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ABSTRACT
Haya and Rurh Meites left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against the nationalist rebellion headed by General Francisco Franco and assisted by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Their life trajectories illustrate international women’s participation in the Spanish fratricide and its limits. According to different estimates, around 700 women volunteered in Spain during the Civil War. They constituted a tiny fraction of the 35,000 or more international volunteers who flocked to Spain to support the Republican forces. Not a few of the women who wanted to enlist were rejected for their presumed inability to contribute to the anti-Fascist struggle. Whereas men could be drafted to the Brigades without any previous military experience, many of the women of the Brigades had been trained nurses and doctors, and their professional skills served to justify their enlistment. While the historiography of the International Brigades is remarkably rich, the history of women volunteers has not been sufficiently researched. Even less scholarly attention has been paid to the enlistment of Jewish women, despite their relative prominence. This article, with its focus on the lives of two women from Jewish Palestine, hopes to partially fill this lacuna.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I would like to thank Pierre and Jean Laroche, Dina Meytes, Eli Brauner, and Dror Sharon for their help in locating relevant documents.
2 Rein, “The Making of a Communist Martyr” and Rein and Sharon, “People’s Diplomacy and Trans-National Solidarity”.
3 Arielli, From Byron to bin Laden.
4 See Ballesteros García, “El efecto de Cronos,” 8. See also Lesnik and Horvat, “The Spanish Female Volunteers from Yugoslavia”.
5 Levin, The Righteous Were with Spain, 71. See Ofer Aderet, “From Tel Aviv to Auschwitz, a Freedom Fighter’s Journey.” Haaretz, April 16, 2014. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-a-life-in-letters-1.5245241, retrieved November 8, 2021.
6 Among recent contributions, see Claret, Breve historia de las Brigadas Internacionales; Sánchez Cervelló and Agudo Blanco, eds., Las Brigadas Internacionales; Hurtado, Atlas de la Guerra Civil española; Rodríguez De la Torre, Bibliografía de las Brigadas Internacionales.
7 Lugschitz, Spanienkämpferinnen: Ausländische Frauen im spanischen Bürgerkrieg; Lines, “Female Combatants in the Spanish Civil War”; Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War; and Hannant, “My God, are they Sending Women?”
8 Gabay, “El onceavo mandamiento”; Sill, Solidarias, 155–164.
9 Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 109–117; Aguado, “El camino de la liberación”; Lines, Milicianas, 103–150; Ofer, “Women and the Spanish Civil War”; and Keene, Fighting for Franco, chap. 7.
10 See Nelson, Galbany-Estragués, and Gallego-Caminero, “The Nurses No-One Remembers”.
11 Centner, From Madrid to Berlin, 57–58. On Gilert, see Davar, “The Verdict of Communists” (דינם של קומוניסטים), September 27, 1934, 1 [Hebrew]; “Belonging to an Illegal Association” (בהשתייכות לאגודה בלתי ליגאלית), Haaretz, September 20, 1934, 6 [Hebrew]; “Belonging to the Communist Party” (בהשתייכות למפלגה הקומוניסטית), Haaretz, September 27, 1934, 6 [Hebrew].
12 Zaagsma, Jewish Volunteers.
13 Sugarman, “Jews in the Spanish Civil War”, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/spanjews.pdf, retrieved 25 July, 2022.
14 Rein, “Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Palestine”.
15 The myth of the 400 volunteers from Palestine stems to great extent from Centner’s work. See his From Madrid to Berlin. See also, Ruth Levin, The Righteous Were with Spain. According to Leon Zehavi, “several hundreds of the party’s members have joined the International Brigades in Spain and fought this early battle against Nazi Germany.” See Zehavi, Apart or Together.
16 Dothan, Reds: The Communist Party in Palestine. See also, Arieli, “Induced to Volunteer?”
17 A new data base, prepared by Eli Brauner, is about to be uploaded to the Israeli Ministry of Defence’s website and includes 521 names of volunteers who left Palestine for Spain and volunteers who immigrated to Palestine/Israel after 1939.
18 They Shall not Pass!, exhibition catalogue; From Here to Madrid, exhibition catalogue.
19 For an early reference to this orphan home, see “The Diskin Orphanage” (בית היתומים דיסקין), Haaretz, 24 June, 1921, p. 1.
