{"title":"Midwifery under German Occupation in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and in Western Poland","authors":"Lisner","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The aim of Germanizing the western parts of Poland, which were annexed to the German Reich in 1939, shaped the planning of obstetric services. Occupation policies such as “racial segregation” determined healthcare policy and biopolitics as well as midwifery practice. This paper takes a closer look at the female-dominated sphere of pregnancy, birth and early parenthood as one of the key points of biopolitics and Germanization and as the sphere in which policies became crucial to women and their bodies. This will shed light on the gender-specific aspects of occupation and race policies in western Poland and their impact on everyday life for midwives. By highlighting the highly divergent and increasingly antagonistic experiences and perspectives of Jewish, German and Polish midwives within the local settings of the city of Łódź/Litzmannstadt and within occupied western Poland, I hope to contribute to an “integrated history” of the occupation.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"24 1","pages":"116 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89697066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jewish Female Medical Defiance in Block 10","authors":"Weinberger","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.08","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the roles played by three female Jewish inmates— Sylvia Friedmann, Sonja Fritz and Dr. Alina Brewda—who were forced to assist in inhumane medical experiments in Auschwitz. Their own words and those of other survivors are presented to paint a picture, however incomplete, of the impossible and unimaginable choices they were forced to confront in Block 10. Interviews with survivors conducted by the author, along with other survivor accounts and testimony from criminal proceedings against Nazi doctors Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann, are used to examine the divergent responses of Jewish women forced to work as medical professionals in an environment where all medical norms ceased to be observed.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"14 1","pages":"133 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83162812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Broken Career of Johanna Hellmann, One of the First Women Surgeons in Germany","authors":"Rebecca Schwoch","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Even today, women in surgery are a minority, so that female role models in surgery are in short supply. One of the first woman surgeons in Germany was Dr. Johanna Hellmann (1889–1981). Hellmann had to fight for her interests throughout her life: at school, in her quest to obtain the qualifications she needed for university entrance; at university, during her studies of medicine; and especially in the medical profession, as she sought to enter surgery, a predominantly male domain. Her career reached a peak in 1932, when she became the head surgeon of a small hospital in Berlin. But in 1933 the relentless Nazi persecution began, and Johanna Hellmann, who had converted to Protestantism, was suddenly considered a Jewess again. Everything she had achieved before the National Socialists came to power was destroyed, and emigration was the only choice left to her.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"43 1","pages":"22 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88159976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Jewish Women Medical Practitioners in Europe Before, During and After the Holocaust","authors":"Miriam Offer","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"40 1","pages":"10 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78745470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Jewish) Women’s Narratives of Caring and Medical Practices During the Spanish Civil War","authors":"Cynthia Gabbay","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article investigates the feminist memory of the Spanish Civil War, focusing on two relevant cases from the Jewish/non-Jewish Spanish-speaking world—those of Micaela Feldman Etchebehere and Marie Glas Langer. Both, the former a libertarian and the latter a communist, were involved in medical practices and authored personal narratives of caring in which the gender issue constitutes a key element. The analysis of Feldman’s and Glas’s caring practices exposed in these texts follows literary research methodologies. It focuses on the reconstruction of autobiographical narratives, centered on topics of medical practice and caring, intersected by the “female” condition and by feminist propositions.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"23 1","pages":"205 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85574706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Many Hats of Dr. Krystyna Modrzewska","authors":"Monika Rice, Katarzyna Michalewska","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the complex identities of Dr. Krystyna Modrzewska (1919–2008), a Polish-Jewish physician and writer, and a fascinating border-crosser. Hailing from an assimilated Jewish family in Lublin, she was a convert to Catholicism as well as a closeted transsexual and transvestite, Modrzewska struggled to create and assert her various personae through shifting historical circumstances. In her multiple postwar and war memoirs, she negotiated her own understanding of Jewishness and Polishness, absorbing the revelations of Polish hostilities against the Jews. Realizing her gender dysphoria, she had to hide and adjust to societal norms, while she projected her real gender identity in her literary output. Ultimately, she framed her life within the Catholic values of guilt, repentance and reconciliation, expressing her most unified self in a mode of personal, spiritual confession. This is the first study analyzing Modrzewska’s multiple identities. Based on original, untranslated Polish documents, it contributes to the understanding of Polish-Jewish female doctors recreating their “selves” in the oppressive climate of communist Poland and post-1968 exile.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"35 1","pages":"177 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80481731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anna Braude-Heller, Seen from a Distance","authors":"Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Dr. Anna Braude-Heller, a pediatrician, worked for many years as director of the Bersohn and Bauman Hospital for Jewish children in Warsaw. She supervised this institution up to its last moments, remaining with her young charges until the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in spring 1943. This article attempts to present both her private life and her career as a consistent path of conscious decisions. It is based on different historical sources, from medical documentation (including her prewar medical articles), through interwar press detailing her activism and involvement in many philanthropic actions, and memoirs from and of the wartime period. One of the most important references is her article, written in the Warsaw Ghetto, concerning the effects of long-standing hunger among children in the hospital she directed.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"99 1","pages":"117 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80570960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Zofia Szymańska and Child Welfare in Twentieth-Century Poland","authors":"S. Martin","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Zofia Szymańska was trained as a child psychiatrist in Paris before and during World War I. She practiced in revolutionary Russia and in interwar Warsaw. She survived the Warsaw Ghetto in hiding with nuns and after the war became a state employee in communist Poland. An examination of Szymańska’s career both before and after World War II introduces us to the development of child welfare services; the transformation of philanthropy into professional social work; the training of psychiatrists, teachers and social workers; the participation of Jewish and Polish women in these fields; the history of crime among and punishment of juveniles; the history of special needs education among Jews and in Poland; aid provided to Jews during World War II; and connections between Catholic institutions and the state in postwar Poland. This outline of Szymańska’s biography allows us to consider twentieth-century narratives of disruption and continuity.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"73 1","pages":"159 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86361869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jewish Women Medical Practitioners Who Rescued Fellow Jews During the Holocaust","authors":"Noam Gidron","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Rescue of Jews by Jews has only lately begun to emerge as a topic of independent research. Yet Jews in every country in occupied Europe, themselves victims of the German occupation, used various daring means to help Jews survive the Holocaust. Among the Jewish rescuers who operated as individuals, and not as part of an underground rescue operation, the number of medical personnel stands out, and quite a few of them were female physicians, nurses and also women with no professional medical background, who pursued this work under extremely difficult conditions, despite the dearth of resources, the constant threat of exposure to infectious diseases and the lack of any protection. Some of them initiated perilous rescue operations that would have meant certain death had they been discovered. This article is dedicated to the Jewish women rescuers who were part of the medical system in Nazi-occupied Europe.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"1 1","pages":"39 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89902685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nursing in the Theresienstadt Ghetto","authors":"Margalit Shlain","doi":"10.2979/nashim.36.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.36.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the context of the reality of life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, especially after it was designated as a ghetto for the old, this article focuses on the work of the nurses, both those who had qualified as nurses before their arrival and those who gained their practical training there. It looks at the relationships between nurses from different backgrounds and origins, seeking insights into these women’s experiences in the extreme conditions of the ghetto. It asks about the value of their struggle to save life, despite their awareness of the inevitable end. In conclusion, it will try to explain the absence of nurses from the epic of the Holocaust and especially from the history of the Theresienstadt ghetto.","PeriodicalId":42498,"journal":{"name":"Nashim-A Journal of Jewish Womens Studies & Gender Issues","volume":"24 1","pages":"60 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80901326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}