Hanna Rheinz

A Cassandra Call

[German]

As Jewish women, we have indisputably shown a great deal of courage and plurality. We have done this in reference to our historical breaks, but also in describing various Jewish sociotopes in that many try to survive and define themselves. It occurred to me in Alice Shalvi’s lecture how much the older generations still experience positive solidarity and value of Zionism, the building of the Jewish State. As a representative of the Jewish community resident today in Germany I see myself as a minority because I am prepared to issue a Cassandra call at this Bet Debora conference that, if my experience is consistent, will not make me very popular.

What happens to women who don't have families? Are women without families imaginable at all? Don’t the chavurot [communities of friends], the communities, that we have set up at this conference as alternatives to the traditional family have exactly the characteristics that we wanted to get away from - namely, the production of black sheep and outsiders – who even show up here? They do not fit in and do not correspond to the new understanding of roles that we want to develop here together.

Bet Debora is not ultimately directed at women who do not have significant others or no longer have families because they are single, widowed or divorced. It is not directed at women who live at the edges of the Jewish community because they are raising children on their own.

Because they live in Germany, these women exist in some senses on the outermost edge of the Jewish community because the infrastructure of many communities has failed to even identify them as a target group. I am not speaking here of those women who did political work in the tradition of the women's union (Frauenbund), or who are active in WIZO, or are integrated in other community organisations or women's networks. I do not mean successful career women who are in the limelight.

I am talking about women in the shadows. These are women who are no longer or have not yet been integrated into the community. These women experience the Bet Debora conference as an opportunity to recharge their Jewish and human batteries ... that is how it has been for me. But if these women return, they come back to communities that take no notice of them and are only just tolerate them.

They are the women who stand alone at the gravesides of their parents, children and friends because there are no men, no fathers and no sons, who can say Kaddish for them. Women who are members of the orthodox unified community are officially discouraged from saying Kaddish. Women who live alone continue to be in lonely positions, particularly when they do not, as here in Berlin, have the opportunity to form a community. But even in Berlin there are women who are very lonely. In my workshop I portrayed one of them who went to the mikvah [ritual bath] for two years even only to be rejected again and again. And it was not just that the rabbis let her know she was unmarried and as a result in the position of an outsider. She also felt stigmatised by other, married women. They repeatedly made it clear to her that she did not belong and was unwelcome.

In my workshop Galut ha-Neshama [Exile of the Soul], I tried to remind participants of the actual idea of Jewish femininity, to get them to recall that the body provides space for the soul – a positive reference to the body that had nevertheless been lost. And finally, these women are left alone and given no opportunity to experience community. Bet Debora was established to include these women as well, who are in a period of isolation and alienation during that it is even difficult for them to recognise common interests in a Jewish environment and use them as a basis for their behaviour.

Bet Debora has made a good start. But chavurot offer family substitutes in an only limited way, because most people are so caught up in their own worlds that the opportunities for establishing solidarity based on empathy, rachamim, the legacy of Jewish empathy, are overshadowed by indifference. It is true that during the course of the story it happens again and again that outsiders contribute creative ideas and move into the centre when their ideas are adopted. Yet for individuals it is difficult to bear the loneliness. They feel they only have one life and it is passing them by and they never come down off the shelf and become the centre of their own lives.

I am making an appeal that we recognise and develop our common interests beyond an understanding that is linked to the family, because being alone and living without a family does not have to mean just loneliness. It is often the case that precisely this juncture is where feminine strengths become apparent. Those who become aware of being alone tend to rely on their own creativity to resolve difficult situations.

My vision of a modern Jewish identity as a woman is that we recall what sounds anachronistic today, solidarity within the kehille (community). But it can only be experienced if we first recognise that we bring ourselves up short when we frequently, voluntarily and subconsciously uphold conventional images of deficient feminism. We make contemptible women who are not integrated in families in the conventional and socially acceptable sense. They are pitied because they are not really “fully valuable as Jewish women”. We can no longer tolerate letting each other remain on the fringes, hoping only that future generations will bring those of us into the centre who today stand on the outside. The task is to stop excluding each other. We must demand and accept our place in within the community, both as individuals and as a group.

Dr. Hanna Rheinz, psychologist and university lecturer, is the author of "Die jüdische Frau. Auf der Suche nach einer modernen Identität" (The Jewish Woman - In Search of a Modern Identity, 1998).