L’Dor V’Dor – Carrying on Poetry from a Woman’s Perspective (Women’s History Day Nine)

 Growing up on Kadya Molodowsky, did Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim know she’d also become a famous writer? Would Rivka’s career have started as early, or been as a poet, without the Holocaust? Who knows – but in Riga’s Kaiserwald concentration camp, along with two other young women in the camp, Rivka decided to lift the spirits of her fellow prisoners through writing and reciting a new poem each day. Eventually, she saved these poems by tucking them under her tongue so they would escape the camp with her upon liquidation.

No one else in her immediate family survived the Holocaust (her mother had already died), and Rivka married “Mula” Shmuel Ben-Hayim in Belgrade, where she went after the end of the war. There, they ran Berichah stations to move Jews out of the region and into British Mandate Palestine (where immigration was not yet legal pre-1948).

From her JWA biography page

They themselves made aliyah in 1947, joining Kibbutz Ha-Ma’pil. Rivka became a member of the poets’ group Yung Yisroel and published her Yiddish poetry. About fifteen years later, Mula was the cultural attaché from Israel to the Soviet Union, and Rivka found herself again with an opportunity for secret connections – this time, of the Soviet Yiddish writers to those outside.

A picture from a CUNY article

With Mula as designer and illustrator, Rivka has published nine books of poetry. Her poems betray a connection to Israel the land, but not the rampant politics or social movements of the country. While she is prolific, her works have not been translated widely.

To learn more about Rivka: read her Jewish Women’s Archive bio and her poetry, an article featuring her work, and a CUNY tribute about her.