Case of the Ninety-Three Daughters of Israel
(Bais Yaakov Movement)
(Bais Yaakov Movement)
Kracow, Poland
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Table of Contents
- Ninety-Three Daughters of Israel (08/11/1942)
- 93 Choose Suicide (Yiddish)
- 93 choose suicide before Nazi shame (01/08/1943)
- Seminary (03/14/1971)
- Chaya's Dance (04/08/1999)
- Israel - The Myth of the 93 Cracow Girls Who Took Their Lives in the Holocaust Exposed (04/07/2009)
Ninety-Three Daughters of Israel
By Chaya Feldman
August 11, 1942
We washed our bodies
and we grew clean;
we purified our souls
and we grew quiet.
Death does not terrify us;
we go out to meet him.
We served God while we were alive
and now we can best serve our people
by refusing to be taken alive.
We made a covenant of the heart,
all the ninety-three;
together we learned
and together we will meet our end.
As I write these words
the hour is upon us:
barely enough time to write down this prayer ...
Brethren, wherever you are,
honor the Torah we lived by
and the Psalms we loved.
Read them for us, as well as for you,
and someday when the Beast
has hunted his last prey,
we hope somebody will say Kaddish for us:
ninety-three daughters of Israel.
In 1943 Meir Shenkolevsky, the secretary of the world Bais Yaakov movement and a member of the Central Committee of Agudas Israel in New York, received a letter from Chaya Feldman: "I don't know when you will get this letter and if you still will remember me. When this letter arrives, I will no longer be alive. In a few hours, everything will be past. We are here in four rooms, 93 girls ages 14 to 22, all of us Bais Yaakov teachers. On July 27, Gestapo agents came, took us out of our apartment and threw us into a dark room. We only have water to drink. The younger girls are very frightened, but I comfort them that in a short while, we will be together with our mother Sara [Sara Shnirer, the founder of the Bais Yaakov Seminary]. Yesterday they took us out, washed us and took all our clothes. They left us only shirts and said that today, German soldiers will come to visit us. We all swore to ourselves that we will die together. The Germans don't know that the bath they gave us was the immersion before our deaths: we all prepared poison. When the soldiers come, we will drink the poison. We are all saying Viduy throughout the day. We are not afraid of anything. We only have one request from you: Say Kaddish for 93 bnos Yisroel! Soon we will be with our mother Sara. Signed, Chaya Feldman from Cracow."
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93 Choose Suicide (Yiddish)
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New York Times - Jan. 8, 1943
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Seminary
New York Times - March 14, 1971
Margot Brown, Beverly Hills, CA writes that the poem describing a mass suicide of girls in a Warsaw seminary during the German occupation, sought by L.G. on Feb. 7, was written by the late Hebrew poet Hillel Bavli. "The Letter of the Ninety-Three Maidens" was based on a letter by Haya Feldmen, one of the 93 pupils and teachers at the Beth jacob School who decided to commit suicide rather than yield to the Nazi soldiers.
Following is the first part of the poem:
We cleansed our bodies and we are pure,
We cleansed our spirits and are at peace.
Death does not frighten us,
We shall meet it calmly.
We served God with our life,
We shall know how to hallow his name in death,
A solemn covenant binds the ninety-three of us.
Together we studied God's Torah,
Together we shall die.
Dora E. Landes, Elkins Park, PA; Gershon and Brenda Bacon, New York; Morris Silverman, New York; and Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, New York, are among readers who responded to this query.
Chaya’s Dance
by Beverly Gray
Jewish Journal - April 8, 1999
Six years ago, Carol Solomon attended Yom Kippur services in Copenhagen.
Flipping through the back of the English language prayerbook, she came
upon a poem, translated from Hebrew, called "The Letter of the
Ninety-Three Maidens." Based on an actual letter that was found after
the Holocaust, it tells of young girls at a Jewish school in Cracow who
took poison rather than allow themselves to be defiled by Nazi soldiers.
Historians question the letter's authenticity. But for Solomon,
"something about this story just captured my heart."
Which is why
Solomon, an L.A.-based choreographer, was inspired to create "Chaya's
Letter," a full-length dance work that will have its world premiere in
Sinai Temple's Barad Hall on Sept. 4, 1999, just before Rosh Hashanah.
