Vayakhel 5784
Amanda Bowman, then Vice President of the Board of Deputies, joined the Muswell Hill community for Shabbat, just one day after International Women’s Day on 9th March 2024. Please note that the content includes topics that some readers may find distressing or triggering. This is an edited version of her address.
“It’s such an honour to be with you today and thank you to Steven Feldman (for full disclosure, my big brother) for the invitation. Given that the proximity to International Women’s Day, I could talk about some of our contemporary Jewish women role models – my current ‘boss’ at the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyl who stands up and speaks out for the whole Jewish community, or your wonderful deputies Judith and Anna or your own fabulous women Council members. Or the British Jewish women politicians and ‘celebs’ who regularly deal with the most vile and evil antisemitism both online and in real life; or about some of the most remarkable women in Jewish history.
But before I go back thousands of years, I want to talk about the awful events of 7th October, and particularly the crimes perpetrated against women. In the hours and days following the massacres, we learned of the magnitude of the unspeakable atrocities that emerged when the sexual and other violent crimes against Israeli women and girls began to surface.
Last week I was at the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 350 young people were slaughtered and dozens kidnapped. Witnesses hiding in the bushes saw terrorists gang-rape, then murder and mutilate women. And yet it took UN Women – the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women almost a week after the attacks to come out with a statement that equated the Hamas brutalities with Israel’s self-defence. And even longer for anything from international women’s organisations, leading feminist organisations and female celebrities. Any reference, approach or mention that these crimes occurred was met with denial or disbelief, or even worse, responded to by those who believe that these women – mothers, daughters, sisters and wives – ‘deserved it’.
It took an agonisingly long time before other women’s organisations around the world began to acknowledge and condemn the brutalities perpetrated on that day. Some have yet to do so.
We came to realise that the world – including international women’s organisations, – were conspicuously silent and – did not believe us. And when the condemnation eventually came, it was too little, too late.
Even this week when the special envoy for sexual violence at the United Nations reported that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that sexual violence occurred at several locations on 7th October, there has still been a deafening silence from some organisations. This, together with their disregard for the atrocities and brutal sexual and gender crimes committed by Hamas – despite the multiple, unequivocal and unbearable evidence – is not only hypocrisy; it can be seen as assent. Enough.
Let me return to our biblical heroines, First among these great women is Miriam, who stood by Moses throughout his life and watched over him as a child. Her steadfast support and unwavering devotion to her brother serve as a model for all Jewish women, reminding us of the importance of family and loyalty.
Or Ruth, who left her home and her people to follow her mother-in-law Naomi back to the land of Israel. Her decision to embrace Judaism and become part of the Jewish people serves as a testament to her bravery and her unwavering commitment to her beliefs. Esther, too, is a shining example of courage and bravery. She risked her life to save her people from the fury of the Persian king and helped to establish the feast of Purim, our holiday that celebrates the triumph of good over evil. Or Hannah, Samuel’s mother. Despite her deep longing for a child, Hannah never lost faith in God, and her unwavering devotion served as an inspiration to the people of her time and continues to inspire us today.
In our sedra today, we’ve been reading about the instructions for building the Mishkan and the role of women played by spinning the hair on the backs of the goats and of donating their jewellery.
March is also Women’s History Month. I set myself a goal this year that each day in March I would research and raise awareness of some women from history that broke barriers and continue to inspire me today. I’ve been posting ‘my’ women on social media and will continue to do so all month.
I’ve also done some research into heroines. Mr Google told me that a heroine was someone with strength of mind in regard to danger; that quality that enables someone to encounter danger with firmness; personal bravery and courage. Words and phrases like strong willed, in-trep-id-ity, and fortitude, the ability to confront fear, pain, risk/danger, uncertainty, or intimidation came up time and again.
In 2009, as part of my daughter’s BatMitzvah preparations, we participated in Kolot, a programme run by the London School of Jewish Studies with mothers and daughters learning together about Jewish Heroines from history. I remain completely inspired by one of the young women that we studied, Hannah Senesh. I hadn’t come across her before and only learned about her through the programme. Not only is she one of Jewish role models I’ve included in my list, but today, on Israel Shabbat, her story is one that highlights how Israel and Zionism is so character forming. And I’d like to share a little about her with you now.
