3. Jewish Women Fighting for Social Justice on Both Sides of the Mediterranean

Raanan Rein

In February 1941, the entire front page of Kol Ha’am, the organ of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), was flled by a large obituary and manifesto. It opened with the following words:

The Central Committee of the Palestine Communist Party announces with deep sorrow the death of comrade Yael Gerson, aged 27. A loyal and devoted comrade, one of the best communists in Palestine. Dear comrade Yael died on February 9, 1941, as a result of the ruthless terror and worsening of the regime in the imperialist prisons in Palestine. Dear comrade Yael had been trampled under the hobnailed boots of imperialist-Zionist terror; she has been sacrifced on the exalted alter of the struggle against the bloody imperialist regime, and for a world free of the horrors of war, destruction, and enslavement, for a socialist world.[1]

The last paragraph of the obituary stated, “[P]ersecuted by the police, Yael left Palestine in 1936 and made her way to Spain to participate in the Spanish people’s fght against fascism.” The newspaper’s readers might have gotten the wrong impression that Gerson actively fought in the Spanish Civil War, when, in fact, she left Palestine only in 1937 and stayed in Paris, where she actively participated in mobilizing political support for the Spanish Republic.

At least 145 volunteers left Palestine to join the Republican struggle in Spain.[2] The majority were Jewish male communists. However, fourteen were women, one of them being Yael Gerson. After a short overview of reactions to the Spanish Civil War in Palestine’s Jewish Yishuv and its leadership, this chapter looks at the life histories of these women, with special attention given to the trajectories of Yael Gerson, Dora Birnbach-Levin, and the Meites sisters, Haya and Ruth. The life trajectories of these women and their political commitment illustrate not only international women’s participation in the Spanish war but also the diverse motives for volunteering in the Iberian civil war. This chapter highlights the need to take gender issues into consideration in discussing these motives, especially regarding what notions of agency or empowerment women used to justify their actions. The voices of female international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War have often gone unheard. To some extent, they were among the “nobodies” of the war. In recent years, however, there has been a growing scholarly efort to give voice to individuals and members of diferent genders, ages, and ethnic groups and incorporate their experiences into the broader history of the Spanish Civil War.[3]

Support for the Spanish Republic in the Jewish Yishuv

The Spanish Civil War resonated across the world. It also had a profound impact on the Jewish Yishuv and its internal debates regarding the need to devote most resources and energy to the struggle for establishing a new Jewish sovereign state in Palestine without ignoring international conficts, especially the fght against the rise of fascism in Europe.[4] Responses to the war varied. Certain factions of the Yishuv, especially Revisionist Zionists, identifed with the Nationalist rebels who sought to rid Spain of the “communist threat.” Others remained neutral, following the example set by the British government, to which the League of Nations had entrusted the mandate over Palestine. But many of those identifying with Socialist Zionism expressed their support of the Spanish Republic by raising funds and collecting donations to aid it in its struggle.[5] The Histadrut (Confederation of Jewish Workers) played a key role in this solidarity campaign with the Republic.

The PCP, outlawed in 1921, was galvanized into action and mobilized considerable support through several front organizations.[6] The most notable of these organizations was Antifa, or “The Society to Aid Victims of Fascism and Antisemitism in Palestine.” The PCP itself conducted its activities covertly. Although it had only a few hundred afliates at any given time, the party’s anti-imperialist propaganda was considered a serious threat by the British mandate authorities. Many communists were therefore detained by the British authorities and sentenced by courts to serve time in prisons, and those born outside Palestine were often deported from the country.[7] The party’s organ, Kol Ha’am (The voice of the people), had to be published clandestinely and was distributed by members of the Communist Youth.

Despite these manifestations of solidarity, a near consensus existed among virtually all sectors of the Yishuv, including the diferent factions of the Zionist left, against the enlistment of young volunteers from Palestine to the International Brigades (IB). The Spanish Civil War coincided with the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–39), which targeted both Palestine’s Jewish population and the British authorities, and cost the lives of hundreds of Jews, Arabs, and Britons. The rationale behind the Zionist stance was summarized in statements such as “the struggle for the life of the Yishuv is as vital as that of the Spanish Republic” or “Hanita [a frontier kibbutz] comes before Madrid.” The latter expression was coined by Yaakov Hazan, one of the leaders of the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer Hatza’ir.[8] The Hebrew press mostly supported the Spanish Republic but at the same time largely avoided reporting on Jewish volunteers who left for Spain so as not to encourage others to follow them.[9] This attitude also refected the hostility of the Jewish establishment in Palestine toward the PCP because of the latter’s anti-Zionist campaign.

