The Kiss of the Shekhinah: Narratives of Human and Divine Motherhood in the Holocaust

Abstract

During the Holocaus Jewish mothers and their children were treated by the Nazis not as non-combatants but as enemies posing a direct racial threat to the Reich. This paper will use the recent research into gender and the Holocaust and oral histories of mothers and daughters who survived the Holocaust to show how woment experienced and resisted that status as "enemies" of the Reich. And more to the theological point, this paper will explore how those mothers' suffering and resistance to their own and their children's suffering signals towards another model of convenantal relation between God and Israel where God's promise to Israel in Leviticus 26: "I will be ever in your midst; I will be your God, and you shall be My people" need no longer be figured in terms of loyality and obedience to the commandment of an overbearing Lord.