The Female Face of God in Auschwitz

A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust

Melissa Raphael

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134561711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.
God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.

1 Reading post-Holocaust theology from a feminist perspective

Before we can repledge our troth to the ancient God or present him with our complaint . . . we must make certain that it is still the ancient God whom we seek.¹

From the post-war period to the present, Jewish women have not offered a sustained theological response to the Holocaust, feminist or otherwise. Jewish women’s private theological reflections on their own holocaustal times and experience are not, of course, unknown and the two best known sources of such reflection are the writings of Etty Hillesum and Anne Frank, both of whom perished in the camps.Yet Frank’s writing was that of one who was barely more than a girl; both were Jewish more by birth rather than religious identity. They knew little of their religious heritage and were each in their own way attracted to Christianity. These two women, who may well represent other Jewish women of the same class and temper, were the products of the liberal, humanistic, universalistic spirit of emancipated, often assimilated, Western Jewry, not of the Jewish scriptures or rabbinic tradition. As Rachel Feldhay Brenner notes in her recent study, although each sought consolation and support from God, it was not that of the Jewish God or the Jewish tradition.²

These women’s apparent obliviousness to the possibilities of Jewish theological insight into their predicament is not surprising. Despite the distinguished history of Jewish philosophical theology, it has long been the popular view that theology is an un-Jewish and unnecessary apologetic enterprise, sufficient practical knowledge of God being generated by law and its communal observance. A complacent opinion prevalent among Jews (rightly condemned as ‘misinformed and naive’ and as a form of religious behaviourism)³ is that they do not have to struggle with faith, but simply to behave as if they have faith: ‘if you observe the law whose very existence is predicated upon the existence of God as giver of that law, whether you actually believe in God is irrelevant.’⁴ And if observant men of the Holocaust period rarely theologized, still less did women whose legal exemption from study amounted to a prohibition. Even were the liberal Judaisms of the time to have developed women’s religious intellects (which they largely did not) Jewish women of Hillesum and Frank’s spiritual temper were in any case far more attracted to Christianity perceived as a religion of love and compassion in contrast to the ‘apparent rigidity and severity of the Jewish Law’.⁵ Their more gracious (female) religion was a humanistic one which placed sacred value on goodness, kindness, empathy, beauty, inner strength and self-giving to others.⁶ Although Hillesum set herself at the heart of the suffering Jewish people in its particular historical situation, hers was a religion of mystical love, suffering, and intimate prayer situated ‘at the centre of all human suffering’.When challenged as practising ‘nothing but Christianity’, she replied,‘ Yes, Christianity, and why ever not?’⁷

A Jewish feminist theology is now in its relative infancy but has still not substantially engaged with the Holocaust,⁸ probably because there is much less Jewish feminist theology than there is Jewish feminism.⁹ This is for roughly the same reasons that there is little Jewish theology. Despite Judith Plaskow having consistently argued that Jewish women’s status as ‘Other’ to the male norm is grounded in a masculinist theology of which halakhic inequalities are but a symptom, most Jewish feminists regard women’s role and status as first and foremost a matter for halakhic and thereby social reform. A theological reconceptual-ization is often (wrongly) regarded as foreign to the tradition and irrelevant to women.¹⁰ Jewish feminist theologians are very few in number and are to be distinguished from women rabbis whose interest in theology may be more practical than theoretical, and from the relatively numerous feminist scholars of the Hebrew Bible.¹¹ Although it by no means suggests indifference, even in the two full-length, single-author volumes of Jewish theology that go by that name (Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai and Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism) the Holocaust is not discussed and barely even alluded to. It may be that post- Holocaust theology has been perceived as a project undertaken by and for men whose aim is either to vindicate or berate an absolutist God who has passed from feminist interest or celebration.

Jewish feminists have played a significant role in the post-war reconstruction of Jewish cultural life and identity (indeed the second wave of Jewish feminism broke at much the same time as post-Holocaust theology began to be published). Yet with other contemporary liberative theologies, Jewish feminist theology would regard the non-natural suffering of the relatively innocent as the result of social, institutional and economic injustice that is undeserved and not, in itself, redemptive.¹²

Since the early 1960s, and gathering momentum after the publication of Richard Rubenstein’s highly controversial After Auschwitz in 1966,¹³ theological enquiry into the Holocaust has been principally undertaken by Ignaz Maybaum, Eliezer Berkovits, Emil Fackenheim and Arthur Cohen.¹⁴ Their books were to form the ‘classic’ corpus of post-Holocaust theology; the canon most commonly studied and critiqued. As Dan Cohn-Sherbok points out, this corpus has not been significantly added to. These writers remain the ‘major figures’ in the field.¹⁵ A sixth writer may now be added to this list: David Blumenthal. He alone engages with the feminist critique that has become a prominent element of the academic milieu, even while choosing to persist in faith with a God whom he knows to be sometimes, though not always, oppressive.