20 Jean Laroche in interview with the author (via zoom), March 13, 2022.
21 Pierre Laroche, e-mail correspondence with the author, March 14, 2022.
22 See “Trial of a Communist” (משפטה של קומוניסטית), Doar HaYom, November 14, 1933, p. 4.
23 Joseph Algazy, “The Civil War in Spain as Reflected by the Hebrew Press in Palestine, 1936–1939”.
24 Locker-Biletzki, “War and Memory”.
25 Levin, The Righteous Were with Spain, 1936–1939, 49–50.
26 Ha'aretz, 13 Aug. 1938. For detailed but biased histories of the party in that period, see the anti-Communist Shmuel Dothan, Reds – The Communist Party in Palestine [Hebrew] (Kfar-Saba 1991); and the pro-Communist Zahavi, Apart or Together.
27 Ofer Aderet, “How a Jerusalem Construction Worker Who Fought in the Spanish Civil War Ended Up in a Mass Grave in a Convent.” Haaretz, September 18, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-09-18/ty-article/.premium/the-jerusalem-jew-who-fought-against-franco-not-for-zionism/0000017f-f044-d497-a1ff-f2c4b5260000, retrieved July 27, 2022; “Lawsuit against a Policeman” (תביעה נגד שוטר), Davar-Evening edition, September 16, 1935, 1 [Hebrew].
28 Following the German occupation of France, Amram joined the Resistance, was arrested and executed in May 1942. For his biography and his last letter to his children, see Diamant, Combattants, héros et martyrs de la Résistance.
29 Rein and Ofer, “Becoming Brigadistas”.
30 Eli Brauner in correspondence with the author, January–April 2022.
31 On the back of the photo, she wrote incorrectly “killed in the Spanish war 1938”.
32 “Forbidden the Return of Communists Who Had Left for Spain” (נאסרה חזרתם לארץ של קומוניסטים שיצאו לספרד), Haboker, May 4, 1939, 6.
33 Diamant, Combattants juifs dans l’armée républicaine espagnole.
34 Ibid., 169.
35 Ibid., 167.
36 Rein, “El precio a pagar por decisiones personales”.
37 Diamant, Combattants juifs dans l’armée républicaine espagnole, 167–8.
38 Ibid., 168.
39 Ibid.
40 Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Documents of the Soviet era), in http://sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/sections/organizations/cards/216954/images.
41 Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Documents of the Soviet era), in http://sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/sections/organizations/cards/142431/images.
42 Given the high number of Jews in the many socialist and communist parties, a Jewish symbol in Spain could have an important propagandistic value. See Zaagsma, “Die Botwin Kompagnie,” and Centner, From Madrid to Berlin, 105–107.
43 Diamant, Combattants juifs dans L’Armée Républicaine Espagnole, 113.
44 Ibid., 228.
45 On internment camps for Republican refugees and exiles in Southern France, see Soo, The Routes to Exile; Dreyfus-Armand, El exilio de los republicanos españoles en Francia; Cohen and Malo, eds. Camps de sud-ouest de la France; and Stein, Beyond Death and Exile.
46 Diamant, Combattants juifs dans L’Armée Républicaine Espagnole, 252.
47 On Reclus, see Jean Maitron and Constance Bantman, “RECLUS Paul [dit (alias) Georges Guyou],” Dictionnaire des anarchistes, https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article154834.
48 Dora Levin, “The Medical Services of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939”. I would like to thank Eran Torbiner for sharing with me this document. On the International Brigades medical services, see Requena Gallego and Sepúlveda Losa, coords., La sanidad en las Brigadas Internacionales; Coni, Medicine and Warfare, chap. 7; and Anton-Solanas, Wakefield, and Hallett, “International Nurses to the Rescue”.
49 Adela Botwinska in an interview with Amos Levin, in Levin, The Righteous Were with Spain, 72.
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Raanan Rein
Dr. Raanan Rein is the Elías Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, most recently Spain 1936: Year Zero (2018), Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina (2020), and Jewish Self Defense in South America: Facing Anti-Semitism with a Club in Hand (2022).