arts Commission, beautifying her hometown with an outdoor sculpture museum at the Botanic Garden.
Tamar De Sola Pool
Born into a family deeply involved in Jewish activism and scholarship, Tamar De Sola Pool spent over a decade as both a Hadassah chapter president and later Hadassah’s national president. She wrote two books in collaboration with her husband, volunteered at displaced persons camps in Cyprus, and helped resettle Jewish children in Palestine with Hadassah.
Lucie Porges
Lucie Porges brought a combination of elegance and a relaxed sensibility to her long and fruitful collaboration with top fashion designer Pauline Trigère. As she continued to design, Porges also imparted her immense knowledge in the Fashion Department of the New School for Social Research.
Zosha Posnanska
A left-wing political activist and Soviet intelligence recruit, Zosha Posnanska was a fearless fighter against the Nazis and for a peaceful world.
Post-Biblical and Rabbinic Women
IIn antiquity, the treatment of women drew from patriarchal biblical traditions. Despite a few notable exceptions, women had minimal legal rights but were active participants in alternative Jewish sects and could hold office. As rabbinic material was codified, control over women increased, although the literature was not exclusively restrictive towards women.
Poverty: Jewish Women in Medieval Egypt
The documents recovered from the Cairo Genizah give insight into the lives of Jewish women in poverty in medieval Egypt. Without husbands, women were often left without any means of earning a living, though the Jewish community assumed responsibility for providing for widows.
Riv-Ellen Prell
Anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell initiated ethnographic study of ordinary American Jews that paid attention to religion, gender, ritual, and cultural performance. Her work addresses the primacy of gender in twentieth-century Jewish life and looks at economic and power relations often expressed through negative stereotypes of Jewish women.
Olga Benário Prestes
A Communist activist before and during World War II, Olga Benário Prestes’ political activities led her to the highest ranks of the Communist Youth International. Her relationship with Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes, who was part of a failed coup, led to her deportation to Germany, where she was gassed at Bernburg in 1942. Although her name is not well known in the United States, Olga is famous in Brazil and was considered a great heroine in the German Democratic Republic.
Project Kesher
Project Kesher is a feminist Jewish organization empowering women in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Russian-speaking community in Israel to build a society in which inclusive Jewish life can flourish, and where women are the instruments of peaceful change.
Prose Writing in the Yishuv: 1882-1948
Female Yishuv writers have often been ignored in discussions of Jewish literature from the period. As the sometimes-melancholy tone and escapist themes of their writing show, these women struggled to escape the margins in pre-state Palestine. Nonetheless, the works of these female writers offer important insights into the lives of Yishuv women and paved the way for contemporary women writers.
Erna Proskauer
Erna Proskauer dreamed of becoming a judge in Germany but lost her job in 1933 and emigrated first to France and then to Palestine. After returning to Germany, Erna faced several setbacks in her quest to return to her career as a lawyer but ultimately opened her own firm. At the age of sixty-five, she took over her former husband’s law office and continued working for another twenty years.
Pulcellina of Blois
Pulcellina was a prominent and powerful Jewish moneylender in twelfth-century Blois. In 1171, she was burned at the stake with mother than 30 other Jews on the false accusation of murdering a Christian boy.
Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger -Friedenberg
Born in Italy in 1825, Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger-Friedenberg was a persistent educator and writer. She is best known for the publication of her Jerusalem journal, which shared her extraordinary experiences in a way that combined messianic hope and the enlightenment ideals of knowledge and progress.
Antonietta Raphaël
Painting and sculptor Antonietta Raphaël rose to fame in the 1950s. Her paintings were seen for the first time in Rome in 1929; during World War II, she took up sculpting, and in the 1950s, she rose to prominence and exhibited her works worldwide.
Clara Raven
Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp
Created to incarcerate women and serve as a “model” concentration camp, Ravensbrück imprisoned about 132,000 women and children between 1939 and 1945, committing them to slave labor and miserable conditions. In addition to thousands of political prisoners, criminals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and those deemed “asocial,” about 20 percent of the camp’s prisoners were Jewish.
Dalia Raz
Dalia Raz was an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who worked to redefine women’s role in the Israel Defense Forces. As an OC (Officer Commanding) in the IDF Women’s Corps, she worked to expand the types of duties women were able to perform while serving in the IDF and encouraged women’s participation across all sectors of the IDF’s operations.
Miri Regev
Miriam “Miri” Regev is a former Brigadier-General in the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit and a current member of the Knesset in the Likud party. As a member of the Knesset, Regev has held government postings as Minister of Culture and Sport and Minister of Transportation and Road Safety.
Eva Gabriele Reichmann
Born in Silesia, Eva Gabriele Reichmann studied economics in Germany and, after fleeing the Nazis, in London. A prolific writer, especially after her retirement in 1959, Reichmann focused mainly on Judaism and the social history of German Jewry. She was awarded several medals for her contributions to democracy, freedom, and tolerance and died at the age of 101.
Havivah Reik
Havivah Reik was a Palmah soldier and parachutist who was killed by Nazi collaborators on a secret mission to save thousands of Slovakian Jews.
Gail Twersky Reimer
Gail Twersky Reimer is a teacher, writer, editor, passionate advocate for the humanities, and visionary pioneer of Jewish feminism. Reimer founded the Jewish Women’s Archive in 1995 to ensure that Jewish women’s stories would become integral parts of the historical record. Under her leadership, JWA pioneered the use of virtual technology in collecting, chronicling, and transmitting knowledge of Jewish women’s lives.
Religious Zionist Movements in Palestine
Religious Zionism, distinguished from the secular Zionists by its religious nature and from the ultra-Orthodox community by its Zionism, consisted of two major movements in the Yishuv: the Mizrachi and the Ha-Po’el ha-Mizrachi, a trade union. Women created their own organizations within these movements but distinguished themselves from the men through their support of women and their interests.
Resistance, Jewish Organizations in France: 1940-1944
Despite the fact that women did not hold a high status in prewar French society, Jewish women played a disproportionately large role in the French resistance against the Nazis. Hundreds of women protected their fellow Jews, especially Jewish children, from the Nazis.
Elise Richter
Elise Richter could not pursue a university degree until she was in her 30s, when she became part of the first group of women to study at the University of Vienna. She received doctoral and post-doctoral degrees and subsequently taught classes on various Romance languages while publishing extensively, making important contributions to the field of historical and comparative linguistics.
