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Holocaust Survivors: Rescue and Resettlement in the United States

Immediately after the Holocaust, the American Jewish community assisted in the postwar rehabilitation and resettlement of survivors who arrived in the United States. Families sponsored European relatives and communal agencies organized to help survivors’ adjustment. While the contemporary media described a warm welcome by American communities and survivors’ rapid acclimation, this triumphant narrative belied the fraught reality of survivors’ early years in the United States.

Hannah: Midrash and Aggadah

Hannah is depicted by the Rabbis as a righteous woman who was devout in her observance of the commandments and tested by God through her infertility. Her story is the basis for much of the rabbinic conception and rules of prayer.

Hannah: Bible

Hannah, the second and barren yet preferred wife of Elkanah, promises to return her child to YHWH if he grants her a son. Her prayers are answered, and she follows through on her pledge to YHWH. Hannah’s narrative emphasizes the importance of fertility and childbirth in Israeli artistic narratives and presents a portrayal of an independent and resourceful woman.

Hagar: Midrash and Aggadah

Hagar is the subject of much interpretation by the rabbis, who portray her as a spiritual and even righteous woman. The rabbis often depict her relationship with Sarah as harmful and fractious, though some traditions identify her with Keturah, taken as a wife by Abraham in Gen. 25:1; in this interpretation, after their divorce she remarried Abraham after Sarah’s death.

Haganah

Women played many different roles in the operations of the Haganah. Though their stories are frequently excluded from the story of the Jewish paramilitary organization in British Mandate Palestine, women served as caretakers and nurses, as well as fighters and commanders.

Hagar: Bible

Hagar is Sarah’s Egyptian slave woman, whom Sarah gives to Abraham as secondary wife and who would bear a child for him. After Hagar becomes pregnant, Sarah treats her harshly. Eventually Hagar flees from her mistress into the wilderness, where God’s messenger speaks to her. Hagar has long represented the plight of the foreigner, the slave, and the sexually abused woman.

Eve: Midrash and Aggadah

Eve’s character is posited to be that of the original and quintessential woman. The Midrash interprets her traits as representative of the negative aspects of femininity. Eve’s punishment for her sin is also tied to the traditional ideas of the fundamentals of womanhood – childbirth, pregnancy, and male spousal domination.

Dinah: Bible

The story of Dinah, the only daughter of the patriarch Jacob, recounts an episode in which she goes out to see the “daughters of the land” but is raped, seduced, and/or abducted by Shechem, a Hivite prince, who subsequently falls in love with and wishes to marry her. The story ends in the slaughter of Shechem and his townsmen and may be read as a condemnation of intermarriage.

Deborah 1: Midrash and Aggadah

Rebekah’s nurse Deborah died when Jacob was on his way to the Land of Canaan, close to Bethel, where she was buried under a tree. The rabbis describe her as having a close relationship to Jacob.

Dinah: Midrash and Aggadah

Dinah was the only daughter of Jacob and Leah, and the Rabbis present her as possessing many positive qualities, as was fitting for the daughter of the progenitors of the Israelite nation. The rabbis also offer many different explanations for the rape of Dinah, trying to understand the troubling story.

Elisheba: Bible

Elisheba was the wife of the high priest Aaron and the mother of their four sons, but she does not appear in any stories. Mention of her in the genealogy signifies the importance of women in the destiny of their children.

Elisheba, daughter of Amminadab: Midrash and Aggadah

Elisheba is mentioned only a single time in the Torah she-bi-khetav: Lit. "the written Torah." The Bible; the Pentateuch; Tanakh (the Pentateuch, Prophets and Hagiographia)Torah (Ex. 6:23), as the daughter of Amminadab, the sister of Nahshon and the wife of Aaron the High Priest. The Rabbis speak at large concerning her. They note her importance, since her life was bound up with the most distinguished families in Israel: her husband was appointed High Priest, her children were deputy high priests, her brother was nasi (chieftain) of the tribe of Judah and her brother-in-law Moses led the Israelites. The A type of non-halakhic literary activitiy of the Rabbis for interpreting non-legal material according to special principles of interpretation (hermeneutical rules).midrash accordingly applies to Elisheba the verse “And may your house be like the house of Perez whom Tamar bore to Judah” (Ruth 4:12), which was meant to signify that Elisheba, too, was descended from the royal line since she was from the tribe of Judah (Ruth Zuta 4:12). Commenting on Jacob’s blessing to Judah, “You, O Judah, your brothers shall praise” (Gen. 49:8), the Rabbis list Elisheba daughter of Amminadab among the important people and officials that were born to this tribe and call her “the mother of the priesthood” (Gen. Rabbah 97:8).

