Seite - 300 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

00 Harriet Pass Freidenreich tutor who taught them Hebrew. Two sisters from Tarnow, Galicia, Henda and Ida Silberpfennig grew up in a similar household. (They later became Helen Silving-Ryu, a law professor in Puerto Rico, and Judith Kestenberg, a New York psychoanalyst.) Their private teacher instilled in them a love for the Bible and the Hebrew language, as well as an enduring attachment to Jewish history and culture. While studying po- litical science and then law at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s, Henda/Helen would not travel on a streetcar or carry an umbrella on the Sabbath, but walked a considerable distance in order to attend her Saturday classes. She con- tinued to keep kosher until her emigration to the United States and prayed privately throughout her life. When asked why she insisted on remaining Jewish after her mar- riage to a Korean Protestant and on being buried with a Jewish star on her tombstone, albeit in Korean cemetery, Helen Silving-Ryu replied : “I am Jewish because I believe in the Jewish God.”9 Such a statement is rare, however, since in their memoirs, very few university women even mention God or belief in Judaism ; recollections of Jewish observances in their childhood are somewhat more common. Although university women who became active Zionists tended to come from tradi- tional backgrounds, some young women became Jewish nationalists as a form of rebel- lion against their assimilated families. Rudolfine Walltuch (later Menzel), born in 1891 in Vienna, claims to have no childhood memories of Judaism or Jewish holidays. As she later wrote, “I do not remember ever in that time [when I was very young] hearing the expression, ‘Jew’ ; the Jewish question did not exist for this (wealthy) social strata, we were all ‘Liberals’ and nothing else.” 0 As a teenager, however, Walltuch discovered Zi- onism and helped form a “Jüdischer Wanderbund” affiliated with the Blau-Weiss move- ment. While studying chemistry and natural sciences at the Technische Hochschule around 1910, she was accepted as the first, and apparently the only, woman member of the Zionist Student Organization, Theodor Herzl. A small Zionist women’s student organization developed in Vienna after World War I, but only a fairly small minority of university women openly identified themselves as Jewish nationalists, although as a response to antisemitism, others became Zionist sympathizers by the 1930s and later Questionnaire completed by Rose Stein Gurewitsch (b.1908, Cracow) and letter from her daughter-in- law, Bonnie Gurewitsch, New York, February 3, 1993. Helen Silving, Helen Silving Memoirs, New York 1988, pp. 35–38 ; Judith S. Kestenberg, „Kind- heit und Wissenschaft : Eine biographische Skizze“, in Ludger M. Hermanns, ed., Psychoanalyse in Selbst- darstellungen, Tübingen 1992, pp. 161–162. Silving, Helen Silving Memoirs, pp. 237 & 275–277. Ibid., p. 623. 0 Rudolfine Menzel, unpublished manuscript, My Life in Germany collection, Houghton Library, Har- vard University, Boston, Ger 91, #155, p. 3. Ibid., pp. 7–61.