"In the Beginning of Petach-Tikva" Hanna Frumkin-Segal and the Struggle over the Public Memory

• In Event: “I only knew to tell about myself?” Zionism and Gender in Egodocuments by Three Women in the First Half of the 20th Century (Hebrew)

Abstract

Hanna Frumkin-Segal (1874-1968) was a Hebrew MASKILAH and a member of an Orthodox family of rabbis and scholars. She was born in Lithuania but lived her adult life with one foot planted in the Land of Israel and the other in England.

Frumkin-Segal left behind several written works of various genres: a collection of letters, one op-ed and two works of historical content: a Hebrew adaptation of an English novella taking place during the Crusades, published in London in 1898, and a manuscript of a memoir about her childhood in Petach-Tikva in the 1880’s, published posthumously by her family in 1998.

This literary yield is not opulent, but should not be underestimated. First, because Hebrew writings by educated women from Orthodox families at the turn of the 20th Century were quite rare and any such source sheds more light on their world; and then, because those writings not only illustrate the writer's own perspective, but also illuminate the Orthodox society to which she belonged from a new angle.

I would like to focus on the manuscript of Frumkin-Segal’s memoir. While the apparent motivation for writing the memoir was to relate her father's life story and present his contribution to the national enterprise in general and the establishment of Petach-Tikva in particular, the hidden motivation that drove Frumkin-Segal was to sound the voices of Petach-Tikva’s women and to present them as equal partners in the settlement enterprise.

Reconstructing Frumkin-Segal's life story by looking through her memoir draws an image of an assertive, educated activist, who conceived of the women's place and their social, cultural and intellectual status as equal to that of men and was active in shaping the public awareness accordingly. Examining Frumkin-Segal's memoir enables us, then, to sound her voice and open up new vistas for her world. Furthermore, the attempt to reconstruct her path by delving into her writings, enables us to illuminate further the society to which she belonged – the Lithuanian Orthodoxy, and to reinforce the claim that this society was characterized by trends of openness and adaptability, alongside the trends of seclusion and segregation.

Author

• Roni Beer Marx, The Open University of Israel