Writing women out of (and into) post-Holocaust theology

Cynthia Ozick’s lament for what she sees as history’s invisible ‘holocaust’ of Jewish women is illustrative of a Jewish failure to perceive its own capacity to silence and erase persons from history, even if without violence. She writes that Jews rightly grieve for the tragic losses of the Holocaust but are indifferent to, or simply have not noticed, the cultural and intellectual debilitations that Judaism’s sexism has produced. There has been a ‘wholesale excision’, ‘deportation’ and isolation of women; half of world Jewry has been ‘cut off and erased’ from the ‘creative center’ of ‘Jewish communal achievement’ for centuries upon centuries. And yet of this catastrophic loss of countless poets, artists, writers, scientists, doctors and discoverers, ‘Jewish literature and history report not one wail, not one tear’; indeed ‘we have not even noticed it’.¹⁶

The cultural exclusion of women from the tradition is reproduced in and by its texts, including those of the Holocaust which, as themselves narratives of isolation, deportation and disappearance, subject women to a double invisibility: that of their historical annihilation and that of their subsequent theoretical erasure. It is not only that post-Holocaust theology has been a thoroughly masculine discursive space; it has also been markedly androcentric in its outlook. Using gender as an analytical category, this claim can be defended and developed by examining the introductory chapter of a widely-used text – Dan Cohn-Sherbok’s God and the Holocaust – which exemplifies the gendered bias characteristic of almost all theological discussion of the Holocaust.¹⁷ Entitled ‘The Horrors of the Holocaust’, the chapter presents the reader with a series of distressing accounts of Nazi atrocities interspersed with contrapuntal narratives of the survival of (male) Jewish spirit and practice against all odds. Cohn-Sherbok’s chapter is indispensable to his book in setting his subsequent discussion of Holocaust theology in historical and religious context.

While women all but disappear in the theological bulk of the book, they are an identified presence in this historical section of the text and one whose innocent victimization is a readily apprehended index to the moral depravity of the perpetrators. However, although unintentional and reflecting the masculine bias of his sources, in the eyewitness accounts Cohn-Sherbok has chosen for his own text, women are without voice or reason. The first woman to come into sharp focus is a pathetically child-like 70-year-old from the Krakow ghetto. Her hair is loose about her shoulders and her eyes are glazed; she is in her house slippers, and has arrived for deportation without any luggage, carrying only a small puppy close to her breast. Next, ‘laughing, inarticulately gesturing with her hands’ appears, ‘a young deranged girl of about fourteen, so familiar to all the inhabitants of the ghetto. She walks barefoot, in a crumpled nightgown.’¹⁸ This text also contains accounts of a mother, ‘crazed’ by the murder of her new-born baby and women suffering the humiliation of being stripped and shaved. These narratives of female abjection are juxtaposed with stories of heroic Jewish resistance which the reader either knows or assumes to be male in character since women largely disappear from their narration.¹⁹ In fact, women were active in the Jewish ghetto under- ground, in forest partisan groups and one, Gisi Fleishmann, was the courageous leader of the Slovakian Jewish community.²⁰ But in the text in question, resistance in the Warsaw ghetto is summarized in a now famous man: Mordecai Anielewicz, whose declaration that ‘He who has arms will fight. He who has no arms – women and children – will go down into the bunkers’,²¹ removes women from textual view. Of course it may seem as if the present feminist study will approach post-Holocaust theology precisely as traditionalists might hope and expect it to do, namely, by affirming and focusing upon women’s familial and social experience which has also been essentially private. However, the difference is that in the present study women of the past and present are speaking subjects whose experience, read and valorized from a feminist theological perspective, is affectively, morally and intellectually productive.²²

Over the following pages of his chapter, Cohn-Sherbok presents striking accounts of how masculine religiosity can transcend the most harrowing of material circumstances. And these accounts are placed between narratives in which, again, women are not represented as religious subjects. We read how, at Yom Kippur, 1943, one Atlasowicz stood before a makeshift lectern in the Pawiak prison and spoke of the moment as ‘our continuation. Here we take up the golden tradition of sanctity handed down to us by generations of Jews before us’.²³ This peculiarly Jewish hierophany among men who still inhabit sacred time is immediately followed by a sharply contrasting account of a large group of women in Auschwitz-Birkenau, who, having been starved in their barracks over some days, met their death on Christmas Day, 1943.The description of this event merits close attention:

The victims knew they were going to the gas chamber and tried to escape and were massacred. According to an account of this incident, when the lorry motors started, a terrible noise arose – the death cry of thousands of young women. As they tried to break out, a rabbi’s son cried out: ‘God, show them your power – this is against you.’When nothing happened, the boy cried out, ‘There is no God.’ ²⁴

Of these thousands of young women’s faith in (or denial of ) God, history knows nothing. If the women cried out to their God, no one remembers it. In the text, as in Jewish tradition and in holocaustal life/death itself, the religious authority and significance of speech belongs to the male line – the rabbis and their actual and metaphorical sons.²⁵ Here, the women are background noise; only the boy, the voice of Judaism as distinct from victimized Jewry, is heard above their din.

