This paper explores the Holocaust testimonies of three relatively unknown female ghetto fighters who survived the Holocaust and moved to Israel: Elsa Lustgarten, Hela Shuper Rufeisen, and Rivka Cooper. Judith Tydor Baumel, in a study of the place of women in the Israeli mythos of resistance and heroism has said that, “female Zionist partisans were among the first survivors to reach the Yishuv, thus shaping the public consciousness of heroism in their image.”[1] Therefore, female survivors in Israel were in a strange position. On the one hand the Holocaust was cast as a female tragedy, a tragedy of disempowered and emasculated East European Jews. On the other hand, the strength and bravery of female partisans became the starting point for the Israeli culture of heroism. But what if you were an Israeli woman survivor who didn’t attain the fame and iconicity of women like Zivia Lubetkin, Ruzka Korczak or Vitka Kempner? What stories did you feel you could tell and how were you to tell them? In her book on female Holocaust survivors in Israeli society, Sharon Geva explorers the rhetoric of female survivors as “bearers of arms” within popular Israeli culture.[2] This essay will consider Israeli woman survivors testimonies about “bearing arms” outside of the Israeli public and political limelight.
[1] Judith Tylor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1998), 215.
[2] Sharon Geva, El ha-Ahot ha-Lo Yedu’ah: Giborot ha-Shoah be-Hevrtat ha-Yisre’elit (Israel: Hotsa’at ha-Kibutz ha-Meuhad, 2010)