Introduction: Jewish Women Medical Practitioners in Europe Before, During and After the Holocaust

Abstract

Introduction: Jewish Women Medical Practitioners in Europe Before, During and After the Holocaust Miriam Offer (bio) This issue of Nashim presents a collection of articles that examine gendered aspects of the history of Jewish medicine in Europe, by exploring the roles and activities of Jewish women in the nursing and medical professions in the mid-twentieth century, before, during and after the Holocaust. Academic study of medicine during the Holocaust—both Nazi and Jewish— developed relatively late compared to other aspects of Holocaust research. The seeds of research on Jewish medical activity in the ghettos and camps, which began during the Holocaust itself and was continued in its immediate aftermath by Holocaust-survivor physicians, was shunted aside by other topics that troubled historians studying the “victim,” particularly Jewish leadership, Jewish resistance, and the roles of “bystanders” both inside and, primarily, outside German-occupied countries. In the field of the study of Nazi medicine, German physicians, who had served under the Nazis and continued to hold senior medical positions after the war, were instrumental in the deliberate silencing of research, so as to conceal the nefarious crimes committed by the German medical system and their personal involvement in these atrocities.1 Renewed interest in Nazi medicine began in the 1980s, preceding the revival of the study of Jewish medicine and influencing the latter’s acceleration. The demise of the aging German physicians who had suppressed research on the subject, as well as the effects of the end of the Cold War, led to a dam-burst of new studies, starting in the 1980s, with a new wave since the start of the new century.2 To date, however, very little has been written on gender issues as a significant subdiscipline of this field. Conspicuously absent, in particular, is a description of the central role of women in forming the medical systems established independently by the Jews in the interwar period, during the Holocaust and in its aftermath.3 From the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War II, following the opening of universities in Europe to women, the number of female university students grew steadily. However, Jewish women who wished to study medicine nevertheless faced great obstacles. Parents frequently objected, because they foresaw difficulties for their daughters in finding a match: Convention dictated [End Page 10] that a woman hold a lower position than her husband. Within the medical faculties, female Jewish students had to cope with derision and sexual harassment from male lecturers and students as well as antisemitism.4 Considering these difficulties, it is impossible not to be struck by the number of young Jewish women who flocked to study the profession, to the extent that they constituted a high proportion of all female medical students in the 1930s, until Hitler’s rise to power.5 Jewish women were enthusiastic about penetrating formerly all-male occupations. The first Jewish female university students largely came from assimilated families that did not observe the religious traditions, but others came from modern-Orthodox homes and completed their studies while maintaining a religious lifestyle.6 This trend among Jewish women to study medicine produced a rise in the number and proportion of Jewish women doctors throughout Europe. In the Warsaw Ghetto, there were over 160 women doctors—around 20% of the approximately 730 doctors.7 About 350 nurses qualified at the Jewish school of nursing established in Warsaw during the interwar period, and about eighty more studied there in the ghetto. A list of the 2,800 Polish Jewish physicians who perished during the Holocaust, memorialized in a book dedicated to them by Polish Jewish physicians who had immigrated to the United States, includes nearly 400 female physicians— around 15% of this partial list of victims.8 In central and west European countries, secularization and modernization led to increased integration and assimilation among the Jewish intelligentsia and white-collar professionals. Hence, no nationwide Jewish medical organization was created, as in Poland, but the percentage of Jews in medicine was still far greater than their percentage in the general population, and the same was true of Jewish women.9 For example, on the eve of World War I, Jewish women...