The narrative moves on and Cohn-Sherbok relates another dreadful set of events – this time the snatching of children from the streets of the Kovno ghetto and from their mothers. Again, unlike the men, the women have (or are accorded) no theological voice. Once more they are screaming. Their quasi-animal reaction to the loss of their children renders them, in this context, not so much Jews, as the male figures in the text have remained, but biological mothers alone. It is not that women would not have been demented with shock and grief, nor is it the recounting of the events themselves that is problematic; on the contrary it is incumbent on Jews to do so. Rather, it is the positioning of gendered experience in texts as that of subjects or objects which determines its theological significance, or lack of it. In this text, women, as the objects of terror, scream; men, as subjects, can both grieve and pronounce. Women might well ask, ‘Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has He not spoken through us as well?’ (Num. 12: 2), but if he has, men have not been accustomed to listening.

It is for historians to decide whether it was only men who delivered great prophetic speeches of the sort made by, among numerous others, Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman in the Kovno ghetto, Rabbi Yerucham Hanushtate in Treblinka or the Ostrovzer Rebbe, Rabbi Yehezkel Halevi Halstuk who, in 1943, garbed in his prayer shawl and kittel, faced the German guns in Zusmir with the words: ‘For some time now I have anticipated this zekhut [privilege] [of Kiddush Ha’ Shem – the sanctification of God’s name]. I am prepared.’²⁶ Certainly, only such men were given the roles, costumes and lines of a religiously performative death.The Jewish ideology of femininity as properly private and modest and whose glory, according to the halakhic maxim ‘is to be out of public view’, was such that public religious utterance of the prophetic kind was culturally and religiously alien to women in the gendered division of religious labour.²⁷ By contrast, at sites of mass execution it was possible for observant Jewish men to dance and sing, rejoicing in their opportunity to die for Kiddush Ha’ Shem, ‘completely ignoring’ the Germans surrounding the graves who were preparing to shoot. Indeed, as Eliezer Berkovits comments: ‘At that moment [when the men jumped into the pit] they lived their lives as Jews with an intensity and meaningfulness never before experienced.’²⁸

If Berkovits is, or can be, right, it is not immediately apparent how a Jewish woman at just such a site of execution, perhaps holding a baby in her arms and with terrified children clinging to her legs, could have died that fully Jewish death. How, after all, would her body have been marked by God as a covenantal partner where it bore no religious mark or clothing (circumcision, sacral facial hair, and the fringed garments – tallit and tziziot ) that help male Jews remember the covenant? How would her body protest its Jewishness when, in short, that body was required to do no more than look like a woman (that is, to refrain from wearing male garments)? Much of the present study will attempt to answer this question. But on the basis of existing historical and theological texts it is almost impossible to answer how, if at all, it might have been possible for a woman’s falling into the pit to have been an intense and meaningful Jewish experience of the sort at once mourned and celebrated by Berkovits.

Mordecai Anielewicz wrote in a letter smuggled out to Palestine that he and his comrades would die a death of historical meaning and inspiration to future generations.Theirs was to be an owned, honourable (if secular) manly death.²⁹ In historical consciousness at least, Jewish men did not simply die in the great Jewish mass; like the Ostrovzer Rebbe, they met their own deaths authoritatively and in their own names. By contrast, the mehitzah or screen that keeps women out of sight and at a modest distance from the holy is also, figuratively, a feature of Cohn-Sherbok’s text where women are a nameless throng,³⁰ viewed at an ontological and spatial distance and who, even at close quarters, are without the dignity of an audible, reasoned voice.

After the distressing ‘white noise’ of female panic, Cohn-Sherbok permits his reader to experience a dramat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Reading Post-Holocaust Theology from a Feminist Perspective
• 2. The Hiding of God’s Face In Auschwitz
• 3. Feminist Intimations of the Holy In Auschwitz
• 4. Face to Face (With God) In Auschwitz
• 5. A Mother/God In Auschwitz
• 6. The Redemption of God In Auschwitz
• The Princess and the City of Death: A Feminist Maaseh, After Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
• Notes
• Select Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms
• Bibliography