Still, between 150 and 200 volunteers left Palestine for Spain, and most of them are members of the PCP.[10] This is a considerable fgure, considering that the entire population of the Yishuv numbered no more than 400,000 people at that time and that the Zionist parties strongly discouraged their members from volunteering in Spain.

International Female Volunteers in the Spanish War

International female volunteers arrived in Spain at the height of a feminist struggle in the country. In the new 1931 constitution of the Second Spanish Republic, women gained sufrage, and civil marriage and divorce were legalized. The challenges to traditional gender distinctions, however, became greater during the initial phases of civil war. As men left for the front, women were compelled, and often encouraged, to take up paid work, and their presence in the public sphere increased dramatically—mostly, but not only, in the Republican zone.

The frst months of the war, in the summer of 1936, also saw the enlistment of Spanish and foreign women to the popular militias. The Milicianas, women who decided to leave the relative safety of their homes and jobs to enlist with armed groups and embark on a venture with a highly uncertain outcome, were at frst lauded as a revolutionary icon of resistance and heroism but within a few months became the subject of scorn and ridicule. With the consolidation of the Republican Army, these women, who for the frst time in their lives were experiencing the ability to control their own destiny, were gradually pushed out of the armed forces, sometimes even characterized as prostitutes. By May 1937, all women had been removed from the frontline, as Republican men were concerned by the “modern woman” and the transgression of gender stereotypes.[11]

The enlistment of female volunteers from across the world to aid the Spanish Republic in its struggle against the Nationalist uprising was infuenced by the signifcant gap between the revolutionary rhetoric of the Republic’s supporters and the perpetuation and reinforcement of more traditional gender norms in practice. This was clearly demonstrated, for example, in the case of Cypora Gilert and Rosa Blanca, two of the volunteers form Palestine who were willing to place their bodies in the line of fre to take part in the armed struggle against fascism but were forced back to auxiliary roles on the home front.[12]

Estimates regarding the number of women volunteers in the IB range between 600 and 700. They constituted a small minority among more than 35,000 volunteers who traveled to fght fascism in Spain.[13] The ranks of the IB included a great number of Jewish volunteers.[14] In most cases, the percentage of Jews among the volunteers from each country was signifcantly larger than their share in the general population of these countries. The share of Jewish volunteers was particularly large among the women, although we do not have enough data on this group.[15]

At least some of the women who wanted to enlist were refused, as their ability to make any signifcant contribution to the anti-fascist struggle was doubted. Mothers neither were drafted to the IB nor were women without prior training in felds that could be of service, such as nursing.[16] Among those who were not allowed to join the IB were Simona Bronstein, Sara Weisblum, Bilha Tenenbaum, Hana Frank, and Lucia Horowitz; all came from Palestine and hoped to make it to Spain but were forced to stay in Paris while their partners enlisted in the IB.[17] While a rich historiography exists on the IB, there are only few studies on female volunteers. The scholarship on foreign volunteers in the Spanish Civil War has largely ignored the role played by women. Even less scholarly attention has been paid to the enlistment of Jewish women from diferent countries, despite their relative prominence, both on the home front and on the frontlines.

Women of Palestine Joining the Struggle Against Fascism

Yael Gerson was born in Palestine in 1913. This meant that, unlike foreignborn communists, she could not be deported by the British mandate, although they could certainly pressure her to leave.[18] Gerson never made it to the Iberian Peninsula, but her tragic life and early death transformed her into a communist martyr. She became a fgure of a mobilizing myth and a role model to emulate for the younger generation of the PCP, and later of the Israeli Communist Party, regarding international solidarity with the Spanish Republic.[19]

Gerson became involved in communist organizations at a very young age. On May Day 1928, at the age of fourteen, she organized a children’s demonstration, which was one of the frst activities of the communist youth organization. The schoolchildren demanded “mandatory and free education for all the country’s children” and voiced their support of their striking teachers.[20] Leah Trachtman-Palchan was of Yael’s age, and she also joined the PCP and participated in that same demonstration that May. In her memoirs, she referred to Yael’s leadership qualities.[21]

