PROJECTS

Current | Future | Past

Current Projects

Anthology on Sexual Abuse of Women During the Holocaust to be Published by Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England
“The Untold Story of Mielec, Poland,” Yad Vashem Research Project
Portuguese and Hebrew Editions of The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp
Conferences Addressing the Issue Of Sexual Abuse
New Edition: Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story
The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp
Gender Equality: New Brazilian Teacher Guide For Gender Equality In The Classroom
Ongoing Research Project: Antisemitism and Sexism: Jewish Women Who Immigrated to Brazil

NEW ANTHOLOGY IN PROGRESS ON SEXUAL ABUSE DURING THE HOLOCAUST
Remember the Women Institute announces that we are preparing to publish an anthology of work on sexual abuse of women during the Holocaust, edited by Dr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel, with related essays by distinguished scholars and experts from around the world. We are pleased to announce that Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England will publish a forthcoming anthology on this subject edited by Dr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel. The book will be featured in the Hadassah Brandeis Institute's series on Jewish women.

A prestigious interdisciplinary and international group of scholars are contributing chapters. They include:
            Dr. Helga Amesberger, a political scientist at the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna
            Dr. Ellen Ben-Sefer, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Health at the University of Technology, Sydney
            Kirsty Chatwood, an independent scholar from Edinburgh University, Scotland
            Esther Dror, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Education at Haifa University
            Monika Flaschka, a Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History at Kent State University
            Dr. Eva Fogelman, Co-director of Psychotherapy with Generations of the Holocaust and
                       Related Traumas and a psychologist in private practice in New York
            Dr. Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, a professor of film at Sapir Academic College in Israel
            Dr. Brigitte Halbmayr, a political scientist at University of Vienna
            Dr. S. Lillian Kremer, a University Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Kansas State University
            Nomi Levenkron, an attorney in Israel who defends women trafficked as prostitutes
            Dr. Ruth Linn, a professor at the Faculty of Education, Haifa University
            Joanna Ostrowska a Ph.D. candidate in the Jewish History and Culture Department at Jagiellonian University, Krakow
            Dr. Anatoly Podolsky, a historian who directs the Ukrainian Holocaust Center in Kiev
            Dr. Helene Sinnreich, Director of Judaic and Holocaust Studies at Youngstown State University
            Dr. Miriam Sivan, a professor of literature at Haifa University
            Robert Sommer, a doctoral candidate in History at Humboldt University in Berlin
            Dr. Zoë Waxman, a Research Fellow in Holocaust Studies
                      at the Centre for Holocaust and Twentieth Century History, Royal Holloway, University of London

A Visit with Judy Chicago

Rochelle Saidel, Sonja Hedgepeth, and Judy Chicago.

Through the Flower welcome sign, Belen, NM.

Co-editors Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel recently traveled to Belen, NM to meet with feminist artist Judy Chicago and discuss using images from her Holocaust Project for the anthology. She has been addressing the issues of rape and sexual abuse for decades in her art and writing, and through her not-for-profit organization, Through the Flower. Her powerful images and thoughts about these issues will greatly enhance the forthcoming book.

BACKGROUND ON RAPE
Because of the difficulty of obtaining information from the victims, and the sensitivity of the subject, sexual abuse of women during the Holocaust has not yet received the academic attention that it deserves. The two main issues that require further research are rape and forced prostitution. Regarding rape, female survivors often mention in interviews that they know that their friend was raped, but they rarely put the discussion in the first person. Furthermore, this is not a situation where researchers can look for documentation, because there generally is none. Rape has to do with the aggressor's use of power via a sexual act to humiliate and abuse the victim. If this can happen to any woman anywhere, it surely happens when women (and sometimes men) in concentration camps are considered less then human by Nazi captors endowed with the power of life and death. Laws against Rassenschande, or racial impurity, did not apply for Nazis raping their Jewish prisoners. Besides, if there were no witnesses willing to testify, Nazi guards could rape with impunity. A victim would not dare to make an accusation or she would be murdered, and a rapist, even if accused, could simply deny his actions. (The situation of Soviet troops raping women as they conquered Nazi-held territory also needs to be explored.)

