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We are pleased to announce that the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous named Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust as their book of the month for February 2012.

Jerusalem Book Launch Mielec, Poalnd: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp, by Rochelle G. Saidel

Women Under Siege: Gloria Steinem cites Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust as inspiration to launch website to combat sexual violence in war

Personal documents by Moshe Borger presented to the Yad Vashem Archives

61st Annual National Jewish Book Awards Ceremony

42nd Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

I Came to Testify: Rape as a Weapon of War

Monday, January 23, 2012, 8:00 pm

Jerusalem Book Launch for Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp, by Rochelle G. Saidel
Congregation Moreshet Israel
Agron Street
Jerusalem, Israel

Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp by Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel, just published by Gefen Publishing House, is the subject of a book launch co-sponsored by Congregation Moreshet Israel and The Fuchsberg Center on Monday evening, January 23. Mielec is just one of many small dots on the map of the Holocaust, but its remarkable and unique history calls for closer scrutiny. Using an experimental process that was not repeated, the Nazis destroyed the Mielec Jewish community on March 9, 1942. The visual and written documentation in this book allows us to learn about the Jewish community that had flourished in Mielec until the Holocaust, as well as the way in which it was wiped out by the Nazis. Another unusual aspect of the Mielec story is that a labor camp, later a concentration camp, was located there to build Heinkel airplanes. Many of the rare visuals about Mielec during the Holocaust are from survivor Moshe Borger, who was given Holocaust-era correspondence and his sister's photograph album by a Polish neighbor after World War II. Mr. Borger is participating in the event.

Left: Moshe Borger, Mielec survivor, is seated in center of photo, first row, with cane. Right: Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel speaking about her book on Mielec, Poland.

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February 8, 2012

Women Under Siege: Gloria Steinem cites Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust as inspiration to launch website to combat sexual violence in war

Through Gloria Steinem, the Women's Media Center has just launched a website called Women Under Siege, designed to draw attention to the fight against sexualized violence as a tool in genocide and conflict zones around the world. When asked what drew her to this project, she said she got the idea after reading Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, as well as At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance by Danielle McGuire. Lauren Wolfe, director of the Women Under Siege site, consulted Remember the Women Institute before writing the section on the Holocaust for the new site.

"This particular form of violence seems profoundly invisible and therefore it continues to punish the victim and rarely punishes the criminal,” said Steinem. Sexualized violence "is a perennial longstanding deep issue," she said. "We've been working on it as long as I can remember. In the first instance explaining rape was not sex, it was violence." She knew there were lessons to be learned from the experiences of women in conflict zones, and wondered whether the experiences of women raped during the Holocaust could have helped society understand and perhaps prevent further sexualized violence in Bosnia and the Congo.

Created by Gloria Steinem, and with a pioneering grant from activist and philanthropist Bonnie Schaefer, Women Under Siege breaks down how rape and other forms of sexualized violence are used as tools in genocide and conflict throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. This project works from the belief that understanding what has happened from the Holocaust onward might have helped us to prevent or prepare for the mass sexual assaults of other conflicts.

"Documenting the problem allows individual victims to know they're not alone or at fault, and allows the institutions of society to create remedies, from laws to education," says Steinem. "By making clear that sexualized violence is political and public, it admits that sexualized violence can be changed."

With blog entries by CBS correspondent Lara Logan—a very personal telling of what happened to her in Tahrir Square and how it has changed her understanding of sexualized violence; photojournalist Lynsey Addario, on how painful it has been for her to cover rape in Congo; Gloria Steinem, on why she founded the project; as well as Tia Palermo, author of last year’s groundbreaking study that revealed that four women are raped every five minutes in Congo; and Karestan Koenen, who writes about her own rape in Niger from the perspective of her work as a Harvard psychologist and epidemiologist—Women Under Siege has created a space for writers, photographers, and survivors to share their work in the field.

The site includes analyses of how sexualized violence has been used as a tool of war—whether to humiliate, to ethnically cleanse, to retaliate, and so on—and provides testimonies of victims in the Holocaust, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Egypt.

Both the World Health Organization and the UN Security Council have recognized that there is a lack of research on sexualized violence in conflict, while there is increasing demand for better analysis in order to work toward prevention and healing. Women Under Siege brings insight that can now be used in this fight to decommission one of war’s most effective means of destroying the enemy—sexualized violence. Women Under Siege is an offshoot of the Women's Media Center, a non-profit media advocacy group that Steinem began in 2005 along with actress Jane Fonda and writer Robin Morgan.

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March 5, 2012

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel

Yad Vashem Archives Division, Libraries, and International Institute for Holocaust Research invite you to a gathering on the occasion of the presentation to the Yad Vashem Archives of personal documents by Moshe Borger, Shoah survivor from Mielec and the presentation to the Yad Vashem Library of the book Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl that Became a Nazi Concentration Camp by Rochelle G. Saidel. The ceremony takes place on Monday, March 5, 2012, at 15:00, in the foyer of the Archives and Library Building, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.

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March 14, 2012, 8:00 pm

61st Annual National Jewish Book Awards Ceremony
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York City

Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (eds Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel) is a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards for 2011 for the category of Women's Studies (sponsored by Barbara Dobkin). Please see a list of all winners and finalists in all categories. The 2011 winners are honored at the event, which is hosted by Samuel G. Freedman and Abigail Pogrebin, and free and open to the public.

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May 12-14, 2012

42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches
Monroe Community College
Rochester, NY

A special plenary session at the 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, to be held at Monroe Community College, Rochester, New York, from May 12-14, 2012, will discuss sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust. Dr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel, co-editors of a book with this title, will participate. Dr. Marcia Sachs Littell will serve as session chair. The central theme of this year's conference is: "70 Years Later: The Lingering Shadow of Wannsee." For more information on the conference, email asc@monroecc.edu or download the ASC Call for Papers (PDF).

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May 23, 2012, 6-8:30 pm

I Came to Testify: Rape as a Weapon of War
Women’s eNews HQ
6 Barclay Street
6th Floor
New York

Join Women’s eNews and the Anne Frank Center USA for a private screening of I Came to Testify, the lead documentary in the Women, War and Peace series.

After the screening, Pamela Hogan, the film's director; Dr. Rochelle Saidel co-editor of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust and executive director of Remember the Women Institute; and Suliman Baldo, director of the Africa program at the International Center for Transnational Justice, will discuss the changing visability of sexual violence against women in war. While the war in Bosnia brought rape prosecutions to the courts for the first time it took until 2008 and the continuing brutal sexual violence directed at women to see rape named as a weapon of war. Has this legal change made it any easier to talk about the rapes women have faced in the past, and continue to face today? Or are there still too few forums willing to address the unique experiences of women during war? This event is produced by Women’s eNews in partnership with the Anne Frank Center USA.

I Came To Testify: When the Balkans exploded into war in the 1990s, reports that tens of thousands of women were being systematically raped by Serb-led forces as a tactic of ethnic cleansing captured the international spotlight. I Came to Testify illuminates the momentous courage of two women who survived these atrocities.

"Witness 99" broke history's great silence when she and 15 others stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law, resulting in a triumphant verdict that defined sexual enslavement as a crime against humanity for the first time in history. "Z.R." is pressing her case in Bosnia’s backlogged national courts, despite death threats meant to silence her--but like most female war survivors is still waiting for justice while her attacker walks free. The film reveals the scars remaining more than fifteen years after the end of the war and explores the role of justice in healing and reconciliation.

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