According to Yael’s brother, Joseph, who was eight years younger than her, she attended the Tel Nordau School until the eighth grade and then began studying at Tel Aviv’s Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium. In her memory book from the summer of 1927, at the end of primary school, her classmates wrote all sorts of patriotic notes about the Jewish homeland, but curiously enough, several notes pointed to Yael’s character and the path she would take in her life. “Be proud and do not give in to anyone,” wrote one student. “Do not expect anything from others,” added another one, “shape your life with your own hands.”[22] Gerson was a member of the Scouts movement: “We later discovered that her counsellor was a communist, and that he recruited the entire group under his guidance to the communist party.”[23]

Soon after joining the communist youth organization, Gerson was appointed as the secretary of its Tel Aviv chapter. In 1929, she protested the mandate police’s refusal to return the body of a PCP member who had died in a Jerusalem prison to his family. Two years later, she was tried, probably for the frst time, and charged with “membership of an illegal association,” along with other four female activists of the PCP, after participating in a secret meeting in Tel Aviv.[24] One of the other four female militants of the PCP charged in this trial and sent to prison with Gerson was the aforementioned Leah Trachtman-Palchan, who was later deported from Palestine to the Soviet Union. In summer 1935, Gerson organized several demonstrations supporting the hunger strike of ffteen communist prisoners who protested the denial of their rights as political prisoners.[25] Indeed, hundreds of communists were arrested by the British authorities in that period and were subject to torture as a method of extracting information and confessions from them. A considerable number died in custody due to the harsh conditions and lack of medical care. Gerson was detained for this protest and immediately joined the hunger strike herself.[26] On August 9, 1936, the Hebrew daily Ha’aretz reported that Gerson, “a known communist, who has been sentenced to prison twice,” was arrested on the Tel Aviv beach. “The police has been searching for her since the beginning of the events [the Arab Revolt] but was unable to fnd her.”[27]

Yael Gerson’s life was a constant struggle. She was expelled from her school and could not be admitted anywhere else. Ruth Lubitz, who had joined the PCP in 1931 and remained a loyal member until her death in 2010, wrote in her memoir that even in her parents’ home, Gerson “had to fght for the hard and dangerous path she had chosen.”[28] And according to her brother Joseph,

[Yael] stayed in the party despite my parents’ objection. . . . In 1932 or 1933 she was arrested again and detained in prison in Bethlehem. When she was released, she left our parents’ home and rented a room in

town. She worked as a maid for a wealthy family in Tel Aviv. Throughout this time, she had to keep evading the police, which continued its persecution of communists.[29]

Like the rest of her comrades, Gerson went in and out of jail. Her prison sentences amounted to four years in total. She was arrested again in 1937 while she was staying in Be’er Ya’akov with Ephraim Wuzek, another member of the PCP.[30] They were charged with distributing communist propaganda and membership in an illegal association. Gerson was sentenced to two-week imprisonment and charged with a bail of twenty-fve Palestine pounds.

Tired of repression, Yael decided to leave Palestine. According to Joseph:

[M]y sister was involved with a communist man, Moshe Halevy.[31] Probably for fear of the Police in Palestine, Moshe went to Spain to fght against Franco. . . . He was wounded in the war and sent to France to recover. Meanwhile, Yael was released from custody and decided to go to Paris to be with him. The authorities in Palestine were keen to get rid of whoever they could and allowed her to leave. In Paris Yael found Moshe and the two lived together.

Elsewhere in his recollections, Joseph noted: “In 1937 Yael reached a deal with the police (that wanted her to leave the country) and went to Paris to meet her boyfriend.” In Paris, she joined the French Communist Party. Historian Shmuel Dothan presents a diferent version of the events, claiming that Gerson decided to leave Palestine “after she had been abandoned by her Arab partner, who joined the rioters.”[32]

Whichever version is correct, they are both meaningful for understanding the various motivations that spurred young men and women to leave their country and risk their lives in a foreign war. It seems that Gerson’s decision to leave Palestine was not driven solely by solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the working class but also by her personal regard for Moshe. While this interpretation does not undermine her ideological commitment, it shows that personal relations and commitments played a similarly important role. The weight given to each of these identity components varied according to the changing circumstances of time and place.

