The Lilith Blog

March 5, 2018 by Nina Lichtenstein

Post-Holiday Glee: My First Purim in Maine

Photo credit: Nina Lichtenstein.

Living in a place with a tiny Jewish community does not mean that celebrating holidays has any less ruach, or that the festivities are any less meaningful or in any way diminished—to the contrary! I can’t stop feeling cheerful—almost giddy—about how great my first Purim in Maine was, after recently having moved here from Connecticut. It had all the expected ingredients: Megillah reading, groggers, matanot l’evyonim (gift for the poor), hamantaschen, mishloah manot, and a festive seuda—but the different settings and all the new people I met made it feel like an exhilarating and familial discovery.

Since I moved here last summer, I have worn a tallit for the first time, had several aliyot, and felt deeply moved at a Kol Nidre service played by a cellist, while sitting next to my partner. This may not sound all that unusual, unless you’ve spent the last thirty years—the entire time since you became Jewish—in a modern orthodox shul, like me. But in all fairness to my old shul—which I consider my extended family—I should tell you that it was there that I learned how to chant the Megillah (for our annual women’s reading), and also where I have delivered several D’var Torahs over the years.

Moving to Maine has opened my eyes—and heart—to options of Jewish observance that I had not considered before.

The Lilith Blog

March 20, 2017 by Nina Lichtenstein

The Extraordinary Story of Gisèle Braka, a Sephardic Jew in the Holocaust

In seeking to shed light on Sephardic women from French North Africa within the greater Holocaust narrative, I searched the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive for oral testimonies. With a collection of more than 54,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide, I located 20 testimonies by women born in Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria. I decided to let the women speak for themselves because it is vital that their stories exist within a greater narrative of the modern Jewish experience.

Although their stories are unique and individually important, one stood out as extraordinary—that of Gisèle Braka, née Chemama. As a young woman, this polyglot slipped through the cracks of ruthless Paris roundups, joined the Resistance, and survived the War to become an activist for Sephardic and humanitarian causes worldwide.

The Lilith Blog

March 7, 2017 by Nina Lichtenstein

Why We Have to Learn About Sephardic Holocaust Stories

Sephardic women would often feel like outsiders in the camps; linguistically and culturally isolated. “They did not believe we were Jewish” is a much repeated phrase in their testimonies.

One of the more ambitious tasks of Holocaust research in recent years has been to enhance our understanding of the diversity and complexity of what went on during this dark period of human history. Without seeking to minimize any one specific experience, the assumption that the “typical” Holocaust account is represented by the Ashkenazi (male) experience is being adjusted, slowly but surely, by research that focuses on the war-time experiences of women and children, as well as that of other ethnic, religious or types of “minorities” subjected to the horrors of the Nazi machinery.

During a 2010 summer workshop on Sephardic Jews and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I had the opportunity to search in the archives for information on how Jewish women from North Africa (a longstanding research interest of mine) experienced this devastating historic event. I realized that through the oral testimonies collected in the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, as well as the collection at the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies housed at Yale, I would be able to locate information on this minority experience. Being a Norwegian Jew myself, I am acutely aware of the danger and tragedy of dismissing a minority narrative in favor of the majority. I have been on the receiving end of comments about how “few” Norwegian Jews there were. The implication is that in the larger scope of Holocaust history, this story is hardly central or representative to the Eastern or Central European Jewish war experience, even though nearly 50% of Norway’s approximately 1400 Jews were deported and killed, mostly in Auschwitz.  Hence, with the acute awareness of and sensitivity to the dangers of occluding minority narratives in favor of majority ones, my research strives to bring other stories to light.