DPs, mothers and pioneers: Women in the she'erit hapletah

The essay deals with the lives of Jewish women survivors in liberated Germany during the years 1945-1948. Among the topics dealt with are the identities of these women, the roles they played in organizational frameworks formed by the survivors and the dynamics of their rehabilitation process. The gender-related issues with which they grappled during this period - such as the desire to create families while still undergoing physical rehabilitation - are of particular interest to scholars of the period and to feminist scholars looking for the impact of gender in crisis situations. The second part of the essay examines two examples of Jewish women's post-war rehabilitation: the women active in Hechalutz, the Zionist-pioneering movement in Europe, and particularly those who later joined Kibbutz Buchenwald, the first hachshara kibbutz to be founded in postwar Germany. The second were a group of women active in the postwar leadership of the orthodox girls educational movement Beth Jacob, a number of whom originally also joined up with Kibbutz Buchenwald and later founded their own ultra-orthodox kibbutz on the outskirts of the Zeilsheim DP camp, Chafetz Chaim. The essay concludes with an attempt to map out the role of Jewish famale survivors among the Displaced Persons in postwar Germany.