In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and after the outbreak of World War II (WWII), Gerson returned home to Palestine. According to her brother:

[T]he French authorities deported many aliens, and Yael had to leave Paris and go back to Palestine. . . . Her partner, who was a Polish citizen, was sent to an internment camp in North Africa. Yael lost contact with him, but I later heard that he had been deported to Poland.

The British Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had warned Gerson that a resumption of her communist activity would lead to her arrest. Gerson, however, had no intention to stay away from political activism. One evening in August 1940, she left a clandestine meeting of the PCP and was arrested.[33]

Thus, a few months after returning to Palestine, Gerson was again sent to prison in Bethlehem, where she soon developed pneumonia. Her condition quickly deteriorated due to poor conditions and neglect at the facility. She was removed from prison and sent to the government hospital in Jerusalem. When her condition turned out to be fatal, the British approved her bail. Her parents transferred her to the Hadassah hospital, where she died within a few hours, watched by policemen.[34] According to Joseph:

[T]he British police continued its persecution of the communists and got to Yael (they brought communist pamphlets with them, and claimed that they found them while searching the house). After a few months of freedom, she was arrested again. She got pneumonia in the Bethlehem prison, and since antibiotics weren’t yet in use, her condition worsened. . . . She was released and hospitalized in Hadassah by my mother. There, the medical staf tried giving her oxygen, but it was too late. She died at the hospital in February 1941. . . . My father went to Jerusalem, and he and my mother brought her back to Tel Aviv in a cofn.

Gerson was buried the next day, February 6, 1941.

Yael Gerson’s tragic fate was discussed in court after the establishment of the State of Israel during the investigation of the disappearance of Sioma Mironiansky, former Secretary of the PCP. In 1941, he was detained for a police investigation and was never seen again. Suspicions were raised that he had been beaten to death by policemen, who later hid his body or threw it into the sea. In 1948, Israel’s Attorney General ordered the investigation of this afair. During the public inquiry, witnesses provided detailed accounts of the violent repression of communists by the CID. It was also stated that Mironiansky was interrogated by an ofcer named Itzhak Steinberg. One of the witnesses noted:

Steinberg despised the communist prisoners and detainees. There was a young woman, Yael Gerson, who was sent to the Bethlehem prison under suspicion of being a communist. She fell ill in custody, and her elderly mother, who requested the CID to visit her, complained that Steinberg drove her out and refused to grant her permission to see her daughter.[35]

Dora Birnbach-Levin and the Republic’s Medical Services

Dora Birnbach was born in September 1911 to a Hassidic family in Sokołów Podlaski, Poland. From her youth, she rebelled against the strict religious discipline of her environment. At age sixteen, she left her parents’ home and moved to Kraków, where she worked in a hospital for a couple of months and joined the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer Hatza’ir. In 1933, she immigrated to Palestine. Armed with socialist ideals, Birnbach joined the kibbutz Ein Ha-Horesh. Within a short time, she was exposed to the escalating confict between Zionists and Palestinian Arabs. She decided to leave the kibbutz, renounced the Zionist ideology, and moved frst to Jerusalem and then to Tel Aviv, taking temporary jobs in construction or domestic service. She also took a short course in nursing, which would become particularly useful for her in Spain.[36]

In 1936, Birnbach was arrested by British authorities for her membership in a Jewish–Arab trade union that sought to challenge the Histadrut (General Confederation of Jewish Workers), which, as its name suggests, only represented Jewish workers. She was sent to the women’s prison in Bethlehem, where she frst heard about the Nationalist uprising in Spain. Years later, she recalled:

[I]n 1937 I was serving a one-year sentence for political activism in Bethlehem. Around that time, news and rumors reached the prison about an anti-fascist war in Spain, ignited by the Francoist forces’ uprising against the Spanish Republic, who were backed by the armies of Hitler and Mussolini.[37]

In May 1937, after almost a year in prison, Birnbach was released. The British authorities made her an ofer she could not refuse: a release from prison in exchange for her departure from Palestine. This was a rather common practice used by the authorities to force communists out of the country.[38] When interviewed about her choice to join the forces defending the Spanish Republic, she explained that she was determined to continue the anti-fascist struggle she had joined in Palestine. “I came to the conclusion that the right way to fght fascism was to go to Spain . . . to contribute my share.”[39] Like many other volunteers, Birnbach was motivated by both political and ideological motives and more personal ones—namely, the difculties she endured for her activism in Palestine. By aiding the Republic in its struggle, she would consolidate her sense of identity and strengthen her self-esteem.