She represents everything a heroine and role model should be:
She was brave and strong
She was caring and thoughtful
She was fearless and selfless, putting the needs of others before herself seeking no reward for her actions
And she stood up for and ultimately died for, her beliefs
Hannah Senesh was Hungarian, born in 1921 in an assimilated Jewish family. Her father, was a journalist and playwright but died when she was six years old. She grew up with her mother and a brother. She went to a Protestant private school for girls which also accepted Catholic and Jewish pupils, but because she was Jewish, she had to pay three times the regular school fees. We know from her diaries that she was a regular teenager: she worried about doing well in school, wanted to be a writer, flirted with boys, adored her grandma, was teased by her brother. She didn’t come from a religious family. She began to embrace Judaism and only learnt Hebrew when she realized that the situation of the Jews in Hungary was becoming precarious, She also joined Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist students organization.
Her strong belief in Zionism helped her make the decision when she left school to emigrate to Palestine to study in the Girls’ Agricultural School at Nahalal. As with everything else, she threw herself into the work, at college and on Kibbutz where she worked hard but sometimes wondered whether it was the best use of her skills to do the physical labour in the fields, or carpentry, rearing the chickens, laundry, baking etc. And she also joined the Haganah. In 1943, when the chance to return to Hungary emerged, she enlisted in the British army and began her training in Egypt as a paratrooper for the British Special Operations Executive – one of only 37 Jews who were trained for this force. All the while she was making arrangements to bring her mother and brother over to Palestine so that they could all be together
In March 1944, she and two male colleagues were parachuted into Yugoslavia on a mission to help save the Jews of Hungary. She said to her two colleagues before they left
“We are the only ones who can possibly help; we don’t’ have the right to think of our own safety; we don’t have the right to hesitate. Even if the chances of our success are miniscule, we must go. If we don’t, for fear of our lives, a million Jews will surely be massacred. If we succeed, our work can open great and important avenues of activity. It’s better to die and free our conscience than to return with the knowledge that we didn’t even try.”
When they landed, they joined a partisan group and learned that the Germans had already occupied Hungary. The men decided to call off the mission as it had now become too dangerous. But Hannah continued and headed for the Hungarian border. At the border, she was arrested by Hungarian police, who found the British military transmitter she was carrying and which she had used to communicate with her unit and other partisans. She was taken to a prison in Budapest, tied to a chair, stripped, then whipped and clubbed for several hours. At the same time, her mother had been taken into custody – under the guise of being a ‘witness’. Both mother and daughter were continually interrogated. The guards wanted to know the code for Hannah’s transmitter so they could find out who the other parachutists were. She did not tell them, even when they brought her mother into the cell and threatened to torture her too.
They were kept in jail for several months. Even in captivity, Senesh sought ways to keep up the morale of the other Jewish inmates, befriending the captive children, swapping recipes with the women. She developed a communication system, using a mirror to flash signals out of the window to the Jewish prisoners in other cells, and communicated with them using large cut-out letters in Hebrew that she placed in her window one at a time, and by drawing the Magen David in the dust. She tried to keep their spirits up by singing.
But in late October 1944, she was tried for treason. There was an eight-day postponement to give the judges more time to find a verdict, followed by another postponement, this one due to the appointment of a new Judge Advocate. She was executed by a firing squad before the judges had returned a verdict. She kept up her diary entries until her last day, November 7, 1944 writing on the walls of her cell. These words were found in her cell after her execution:
One – two – three… eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark…
Life is a fleeting question mark
One – two – three… maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.
Hannah Senesh was an astonishing woman, a poet and playwright, writing both in Hungarian and Hebrew.
The following lines and maybe her most famous are the last song she wrote after she was parachuted into a partisan camp in Yugoslavia:
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Before I finish, I’d just like to share another piece of Hannah’s poetry. For me, these words describe who she was, how she inspires me and provides a guide for who I could be
There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth
though they have long been extinct.
There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world
though they are no longer among the living.
These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.
They light the way for mankind.
Hannah Senesh along with so many other great women, serve as a source of inspiration and strength for us all, reminding us of the power of faith, the importance of family, and the enduring values of our people. In these most difficult times, may we all strive to live up to their example, and be blessed with their courage, their devotion, and their unwavering faith in the years to come.
Many thanks and Shabbat Shalom