Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel HBI SERIES ON JEWISH WOMEN Shulamit Reinharz, General Editor Joyce Antler, Associate Editor Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor The HBI Series on Jewish Women, created by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, pub- lishes a wide range of books by and about Jewish women in diverse contexts and time periods. Of interest to scholars and the educated public, the HBI Series on Jewish Women fills major gaps in Jewish Studies and in Women and Gender Studies as well as their intersection. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com and www.upne.com/series/BSJW.html. Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Hasan-Rokem, editors, Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation Anne Lapidus Lerner, Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Jewish Poetry Margalit Shilo, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914 Marcia Falk, translator, The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible Sylvia Barack Fishman, Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society Shulamit Reinharz and Mark A. Raider, editors, American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism Farideh Goldin, Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman Elizabeth Wyner Mark, editor, The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite Rochelle L. Millen, Women, Birth, and Death in Jewish Law and Practice JEWISH WOMEN IN PRE-STATE ISRAEL Life History, Politics, and Culture Edited by Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Hasan-Rokem Brandeis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766 www.upne.com © 2008 by Brandeis University Press Printed in the United States of America 54321 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ’Ivriyot ha-hadashot. English. Jewish women in pre-state Israel : life history, politics, and culture / edited by Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Hasan-Rokem. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (HBI series on Jewish women) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–1–58465–702–6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978–1–58465–703–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jewish women—Palestine—History—Congresses. 2. Jewish women—Israel—His- tory—Congresses. 3. Feminism—Palestine—History—Congresses. 4. Feminism—Is- rael—History—Congresses. I. Kark, Ruth. II. Shilo, Margalit. III. Hasan-Rokem, Galit. IV. Title. hq1728.5.i9513 2008 305.48Ј892400904—dc22 2008007648 Contents Shulamit Reinharz, Ph.D. Foreword ix Introduction 1 J Constructing the Historical Narrative Deborah Bernstein The Study of Women in Israeli Historiography: 7 Starting Points, New Directions, and Emerging Insights Yossi Ben-Artzi Have Gender Studies Changed Our Attitude toward 18 the Historiography of the Aliyah and Settlement Process? Henriette Dahan-Kalev Mizrahi Women: Identity and Herstory 33 J Women and Immigration Michal Ben Ya’akov Women’s Aliyah: Migration Patterns of North African 51 Jewish Women to Eretz Israel in the Nineteenth Century vi Contents Joseph Glass American Jewish Women and Palestine: 63 Their Immigration, 1918–1939 Esther Meir-Glitzenstein Ethnic and Gender Identity of Iraqi Women 83 Immigrants in the Kibbutz in the 1940s Penina Morag-Talmon Social Networks of Immigrant Women in the Early 1950s in Israel 100 J Pioneers and Defenders Einat Ramon A “Woman-Human”: A. D. Gordon’s Approach to Women’s 111 Equality and His Influence on Second Aliyah Feminists Henry Near What Troubled Them? Women in Kibbutz and Moshav 122 in the Mandatory Period Smadar Shiffman Forging the Image of Pioneering Women 131 Hagar Salamon A Woman’s Life Story as a Foundation Legend of Local Identity 141 J Education, Health, and Politics Margalit Shilo A Cross-Cultural Message: The Case of Evelina de Rothschild 167 Shifra Shvarts and Zipora Shehory-Rubin On Behalf of Mothers and Children in Eretz Israel: 180 The Activity of Hadassah, the Federation of Hebrew Women, and WIZO to Establish Maternal and Infant Welfare Centers—Tipat Halav, 1913–1948 Contents vii Nira Bartal Establishment of a Nursing School in Jerusalem by the American 193 Zionist Medical Unit, 1918: Continuation or Revolution? Bat-Sheva Margalit Stern “They Have Wings But No Strength to Fly”: 202 The Women Workers’ Movement between “Feminine” Control and “Masculine” Dominance Hannah Safran International Struggle, Local Victory: Rosa Welt Straus 217 and the Achievement of Suffrage, 1919–1926 J Creativity in Word