Birnbach obtained a visa for France, allegedly to visit the Paris International Exposition. She contacted the IB’s enlistment ofce immediately after her arrival.[40] In August 1937, she left France in a small fshing boat, along with a female doctor from Bulgaria, a group of Polish and Romanian nurses, a former priest from Canada who brought tens of thousands of dollars collected by supporters of the Republic in his country, and a young Anglo-Jewish journalist named Sam Lesser, who wrote for The Daily Worker (now known as the Morning Star).[41] After arriving in the Catalan town of Figueras, Birnbach traveled to the IB’s headquarters in Albacete. She served as a nurse and helped build and organize hospitals in Murcia, Valencia, and Catalonia. She also provided medical training for Spanish women and cared for war orphans.[42]

In the handwritten notes she composed many years later, Levin emphasized that the medical services of the IB employed more than 2,000 people, including hundreds of nurses and orderlies and that they were often assisted by the local Spanish population.[43] She also named some of the more prominent European and North American surgeons who volunteered to aid the Spanish Republic.

In mid-1937, in the aftermath of the battles of Madrid and Jarama, the organizational foundations for the medical services had already been set in place. Our objective was to provide medical and sanitary care for soldiers, from frst aid to lifesaving operations.

However, Birnbach clarifed that the hospitals established by the IB “also stressed the importance of community work and public and cultural initiatives serving the local population. In home-front hospitals, the medical personnel and those sufering from mild injuries undertook the care of orphans.”

After the fall of the Republic, Birnbach, like many other Republican refugees and former members of the IB, was detained in the Le Luc and St. Zachary internment camps in southern France until the outbreak of WWII.[44] After a while, a relative helped her reach Great Britain, where she spent the remainder of the war, and she participated in the creation of a Polish antifascist seamen’s association, afliated with the communist party.

In her notes and in an interview with her husband Stephan, Dora BirnbachLevin mentioned several nurses who had come from mandatory Palestine. She recalled Adela Botwinska (born Weinraub) in particular, perhaps because both women returned to Poland after WWII to help build the new socialist state and since they were both driven out of the country by the governmentled antisemitic campaign of 1968, eventually immigrating to Israel.[45] Another nurse from Palestine mentioned in Dora’s notes is Ruth Meites.

Together Yet Apart: Haya and Ruth Meites[46]

Haya Meites did not make it to Spain. She stayed in Paris and took part in the eforts to mobilize public support for the Spanish Republic’s struggle against the Nationalist rebellion supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Her sister Ruth did arrive in Spain and served as a nurse in the Republican zone, until all members of the IB and foreign volunteers had to leave the country. Haya and Ruth’s parents immigrated from Lithuania to Palestine in 1910 and settled in Haifa. Haya was born in 1904 in Vilnius and Ruth on October 23, 1910. It is not entirely clear whether she was also born in Eastern Europe, as some documents state, and therefore came as an infant to Palestine, or whether she was born in Haifa, as she declared in one of the IB documents.

A couple of years after their relocation to Palestine, in 1912, the family home in Haifa was accidentally burnt down. Their mother perished in the fre, and the father was seriously wounded. The children were put in an orphanage in Jerusalem, where they stayed until 1919. After their father came out of hospital, it seems that the family was reunited for a short time, but the children were soon sent to live on a kibbutz.[47] Haya became politically active in 1925 and joined the PCP. She was part of a group that worked in a clandestine printing press, hidden in a vineyard. “We have found a notebook where Haya wrote that they had secret printing works in Bethlehem in 1928,” Jean Laroche, her daughter in law, told me in an interview. Because of this activity, Haya was arrested by the British authorities at least once in 1933.[48] Haya’s ideological commitment impressed the party leadership, and she was sent to Moscow for additional doctrinal training sometime during the second half of the 1920s.