Esther: Bible

Esther, the main character in the book named after her, is a young Jewish woman who becomes queen of the Persian empire and risks her life by interceding for the Jewish people to save them from a pogrom. Set in the Persian diaspora, the Book of Esther depicts the struggle for Jews to survive in the face of hostility in a foreign land.

Esther: Midrash and Aggadah

Queen Esther, the central character in the Biblical book named after her, is extensively and sympathetically portrayed in the Rabbinic sources. In their commentary on the Book of Esther, the Rabbis expand upon and add details to the Biblical narrative, relating to her lineage and history and to her relations with the other characters: Ahasuerus, Mordecai, and Haman.

Eve: Apocrypha

Eve, the first woman according to the Eden story, is mentioned very rarely in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. Mentions of her spark debate about the origin of sin.

Happy 50th birthday, Barbie

Judith Rosenbaum

I have to admit that I didn't grow up with Barbies. Born to a feminist mom in the 1970s, I only had Skipper, Barbie's flat-chested cousin. But as much as Barbie's boobs kind of frightened me (and still do), Skipper just didn't have her charisma.

Zilpah: Bible

Zilpah was given as a wedding gift to Leah by her father Laban on the occasion of Leah’s marriage to Jacob. Through the initiative of Leah, Zilpah became a secondary wife to Jacob and bore him two sons, Gad and Asher.

Nelly Wolffheim

Nelly Wolffheim spent her career developing and teaching a kindergarten curriculum based around Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework. She taught this curriculum, which encouraged children to express their sexual desires, to Jewish women teachers in Berlin. After escaping Germany for England in 1939, Wolffheim struggled to continue her research but began publishing her work again after the war.

Wise Woman of Tekoa: Bible

The midrash includes the wise woman from Tekoa among the twenty-three truly upright and righteous women who came out of Israel. The Rabbi’ note that because the residents of Tekoa frequently used olive oil, they were wise. The woman’s wisdom was therefore linked to the blessing of olive oil and, in the opinion of the Rabbis, reflected the wisdom of all the area’s inhabitants.

Wifebeating in Jewish Tradition

The most useful source to study wifebeating is responsa literature, which includes a variety of attitudes towards the phenomenon. While some sources declare wifebeating unlawful, others justify it under certain circumstances.

Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel

The Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel was founded in 1919 by a nonpartisan group of Jewish women who perceived women’s rights as being fundamentally entwined with the Zionist vision. After a long battle with the Orthodox parties, the Union won the support of the National Assembly in 1926 when the Assembly declared that women would have equal voting and participation rights.

Turkey: Ottoman and Post Ottoman

The Jewish population of Turkey navigated far-reaching changes in the political, social, and geopolitical spheres in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire pursued reform and collapsed and the Turkish Republic that took its place imposed a process of “Turkification” on its residents. During this period, Jewish women partook in traditional customs relating to religion, family, and the home, while also accessing new opportunities in the public sphere through education and political engagement.

Two Prostitutes as Mothers: Midrash and Aggadah

The two prostitutes appear in the narrative about Solomon’s judgement concerning the parentage of a baby boy. The Rabbis debate the identity of the women; some argue that they truly were prostitutes and were therefore not present at the time of the judgment, while others assert that they were yevamot (widows whose husbands had died childless).

Solomon’s Judgment: Bible

In this story, King Solomon is asked to consider the case of two women who gave birth to sons but, due to the death of one of their children, are fighting over the remaining child. While the story is generally cited as an example of Solomon’s wisdom, this narrative also shows the possessiveness of maternal love.

Nettie Sutro-Katzenstein

Dr. Nettie Sutro-Katzenstein founded SHEK (Schweizer Hilfswerk fur Emigrantenkinder), a non-denominational Swiss women’s organization for helping refugee children, in 1933. An effective and dynamic leader, Sutro-Katzenstein directed SHEK headquarters and recruited volunteers, gaining the support of the Swiss public. Between 1933 and 1948, SHEK cared for over 10,000 refugee children, 90% of whom were Jewish.

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