Preliminary Report on “The Untold Story of Mielec, Poland”
Yad Vashem Research Project.

The writing phase for a book with the working title The Untold Story of Mielec, Poland: From Kehilla to Konzentrationslager by Rochelle G. Saidel is currently in progress.  Research for the book was carried out by Dr. Saidel when she served as a Research Fellow at the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem during the Fall 2006 semester.

The untold story of Mielec, Poland, might be entitled “From Kehillah to Konzentrationslager.” Like hundreds of other shtetls and small towns in Poland, its Jewish community was destroyed during the Holocaust. The entire population was murdered, sent to slave labor or deported en masse to the Lublin District on March 9, 1942. Mielec is unique because this was the first town that had its Jewish population deported in the context of the Final Solution. The decision to do so was made very early, in January 1942. Furthermore, after the deportation, the Mielec Jews were not murdered immediately. Nevertheless, histories of the Holocaust barely or never mention Mielec.

Located in the Rzeszow province in southern Poland, Mielec had a Jewish community that was first organized in the middle of the seventeenth century. Just prior to World War II, there were 3,000 to 4000 Jewish inhabitants (depending on source), about half of the population. Only about 200 Jewish residents survived the Holocaust. On September 13, 1939, erev Rosh Hashanah, the Nazis shot or burned alive at least 20 Jews in the synagogue-mikve-slaughterhouse complex.

In January 1942, a decision was made to deport the Mielec Jews, and on March 9, 1942, about 2000 to 3000 Jews or more (depending on source) were transferred to the Berdechow airport. Some sources claim a higher number, and the population had grown because Jews had fled to the town from other locations in Poland. Some were shot before arrival at the airport; the rest were herded into the hangar, where they were subject to a selection. After a group of young people (about 750) were chosen for slave labor in Pustkow concentration camp, the rest were deported to Parchew, Wlodawa, Niedzyrzec, Dubienka and other towns in the Lublin district. They lived there in dire circumstances, awaiting ultimate transfer to Belzec or Sobibor and murder. During that time, the Mielec church organist hid some of their belongings. As the victims waited, they wrote to him asking that he sell certain items and send them money for necessities. He did so, always carefully recording the transactions.

About four months after the Jewish population was removed from Mielec, a forced labor camp was established there to produce airplanes for Heinkel. This later became a full-fledged concentration camp. Survivors of the Mielec concentration camp, mostly not natives of the town, gave testimonies that provided graphic details about their daily life. There were both men and women in the Mielec camp, which functioned for about two years. Some of them provided testimony for trials against the various commandants of the camp. The last, Josef Schwammberger, was finally tried in Germany in 1990, after escaping to Argentina and living there for 40 years.

The idea for this research project began because of a survivor living in Jerusalem, Moshe Borger. He has rare documentation about Mielec before, during, and after the Holocaust, which helps to tell the story of Mielec and appropriately place it within Holocaust history. Research in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw have given the project added dimensions and information. Even though there are very few survivors who were natives of Mielec, there is a wealth of firsthand testimonies regarding the community and the concentration camp that was subsequently created there. These accounts about the pre-Holocaust community and the March 9, 1942 deportation are mostly from a few fortunate Jews who were able to escape into hiding. There are also testimonies by non-Jewish residents and Nazi documents that provide a time line and elaborate plans for the deportation.

This research project also uses as new primary source material Moshe Borger's rare photographs, letters, and documents that preserve the history of his community. These materials (typically unavailable for a destroyed community) tell the story of Mielec and its Jewish inhabitants. They also provide evidence that the Mielec church organist helped the deported Jews. (Mr. Borger owns the original materials, and some have been scanned by Yad Vashem's archives. Rochelle Saidel has Mr. Borger's permission to use them, as well as other materials in his Jerusalem home.)