Several of Haya’s comrades went to Spain to fght fascism. Notable among them was Meir Levi. Born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic family, Levi was a construction worker and became a member of the PCP at an early age. In 1935 he participated in a communist demonstration in Jerusalem and was shot and wounded by a British policeman.[49] Levi was forced by the British to leave the country in 1937. He arrived in Paris, where he was helped by his sister Miriam and her husband Max Amram.

France had the largest Communist party outside of the Soviet Union, and Paris became the organizational center of the IB. It was in Paris that the reality of being a member of the IB frst became tangible through specifc practices of afliation and new personal encounters.[50] Haya did not leave Palestine together with Meir. She left a little later, on October 27, 1937 (the date stamped in her Palestinian passport), and it seems that she planned on joining Meir in Spain. The information she gave to obtain her visa was that she was a professional nurse. Although incorrect, it served its purpose at that point, and she got the visa. Still, she was not able to convince the Comintern ofcials that she could join the medical services of the Republic, so she stayed in Paris.

During the civil war, Levi was a political commissar of a Hungarian unit. He was captured on June 5, 1938, by the Nationalist army and sent to a prison in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena, where he died of typhus on April 24, 1939. Haya kept a photo of the two of them and maintained close ties with Max and Miriam Amram.[51] Haya’s commitment to the Republican cause was frm. A photo taken in Paris on June 20, 1939, from the family archive, shows Haya with a group of “friends who returned from the Spanish war,” as is stated on the back of the photo. It is unclear whether Haya was considering going back to Palestine at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In early May 1939, however, the British authorities decided to ban the return of fve communists who had left for Spain: David Camy, Yaacov Chen, Yechiel Winograd, Yehudit Kipper-Kalman, and Haya Meites.[52] At any rate, once the Germans invaded France in June 1940, Haya had to leave Paris quickly. She moved to Dordogne to join her sister Ruth, who was living there by then.

Ruth left Palestine in June 1937 on her own. She had been told to contact Max and Miriam Amram in Paris to facilitate her joining the IB and crossing into Spain. She entered Spain on November 17 of that year and went straight to Albacete, the Republican training base. Fortunately, she shared her story with David Diamant (Erlich), a Polish-French Jew who wrote the pioneering book on Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.[53]

In her testimony to Diamant, Ruth emphasized her training in Palestine as a nurse working with children in Tipat Chalav, a center that provides health and medical services in the feld of health promotion and prevention for pregnant women, infants, and children. She made no mention of any political activity in which she was involved prior to leaving Palestine for Spain. Once in Paris,

Max took me to Mathurin Moreau Avenue, where I got in touch with the relevant Comintern authorities. I went through two commissions, one political and one medical. I was asked various questions: do I feel morally strong enough, will I not be afraid of the bombings, etc. I was accepted as ft, but I still had to wait for months.[54]

Ruth was very impressed by the Parisian demonstration of July 14, 1937, and the way she described it reminds one of Pinchas Chefetz’s excitement when he described the masses of workers who attended the annual party organized by L’Humanité, the PCF newspaper.[55] The experience of a massive event with a noticeable presence of the organized working class contrasted sharply with the very small clandestine activity of the communists in Palestine. Ruth’s journey to Spain started at the Gare de Lyon. During the trip, she met several other nurses. A party ofcial from the Mathurin Moreau Avenue Committee accompanied them to Perpignan. At the crack of dawn, they crossed the border and made it into Spain. After a brief stay in Albacete, Ruth started her frst job in a hospital installed in a village in Aragon. “You had to be strong, physically and morally, to survive the continuous bombing. Every time the fascist planes came, we had to evacuate all our wounded from the second and third foors, and all this in the greatest calm.”[56] She became friends with another Jewish volunteer from Palestine, Cypora Nilar/Gilert. The head nurse was a young woman in her thirties from Lithuania who had already had six or seven years of professional experience. She served as a mentor for the newly arrived nurses. “She taught us, the young people, not only the job but also and above all the calm and composure needed.” There were seven nurses in the hospital, four of whom were Jewish. They faced a shortage of medicine and equipment and were told to treat only fghters of the IB.

