Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

5 The Bundist Women’s Organization

82 5 The Bundist Women’s Organization Jewish women played leading roles in the Bund’s formative years and participated in that party in relatively large numbers during the years of the Russian Empire. However, the Bund had somewhat less success in mobilizing women in independent Poland between the two world wars than it had had during the czarist era. Unlike the movements previously discussed, Yidisher arbeter froy (YAF), the Bundist women’s organization, did not attract a large membership during the interwar years. The failure of YAF to draw in a mass membership reveals that Bundist counterculture had its limits, and also suggests that the Bund was unable to extend its reach beyond a certain point. . . . In the czarist era, the Bund had no trouble attracting Jewish women into its ranks. The Bund had its roots in organizing work conducted in the Pale of Settlement in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The establishments in the Pale that produced items such as cigarettes, matches, stockings, gloves, and envelopes , as well as the tailoring industry tended to employ high proportions of Jewish women at the end of the nineteenth century.1 Moreover, the first efforts at organizing Russian Jewish workers took place precisely in those fields in which many of the employees were female. In Vilna during 1887, for example , stocking makers—the most common job held by Jewish women in that region—conducted a strike.2 Not only among the stocking makers but also in other trades employing Jewish women, female “half-intellectuals”—those who had received some education but who did not have advanced degrees—proved to be particularly ripe for organizing.3 Khaim-Yankev Helfand, who was active in the Bund in The Bundist Women’s Organization | 83 its early years, has argued that precisely because Jewish men were more likely than Jewish women to have received extended formal training in Jewish rituals and tradition, the women found it easier than did their male counterparts to break with tradition and to join the socialist movement.4 A small number of the earliest Jewish socialist women in the Russian Empire were not workers but rather women who had succeeded—against the odds—in obtaining higher education and who had become attracted to radical ideas. Matle (“Pati”) Srednitsky (1867–1943), who graduated from gymnasium in Vilna, and who trained as a dentist in Petersburg, and Liuba Levinson (1866–1903), who studied at the University of Geneva, were actively involved in the illegal social democratic circle that crystallized in Vilna in 1889, and that eventually became one of the sparks leading to the formal establishment of the Bund. The Bund was built on and grew out of both the union organizing work conducted among Jewish females and males, and the early efforts of intellectuals , including Srednitsky and Levinson. At least two women—Marya Zhaludsky, a seamstress and long-term political activist, and Rosa Greenblat, a weaver—were among the thirteen individuals who attended the meeting at which the Bund was founded.5 When, in 1898, all three members of the Bund’s first Central Committee were arrested, Zhaludsky and Tsivia Hurvitch6 (b. 1874), a glove maker, were among those who replaced them. The second congress of the Bund, which was held in 1898, was attended not only by Zhaludsky and Hurvitch but also by two seamstresses, Shaine Raizel Segal of Lodz (d. 1905) and Liza Epstein of Kovne, which is to say that women made up at least one-third of the delegates to this congress.7 There was no such thing as a separate Bundist women’s organization per se during the czarist era. Thus, the roles of women in the relatively early years of the movement’s existence—which included acting as speakers at Bundist gatherings, distributing literature, storing illegal literature, and working in the movement’s underground printing shops—can be explored only by referring to specific examples.8 A female was considered less likely to raise the suspicions of authorities than a male. As a result, any number of female Bundists, including Yulia Abramowicz (d. 1916),9 Gita Lipshits (d. 1917),10 Sophia Dubnow (1885–1986),11 and Cipe Edelman,12 were able to 84 | Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland smuggle literature or arms for the party. Anna Heller Rozental (1872–1941) was co-opted onto the first Vilna City Committee of the Bund. Zhenia Hurvitch (Evgeniia Adolovna Gurvich) (1861–1940) was a major...