and Music Orly Lubin Nehama Puhachewsky: The Alibi of the Arbitrary 231 Tali Asher The Growing Silence of the Poetess Rachel 244 Yaffah Berlovitz Anda Amir’s Me-Olam, Demuyot mi-Kedem: 257 A Proposal for a Modern Feminine Bible Hannan Hever Poems to the Ghetto: The Poetry of Yocheved Bat-Miriam in the 1940s 268 Yael Shai and Rachel Kollender Women and Music in Jewish Society: 277 Woman’s Role in the Music Tradition in Israel J Shaping the Collective Memory Billie Melman The Legend of Sarah: Gender, Memory, and National 285 Identities (Eretz Yisrael/Israel, 1917–1990) viii Contents Judith Baumel-Schwartz “We Were There Too”: Women’s Commemoration 321 in Israeli War Memorials Aftermath 338 Notes 341 Glossary 411 Index 415 Shulamit Reinharz, Ph.D. Foreword You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you probably won’t go wrong judging an anthology by its editors. The three editors of this particu- lar collection—professor of historical geography, Ruth Kark; professor of his- tory, Margalit Shilo; and professor of folklore, Galit Hasan-Rokem—are stars of the Israeli academic scene. Their subject matter is pre-State Israel, i.e. the Jewish community that lived in what was to become Israel in 1948. Within that community, about which so much has been written, there is one group that has garnered less attention than it deserves. That group is women. The relative lack of attention paid to the study of pre-State Jewish women stems from the same problems that are true around the world. There is no special archive to collect papers on this group; there are no special chairs at univer- sities; and there is very little research support in Israel devoted to this topic. Thus, the work is difficult to undertake and funding is hard to come by. The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, founded (under a different name) in 1997, was created to address these specific problems. The following year we partnered with the Lafer Center for Women and Gender Studies at Hebrew University (and the Tauber Institute at Brandeis University) to hold a confer- ence on a topic never previously discussed in a large public forum—the con- tribution of Jewish women to the creation of the State of Israel. Held at the Hebrew University, the conference was organized under the title “We Were Here, Too!” and received a lot of media attention. The papers in this collec- tion stem from that early conference. The next year we held a complemen- tary conference at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, focusing on the Ameri- can counterparts of these Jewish women in pre-State Israel. This second conference resulted in the volume, American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, edited by Mark A. Raider and myself, and published in this series. x Foreword Since then, many other conferences have been held, and many new re- search projects initiated. And yet, the contributors in the current volume were the earliest ones, and their research was truly groundbreaking. To make this extremely broad topic manageable, the editors chose three foci: life history, politics, and culture. They also chose only Israeli academ- ics, both women and men, all of whom are very well known in their fields. The book begins with historiographic reflection, i.e., how should historians and other researchers deal with the study of women. Two initial contribu- tions, by sociologist Deborah Bernstein and historian Yossi Ben-Artzi, start this discussion. To counterbalance the previous nearly exclusive focus paid to Ashkenazi Jews, several of the next contributions (by Henriette Dahan- Kalev, Michal Ben Ya’akov, and Esther Meir-Glitzenstein) deal with Mizrahi women, North African women, and Iraqi women. Joseph Glass, an expert on immigration to Palestine from the United States and Canada, offers a chap- ter on this topic in the interwar years. Penina Morag-Talmon discusses women immigrants not in terms of individual adjustment and choices, but as parts of social networks. Another group of chapters deals with ideas rather than behaviors. Einat Ramon, for example, brings the ideology of key Zionist theoretician A. D. Gor- don to bear on the feminist concerns of women in the Second Aliyah. The image of pre-State Israel is still very much rooted in the unusual communi- ties of kibbutz and moshav, rather than the city. And in this book, as well, we find an emphasis on the kibbutz. The contribution by Henry Near takes up once again the question of why women did not find in the kibbutz the utopian society of which they had dreamed.