From time to time on the Aragon front, they were entitled to rest. Interestingly enough, although all volunteers were motivated by internationalist ideas, many of them opted for socializing with comrades from the same national or ethnic groups. This was the case with many Jews. As Ruth recalls, at times of rest, they were looking for the company of

Jewish comrades of the Brigades. Among them, I remember Solomon Jofee, a wonderful comrade from Israel, Jankel Lukia, Siomke, a Russian comrade, Micha Bernstein, Meir Levi, political commissar of an infantry company, also from Israel. He was an admirable man; calm and modest; he fell later in the battle. We had a meal together and, for the frst time in our lives, we ate rabbit. . . . We were happy to be with healthy fghters. We spent the day very happily and they told us important battle stories. We, the nurses, related our experience. We sang. This meeting was a great feast for us in the hard daily life of the hospital.[57]

After three months in Aragon, Ruth was sent to a hospital in Benito for soldiers with tuberculosis. There she worked with Sarah, another Jewish volunteer from Romania, as well as several Spanish nurses.

We had seven wards and about 40 beds. The conditions were extremely difcult. We didn’t even have the most essential medicines. We were terribly inadequate as many of the patients felt doomed due to lack of medication. We took out the dead in the silence of the night in order to avoid the pain of the other patients. . . . The situation was so bad, and we were so busy that we lost the notion of time. We never had time to read a newspaper.[58]

Ruth worked in this hospital until they were all evacuated. Leaving the hospital with the patients was a painful process that took more than twelve hours. On their way, they had many incidents. Planes few overhead. Despite the white fag with the red cross they were fying, they were bombed. Of all the nurses, only three survived, including Ruth. They arrived in Valencia with the sick and stayed there for three or four days. Then they were sent to Vic. Toward the end of the war in Spain, on January 17, 1939, Ruth married Eli Rappaport, another Jewish volunteer from Palestine enlisted in the IB.

Conclusions

The echoes of the Spanish Civil War were heard across the globe, including Palestine. The struggle against the Nationalist insurrection, headed by General Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, inspired about 35,000 volunteers to travel to the Iberian Peninsula and aid the Republic to defeat the rebels. The Jewish presence among the volunteers in general and female volunteers in particular was noticeable. Yet histography has not devoted much attention to women’s participation in the war and to Jewish participation in this confict. It is only recently that research has turned more of its attention to women, Jews, and non-European or American volunteers, like in the case of Palestine.

In Palestine, unlike in many other countries, British mandate authorities not only allowed communists to leave the country but even encouraged them to go and fght for their political ideals, as long as they did it on the other side of the Mediterranean. The welcome received by those who eventually found their way back home difered signifcantly among countries, and so did the commemoration of the volunteers in the decades following the fall of fascism and the end of the Second World War. In Palestine many veterans of the Spanish Civil War were forbidden to return, and in the State of Israel, established in 1948, it took until the early 1970s for authorities to recognize the heroic anti-fascist struggle in 1930s Spain and the sacrifce made by international volunteers.

Based on documents held in private hands by relatives of female volunteers who left Palestine to aid the Spanish Republic in its hour of need, this chapter tries to—at least partially—fll the aforementioned lacunae. Of the fourteen women who decided to leave Palestine for Spain or were driven out of the country by the British Mandate authorities, there is enough information on seven or eight of them to develop a general profle of this group of women. They were young, educated, idealistic, and adventurous and hoped to create a better and more just world. Despite their youth, many of them were experienced political activists and had been subject to persecution and repression in their home countries before leaving to the Iberian Peninsula. Most, if not all of them, were childless when they left for Spain. The majority of women volunteers served in auxiliary roles, mostly as nurses and doctors in the IB’s medical services or as translators. As the stories of Yael Gerson, Dora Birnbach-Levin, and the Meites sister demonstrate, the decision to become involved in the Spanish confict was afected by a complex network of political and interpersonal connections and commitments. These women chose to leave their families and lives in Palestine in a move that helped them defne and consolidate their distinct personal identities. At the same time, we can see a parallel search for belonging, which they found both in the international struggle against fascism and in their private, interpersonal relationships.

All of them paid a signifcant personal price following the defeat of the Spanish Republic. At the end of the Second World War, Birnbach-Levin and Weintraub-Botwinska went back to their native Poland and joined the communist regime, only to fnd out years later that their loyalty to communism was questioned due to their Jewish origin. Ruth Meites found herself in an internment camp in Southern France before she could regain her liberty and move to the Dordogne, where she and later also her sister Haya found refuge during the German occupation of France. And Yael Gerson, who never made it to Spain, returned to Palestine and died tragically at a very young age.

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