But a 15-minute excerpt can be seen by the public on Friday evening,
April 16, as part of a Yom Ha Shoah service at the Wadsworth Theatre in
Westwood, under the auspices of Temple Shalom for the Arts.
"Chaya's
Letter" features six young female dancers, who in rehearsal displayed
their passion for Solomon's intense, grueling choreography. The
haunting score was composed by Chris Ridenhour, husband of one of the
dancers, for piano and string quartet. Solomon, who has never before
based a dance on Jewish themes, has been encouraged by the support (both
financial and moral) she has received from the Jewish community.
Michael Berenbaum, president of the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation,
endorsed her work as "powerful, indeed at moments awesome," and calls it
a fitting memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
For more information about "Chaya's Letter," call the Carol Solomon Dance Co. at (323) 957-9614.
VosIzNiez - April 27, 2009
Israel - Which girls attending a Bais Yaakov school hasn't heard the
story of the courageous 93 girls from Sara Shnirer's Cracow seminary who
preferred to take their lives rather than submit to the Nazis'
despicable plans? A small street in south Tel Aviv bordering on the
streets of Mordechai Analewitz (commander of the Warsaw ghetto) and
Chana Seresh (the Hungarian Jewish parachutist who was brutally murdered
by the Nazis) was called "The 93" after the righteous girls. A book was
written about them called "Chaya Feldman's last letter" recounting the
tale of courage.
But 60 years of research have concluded that the story was a fraud.
Who created the myth and why?
The beginning of the chilling story was in New York in 1943. Meir
Shenkolevsky, the secretary of the world Bais Yaakov movement and a
member of the Central Committee of Agudas Israel in New York, received a
letter from Chaya Feldman just before she gave up her life: "I don't
know when you will get this letter and if you still will remember me.
When this letter arrives, I will no longer be alive. In a few hours,
everything will be past. We are here in four rooms, 93 girls ages 14 to
22, all of us Bais Yaakov teachers. On July 27, Gestapo agents came,
took us out of our apartment and threw us into a dark room. We only have
water to drink
"The younger girls are very frightened, but I comfort them that
in a short while, we will be together with our mother Sara [Sara
Shnirer', the founder of the Bais Yaakov Seminary]. Yesterday they took
us out, washed us and took all our clothes. They left us only shirts and
said that today, German soldiers will come to visit us. We all swore to
ourselves that we will die together. The Germans don't know that the
bath they gave us was the immersion before our deaths: we all prepared
poison. When the soldiers come, we will drink the poison. We are all
saying Viduy throughout the day. We are not afraid of anything. We only
have one request from you: Say Kaddish for 93 bnos Yisroel! Soon we will
be with our mother Sara. Signed, Chaya Feldman from Cracow."
The letter also reached Israel, was published in the Davar
newspaper and the New York Times, and was the inspiration for songs,
articles, assemblies, prayers and poems. A memorial booklet was even
issued in memory of the women, who were symbols of bravery, purity and
modesty.
The one problem with the story: After 60 years of comprehensive
research, Yad Vashem says conclusively that it never happened. The 93
women were a Holocaust myth, without a basis in reality.
The street in south Tel Aviv was called "The 93" after chareidi
organizations, including the administration of Bais Yaakov and Agudas
Israel, asked the municipality to commemorate the girls and call a
street after them. The Name Committee accepted the request, based on the
"The 93" book which was published by the "Committee to Protect the
Honor of a Bas Yisroel" (published in Iyar 1943) which contained
articles, prayers and songs in memory of the undefiled girls who took
their lives.
Atty. Naomi Levenkron, an expert on women-trafficking and the
director of "Mishna", a non-profit dedicated to studying social law in
the Administration College, happened to come across the story. "As one
whose occupation revolves around prostitution and rape, I was astonished
how come I had never heard this story before."
Levenkron turned to Yad Vashem and received the laconic reply
that the story wasn't true. The response shocked her. "I heard about
Holocaust deniers, but I never met Holocaust inventors," she said. She
even suspected Yad Vashem's attitude to the story was based on apathy
towards abuse of women.
