Last Tuesday Lenore Weitzman, an author and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Scholar-in-Residence, discussed the work of the kashariyot, women who helped Jews in ghettos during the Holocaust, and the role that their gender has played in their disappearance from history.For the past 12 years, Weitzman has been researching the relationship between gender and the Holocaust. She found that the acts of the kashariyot, which means "couriers" in Hebrew, have been virtually ignored by post-war historians despite the fact that they were significant contributors to the Jewish resistance in the era when Eastern Europe was occupied by Nazis.

"How is it possible that these women have been left out of history?" Weitzman asked her audience. She believes that the kashariyot have been primarily overlooked due to the fact that "historians have relied on their own assumptions," in that those classified as heroes and subsequently studied were "only those who engaged in combat in the ghettos."

The kashariyot initially were secret couriers who smuggled underground papers, food and money to and from the ghettos while informing Jews of the ongoing mass murders and secret killings. Later, their efforts were turned to rescue.

In the ghettos, the kashariyot were symbols of hope and resilience who, in the early stages of the Nazi occupation, set up schools and soup kitchens. Weitzman peppered her lecture with quotes from those who lived in the ghettos and knew the kashariyot to show how well-respected and loved the couriers were despite their current neglected state.

Weitzman said that although the kashariyot initially were both men and women, when the Nazi regime instituted a death penalty for Jews traveling outside of the ghettos, the leaders of the Jewish resistance preferred that women acted as their couriers. Men could be immediately identified as Jews because they were circumcised.

Jewish women were also favored because they were more often sent to public schools than their male counterparts, Weitzman said. This helped women to become more familiar with culture outside of Jewish culture alone and also helped them speak Polish without a Yiddish accent.

The female kashariyot avoided the use of sexual enticement to achieve their aims, as it was far too risky: The last thing a courier needed was a man seeking her time or asking questions, Weitzman said.

When they lived and worked as couriers, these women shared specific ideal characteristics as kashariyot, Weitzman said. For example, couriers were typically in their late teens or early twenties, as young people were typically stronger, more idealistic and single and consequently free from family responsibilities.

Shulamit Reinharz (SOC), who introduced Weitzman at the lecture, said that not too long ago this particular issue was considered incredibly taboo. A common view, she said, was that comparing the respective experiences of men and women during the Holocaust supposedly insinuates that one gender may have suffered more than the other.

Weitzman's investigation of the kashariyot is part of ongoing research for a book the professor is writing while at HBI, which will examine resistance during the Holocaust from a gendered perspective.