Lani Lederer Berman
Synthesizing Rabbinic Literature and Personal Diaries for a Comprehensive Picture of Orthodox Women’s Lives During the Holocaust
2017 | Full access
This thesis delves into rabbinic literature that deals with issues arising during the Holocaust in an effort to demonstrate that it is a critical primary source to understanding the daily lives of religious Jews, and specifically religious women. As women’s and gender studies have received growing attention in Holocaust scholarship since the 1980s, the experiences of religious women are noticeably lacking. Rabbinic literature is largely understudied within the canon of Holocaust sources, as well. Thus, in discovering that rabbinic literature may, in fact, be used to deepen how we view the ritual practices and more private aspects of religious women’s lives under Nazi rule, I sought to utilize this lesser reviewed corpus of literature to explore the under-represented experiences of religious women during the Holocaust.
While personal diaries and memoirs written by women are valuable firsthand accounts of the trauma, they do not necessarily reveal the entirety of the picture of women’s more intimate experiences. Through researching secondary scholarship on Holocaust diaries, I discovered that there are gaps in these personal accounts. Victims often focused on documenting external occurrences rather than recording their personal emotions in their writing. Furthermore, as Jewish diarists internalized the scope of the Final Solution, they understood that their writing would serve as a historical text and thus read by a future audience. This realization may have deterred an individual, especially a religious woman, from writing more intimate details.
Rabbinic literature, while an imperfect autobiographical and historical source on its own, is quite effective when synthesized with diaries, memoirs, and personal testimonies. Although they are texts written by men, the issues the sources cover reflect some of the more difficult challenges faced by religious women. With a strong tradition of rabbinic responsa dating back to the 3rd century CE, women could not only rely on the age-old practice of “asking the rabbi,” but were also afforded the comfort of anonymity in doing so.
I have demonstrated in this thesis the benefits of incorporating rabbinic literature into the greater corpus of Holocaust scholarship. I explored the intimate topics of the mikveh (ritual bath), sexual relations, both voluntary and coerced, birth control, and abortion in rabbinic sources as well as diaries, memoirs, postwar testimonies, and secondary literature. I analyzed which of these sources delve into these topics, discovering that the mikveh rarely appears in autobiographical accounts. Yet, there are rabbinic texts that discuss quandaries surrounding its usage and laws related to the mikveh. The topic of sexual relations has gained traction in Holocaust scholarship more recently; the rabbinic sources that address questions on this topic enrich our perspective of the challenging decisions women in hiding and in ghettos faced in this realm. I discovered that birth control appears in rabbinic literature spanning various countries during the war. I thus presented this topic with geographic sensitivity, as the Jewish communities in which birth control-related questions appeared confronted diverse realities. Finally, the topic of abortion likewise appears in various countries, most prominently in the ghettos in which the Nazis enforced compulsory abortion (such as Theresienstadt and the Lithuanian ghettos) as well as among women in hiding. Rabbinic literature on this topic is less preponderant, yet it remains an essential source in that it reveals how religious Jews approached these painful realities.
Rabbinic texts offer substantial insight to the challenges that women faced because, based on the content, religious women did discuss personal aspects of Jewish observance with a trusted rabbi, rather than record such a quandary in a personal diary. Studying the documents written by the rabbinic leadership alongside diaries, memoirs, and postwar testimonies deepens our insight into the lives of religious women during the Holocaust and reveals a bit more of the struggles with which they grappled.
Supervisor:
Prof. Eliyana Adler