The Ninety-Three Bais Yaakov Girls: Shame, Affect, and Transnational Identification within a World at War

• In Event: Bais Yaakov in Historical Perspective

Abstract

In early 1943, the Jewish world was shaken by a (now discredited) report of ninety-three Bais Yaakov students who had committed suicide rather than be taken as prostitutes for German soldiers. Rabbis gave sermons on the subject, poets wrote elegies, schools raised money in honor of the ninety-three, young girls said Kaddish for their martyred “sisters,” and in the Land of Israel, streets and parks were named after the ninety-three. The episode is of interest for many reasons, including the way it complicates a certain narrative that holds that sexual violence in the Holocaust was pervasive but “taboo” as a subject of discussion, emerging only decades after the war under a cloak of shame and secrecy. It is therefore remarkable that within the Orthodox world, a story about sexual violence (fictional though it apparently was) became a major lens for Orthodox understanding of the genocide while it was still unfolding. This paper will explore a number of documents published by a Tel-Aviv-based group called “The Committee for the Defense of the Honor of the Jewish Daughter” that served to publicize the story and create a script for private reflection and public commemoration; these documents reproduced the “Last Will and Testament of the Ninety-Three Bais Yaakov Girls,” an “eyewitness report” to the events, adding poetry, reflections by Beit Yaakov (as the name of the school was pronounced there) administrators, poetry, and urgent calls for a renewal of girls’ commitment to Torah and modesty. The questions I will ask include: What did this story mean in Tel Aviv in 1943, to the committees that organized commemorations and to the girls and women who were their primary audiences? How did this story function within the cultural field of 1940s Tel Aviv? What do these documents help us see about how Beit Yaakov in the Land of Israel saw its relationship to Bais Yaakov in Poland, both in the interwar period and at this moment of devastation?

Author

• Naomi Sheindel Seidman, University of Toronto