Mr. Borger, then a teenager, was hidden near Mielec with the help of a school friend's family. His sisters, Sarah and Ziporah, were deported. (Testimony in the Mielec Yizkor Book describes how a friend tried to help them escape.) Mr. Borger has extraordinary correspondence between the deportees and the church organist, given to him after the war. His photographs include a variety of cultural, school, and youth group activities and people from Mielec before World War II, during the inter-war period. He also has photographs of post-war Mielec and correspondence with his Landsmannschaft and the organist. This is an unusual and rich collection. This previously unknown story of the organist helping deported members of the Jewish community, combined with other extant testimony and documentation from Nazi documents and Polish documents from post-war investigations will help to give Mielec its place in history.

The testimonies in the Yad Vashem archive and other archives are in Polish, Hebrew, German, and English. Those not in English have been translated by competent translators. Nazi documents have also been translated, in an effort to understand why Mielec was chosen for this experiment, and why it was not repeated. A preliminary field investigation in Poland was made in May 2005. More intensive field research continued in May 2007 in Mielec. In addition, several survivors of either the town or the concentration camp have published their memoirs and some have shared unpublished information. There is yet more background in a Yizkor book,  Pinkas Kehilla, as well as archives in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States.

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Portuguese and Hebrew Editions of The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

New Portuguese Edition of The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by University of São Paulo Press
May 2009 is the publication date for the new Brazilian edition of The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by University of São Paulo Press. There are a number of links between this concentration camp and Brazil: Olga Benario Prestes was deported from Brazil to Nazi Germany in 1936; several survivors in the book settled in Brazil after World War II; and another had links to the country through her father.

The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (Hebrew Edition)

October 31, 2007 marks the official date for the publication of the Hebrew edition of The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by Rochelle G. Saidel. The book, elegantly translated into Hebrew by Avri Fischer, is the first in Hebrew on this subject. The Ravensbrück book is published by Beyahad Publishers, the publishing division of Lohamei Hagetaot, The Ghetto Fighters' House and Museum, Israel. Professor Dalia Ofer, Max and Rita Haber Professor of Holocaust and Eastern Europe Studies, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written a foreword for the new Hebrew edition.

The book launch, co-sponsored by Remember the Women Institute, is a feature of the conference, Women and the Holocaust: Childhood and Youth under the Third Reich – A Gender Perspective, to be held October 29 -31. The October 31 morning session inaugurating the book takes place at the Ghetto Fighters' House and Museum, north of Haifa.

The publication of the book was made possible by generous grants to Lohamei Hagetaot by Lili Haber, Naomi Asai, the Crakowian Association in Israel and Moshe Berger; and to Remember the Women Institute by the Five Millers Family Foundation, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation. For more information about the English edition of the book, please see below. For more information about the conference, please see Events.

The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp (English Edition)
by Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel
Imprint: Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press,
Paperback edition, 2006, ISBN 0-299-19864-2, with new preface, $21.95.
Hardcover, 2004, ISBN 0-299-19860-X, $29.95, 336 pp. with 63 images. ORDER FORM (requires Adobe Reader).

See information about book launch of paperback edition and reader comments.

The hardback and/or paperback edition is now available throughout Israel via Yad Vashem by phoning (02) 644-3511. Also available in Jerusalem at M. Pomeranz Bookseller, Shmuel HaNagid Street 4. Telephone (02) 623-5559. E-mail: pomeranz@netmedia.net.il

And at Tamir Books, Rehov Emek Refaim, Jerusalem, as well as at selected Steimatzky bookstores.
Available in Brazil through the Livraria Cultura web site and retail store in Conjunto Nacional Av. Paulista, 2073, São Paulo, and in other cities in Brazil. São Paulo telephone (11) 3170-4033, fax (11) 3285-4457, and e-mail: livros@livrariacultura.com.br

