Women’s Zionist Movement in Europe at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Cover Image

Syjonistyczny ruch kobiet w Europie na przełomie XIX i XX wieku
Women’s Zionist Movement in Europe at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Author(s): Katarzyna Czerwonogóra
Subject(s): Jewish studies, Jewish Thought and Philosophy, History of Judaism
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Zionism; women’s movement; Puah Rakovsk;, WIZO

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the process that led to the creation of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in 1920 in London. The main reason for creating a separate international women’s organization within the Zionist movement was the lack of support for women’s ideas in the male-dominated structures. The trigger for the establishment of a separate women’s group after World War I was a trip to Palestine by three middle-class British Jewish women, the wives of high-ranking clerks in the British Mandate for Palestine. However, the creation of WIZO at that particular time was an outcome of several political and cultural phenomena: the beginnings of emancipation of Jewish women in Eastern Europe during the Haskalah, processes of emancipation of Jews in Western Europe, the development of modern nationalisms and anti-Semitism, and the international recognition of the Zionist movement. These conditions led to the creation of Jewish women’s networks, which were the pre-existing condition for the creation of WIZO.

  • Issue Year: 18/2015
  • Issue No: 36
  • Page Range: 271-291
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Polish