But there were annoying question marks hanging over the story
long before Atty. Levenkron got involved. Prof. Judy Tidor
Baumol-Schwartz, the head of the Contemporary Jewry Program in Bar Ilan
University, had asked, "How could Chaya Feldman's suicide letter arrive
from a room in the closed ghetto, in occupied Europe, to the rabbis in
New York? Where did the women acquire such a large quantity of expensive
poison? How come none of the Holocaust survivors had heard of this
story, which occurred in a relatively small ghetto? Why was the Yiddish
letter written in a Hungarian dialect, while Chaya was from Poland? The
large number of girls proves that the story was impossible."
Chareidi Holocaust researcher Esther Farbstein, the head of the
Holocaust Studies Center in the Michlala, and author of the book "Hidden
Thunder", confirms that from the point of the Nazis, the story is
illogical. "It's hard to believe that an organized group of Germans
planned an action which opposed the Nazi racial laws, which forbad
relations with Jews, and all the more so to do it in public -- even
though it is possible that similar events took place in less public
circumstances and in different numbers, such as when the soldiers
serving in the Wehrmacht felt themselves unhampered by the regulations
to maintain their race."
Despite the hard questions, the chareidi community continues to
celebrate the story. Sarit Yechimowitz, who learned in a Bais Yaakov
school, recalls that on the day of the 93 girls' yahrtzeit, the girls in
her school had an assembly, the principal spoke, and an important rav
visited who spoke about the girls' courage and their dying al kiddush
Hashem.
Yechimowitz explains, "The story had a strong impact on us, even
me, who was known as a rebel. The line that was taught is that it was
':yaharog v'al yaavor. When you hear again and again about these women's
courage, you think to yourself, 'How can I dare go with a short skirt,
when 93 women died al kiddush Hashem to be sure their bodies weren't
violated?"
Esther Ettinger, the author of "Wonder in the Night", an account
of her childhood and youth in a Bais Yaakov school in Tel Aviv, says she
also remembers the story of the 93 girls. "This story sanctifies the
goals and important values we were educated to in Bais Yaakov --
maintaining our modesty and purity," she says. "It shows the greatness
of faith and the desire for Kiddush Hashem." Nevertheless, Ettinger says
that she had also heard that the story was a myth.
"A Holocaust survivor, who taught in Bais Yaakov, told me that
she has her doubts about the story and therefore doesn't teach it," says
Prof. Baumol-Schwartz. "She told me that there are enough stories of
true bravery by Jewish girls in the Holocaust, but if someone wants to
use this story of the 93 girls, let them.
"I find a dark side to using a fabricated letter about a story
that never occurred, but the people who created it probably had good
intentions. The story has elements that are poignant to all of us."
Ms. Farbstein says that the story became famous after the war,
when ghetto fighters and partisans were prime heroes in Israeli society.
"All the others, particularly the religious, had to defend themselves
for going like sheep to the slaughter. There was need for a story of
courage that could compare with a ghetto revolt."
After researching the case, Atty. Levenkron wrote an article
which appeared in the Theory and Review journal tying the myth to the
shame and guilt suffered by raped women.
"Throughout history," she explained, "the occupying army not only
conquered the enemy country but also its women's bodies. When the war
was over, the suffering of the women victims didn't end either. Their
community, who should have been supportive of them and help their
rehabilitation, accused them of consorting with the enemy. Norwegian
women who had relations with German soldiers as part of the German plan
to improve its racial purity, were treated viciously and with
hostility. Women who were raped in Darfur are similarly treated
shamefully by their communities.
"During my research I discovered only a few references to sexual
abuse or sex in exchange for food during the Holocaust. Even when such
cases occurred, they were never retold in first person. Holocaust
researchers preferred to deal with other questions focusing on
femininity rather than sex. A discussion of this kind in reference to
the Holocaust is viewed as eroticizing the genocide."
Mrs. Levenkorn believes that the message which the story of the
93 girls conveys is that whenever a Jewish woman is in danger of being
raped, she has the choice to commit suicide or live a life of shame.
But this may be a misunderstanding. Perhaps the message of the
story is that where a woman is likely to be killed anyway, she should
take her life in purity rather than first become a rape victim and then
be killed.
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