This is the first book in English to recount the experiences of Jewish prisoners in Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, and to incorporate the camp into Holocaust memorialization. Based on the author’s interest in the camp and its victims, as well as her personal relationships with some of the survivors, the book was envisioned when she first visited the camp memorial (then in East Germany) in 1980. It includes narratives from interviews with some sixty survivors in the United States, Israel, Canada, Europe, and Brazil, as well as unpublished testimonies and documents. Some survivors shared a poem, diary excerpt, or unpublished memoir, which are incorporated into the book. There are also sixty-three graphic images, and an extensive bibliography.

This crossover book is of interest to scholars as well as general readers of memoirs, women’s lives and history, and twentieth century and Holocaust-related history. Although it is written in a style that is engaging to general readers, it is thoroughly researched, documented, and footnoted. The book fills a gap, because the camp and the experiences of its female Jewish victims are virtually unknown to most English language readers. Even anthologies that study women during the Holocaust have either omitted the camp or included only superficial information.

Because Ravensbrück was created as a camp for female political prisoners, many of them Communists, and was located in East Germany, the Cold War interfered with information about and interest in it after World War II. Furthermore, because many prisoners were political rather than Jewish, the camp has until now been downplayed in most of the literature, historical accounts, museums, and memorials that recount Jewish Holocaust experiences. However, thousands of Jewish women were murdered by slave labor, torture, starvation, shooting, lethal injection, “medical” experiments, and gassing in this camp, which was located about 50 miles north of Berlin. Among the some 132,000 women who were in the camp, about twenty percent were Jewish. This innovative book aims at bringing to life the stories of the Jewish prisoners in the context of the camp, so that readers can better understand the despair in Ravensbrück and the ways that some of its victims managed to survive and rebuild their lives.

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Addressing the Issue Of Sexual Abuse

CONFERENCE ON FORCED PROSTITUTION HELD AT RAVENSBRÜCK MEMORIAL
Forced prostitution, a related issue, is somewhat easier to document. Research on this has developed further in Germany than in the United States. A special conference at the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp memorial addressed the issue in September, with papers by mainly German scholars. Women from Ravensbrück and other camps were routinely taken to men's camps to serve as prostitutes for Nazis and privileged male prisoners.

Dr. Sonja Hedgepeth of Middle Tennessee State University was the representative of both her university and Remember the Women Institute at this conference. In addition to bringing back and sharing information, the conference was an opportunity to dialogue with scholars from Germany and other countries. For a complete program and list of participating scholars, please see http://www.ravensbrueck.de/mgr/deutsch/dl/esur07/esur07progeng.pdf.

CONFERENCE SESSION ON SEXUAL ABUSE AT MTSU
At a conference on the Holocaust at Middle Tennessee State University on November 8 – 10, Dr. Hedgepeth and Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel co-chaired a ground-breaking session organized by Remember the Women Institute and entitled “Sexual Coercion of Women During the Holocaust.” Featured presentations were “Silenced by Death, Silenced by Shame: Sexual Abuse in the Ghetto” by Helene J. Sinnreich, Ph.D., Director, Judaic and Holocaust Studies, Youngstown State University (www.ysu.edu/judaic); and “Gendered Violence: Rape in the Nazi-occupied East” by Monika Flaschka, Doctoral candidate, Modern European History, Kent State University and Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow for Archival Research, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007. Dr. Hedgepeth also reported on the September conference at the Ravensbrück memorial.

