‘Her path is the future’: The ‘Woman Question’ in Rakhel Faygnberg’s Journalism

Rakhel Faygnberg was the first professional Jewish female author. She made her debut in St Petersburg’s Dos lebn with a memoir of her childhood in the Belarusian shtetl of Lyuban and then made a name for herself as a talented novelist. Having survived the pogroms in Ukraine in 1919, she devoted herself to collecting and publishing the testimonies of survivors. This chapter discusses her series of articles ‘Letters to a Jewish Daughter in Poland’ and a women’s column she edited for Der moment, which included a survey on relations between men and women in Jewish society. Faygnberg was an ardent opponent of assimilation, which she proposed to fight by acquainting Jewish girls with the cultural wealth of Judaism and by increasing the role of women in religious life.