In addition to the German scholars and those mentioned above, some members of the Remember the Women Institute have worked on the issue of sexual abuse of women during the Holocaust, including Dr. Myrna Goldenberg, Dr. Ellen Ben-Sefer, and Dr. Miriam Sivan. Dr. Goldenberg is continuing to focus on rape in her research, and recently presented a paper on the subject at a genocide conference in Sarajevo. Dr. Zoë Waxman, Royal Holloway, University of London, presented a related paper at the spring 2007 conference on the Holocaust at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

The subject of sexual abuse of women during the Holocaust has been addressed in literature, as early as Ka-tzetnik's House of Dolls, first published in English in 1956. Nava Semel, an outstanding contemporary Israeli novelist, wrote about the sexual abuse of a girl in hiding in The Rat Laughs (in Hebrew, soon to be published in English in Australia). However, much more academic research still needs to be carried out and reported.

Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story, The New Expanded Edition Book Published by Syracuse University Press in March 2007, with Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel as Editor. Now in its second printing!

Paperback $16.95 ISBN 978-0-8156-0861-5

Order though Syracuse University Press
See Press release
See reviewer comments about this new book.
See the New York Times comments

Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story, a new expanded edition of My Story, a memoir by Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, was published by Syracuse University Press in Spring 2007. Gemma was the sister of former New York City (1933-1944) Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and she was held as a political hostage in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel has edited Gluck's memoir, adding a prologue and epilogue. She also included an appendix with letters written between Gemma and Fiorello between 1945 and 1947, as well as visuals that trace Gemma's life story. The Remember the Women Institute and the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Foundation provided partial support for the publication.

Gemma La Guardia Gluck's original memoir, My Story, edited by S. L. Shneiderman and published in 1961, has long been out of print. While the focus is on Gemma's experience in Ravensbrück, it is much more than a Holocaust memoir. It begins with the great wave of immigration to the United States from Europe in the 1880s, and follows the family to army posts in Dakota Territory and Arizona. It also traces the family history of the La Guardias, including the background of Gemma and Fiorello’s Jewish mother, Irene Coen La Guardia.

Gemma and her family returned to Italy in the early twentieth century, when she was in her twenties. Fiorello went back to New York to learn a law degree and launch a political career, but Gemma remained in Europe and married a Hungarian Jewish man. Living in Budapest in 1944, she was arrested by the Nazis. In addition to her incarceration in Ravensbrück, Gemma details the often untold story of the extreme hardships of living as a displaced person in post-World War II Berlin. She also describes how her daughter and infant grandson were reunited with her as she was sent out of the concentration camp, and how the three of them struggled for two years to immigrate to the United States.

Gemma's memoir is a story of a wise and strong woman who remained optimistic and resourceful, even when life was much less than fair. For related lectures, see 2007 EVENTS. Read a summary of a lecture related to this book.


The old, 1961 edition of My Story, edited by S. L. Shneiderman (out of print).

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NEW BRAZILIAN TEACHER GUIDE FOR GENDER EQUALITY IN THE CLASSROOM

Dr. Rosa Ester Rossini, a member of the Advisory Board of Remember the Women Institute, is coordinator and Dr. Rochelle Saidel is part of the team that is editing a new edition of a guide on gender equality for Brazilian teachers. The guide is a project of NEMGE, the Center for the Study of Women and Social Relations of Gender at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Eva Alterman Blay, a member of the Institute's Advisory Board, is the scientific coordinator of NEMGE.

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ANTISEMITISM AND SEXISM: JEWISH WOMEN WHO IMMIGRATED TO BRAZIL

This ongoing project is analyzing the experiences of the Jewish immigrant women who came to São Paulo because of persecution in Europe during the German Third Reich. Using oral history interviews and written memoirs, some 25 women’s stories are included in the study.

The project’s purpose is to develop an understanding that Jewish women had to face certain issues not only because of their religion. The theoretical assumption is that within the universal suffering of all of the victims of the Holocaust and the general problems faced by all new immigrants, men’s and women's experiences were different. The study analyzes the specific issues of gender that made the female experience different from that of the male, examining both positive and negative gender-related aspects. Results of the study are projected to be published in both English and Portuguese, and will be made available to educational and cultural institutions. Interviews were done in conjunction with the Center for the Study of Women and Gender (NEMGE in Portuguese), University of São Paulo.

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