Sixty-six years of a relationship that knew its ups and downs, a daughter with Down’s syndrome, decades of Zionist public activity before and after the founding of the state, ten years in the President’s Residence. Despite this impressive record, the name Rachel Katznelson-Shazar doesn’t mean much to most people, even Israelis, unless she is mentioned alongside her husband – Israel’s third President Zalman Shazar.
But Rachel Katznelson-Shazar was not just “the President’s wife.” She was a woman of many accomplishments and a Zionist leader brave enough to knowingly and deliberately focus on an issue which was then in its infancy and even treated with criticism and contempt: the role of the woman and her importance within the Zionist movement.
Rachel Katznelson was born in 1885 in the city of Bobruisk in Belorussia. This was a city with a clearly Jewish majority, with a rich and varied Jewish life. She herself was born into an established, well-off family that allowed her to acquire a western-style education. But despite a comfortable living, surrounded by a loving family, Rachel was always drawn towards that which was different.
In those days, Zionism was a new, revolutionary movement growing in Europe, attracting younger members of Jewish families. After the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, many Jews were drawn towards the Zionist dream of establishing a Jewish state in the distant Land of Israel, even if the practical realization of that dream remained distant.
Rachel, for whom a long, obstacle-ridden path only served as an incentive, became an enthusiastic Zionist activist, inspiring her relatives to join the cause as well. By the end of the 1930s, all of her close family members had made Aliyah, with the exception of her brother who died before he could leave (his widow and children made Aliyah after his death).
How irregular was this? Rachel said it best: “Of all my 70 cousins, only the children of my father and mother came to the country, another one or two had a peek and left; others did not bother with a peek.”
As befitting the pioneer that she was, Rachel came first, reaching the port of Jaffa in 1912. The country, then under Ottoman rule, was far from a comfortable or easy place to live. The neglected, dusty, and poverty-stricken land was utterly different from any reality she had experienced or known from the wealthy European home she left. But Rachel faced another, no less formidable obstacle in coming to be a Zionist pioneer: she was a woman.
On the one hand, it could have been much worse. The pioneers of the Second Aliyah – people like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharet, and Berl Katznelson – were influenced by socialist ideals that developed almost in parallel to Zionism, and as a result Zionism would become a truly pioneering movement (pun intended) when it came to the status of women.
On the other hand, like any historic change, the struggle of the pioneering Hebrew women for status and recognition was not a smooth one. The female pioneers, most of whom were single and childless, were expected to be completely devoted. Family life and the life of a Zionist pioneer did not go hand in hand. Alongside the Zionist men who believed in women and their ability to become an integral part of the pioneering project, there were many who dismissed them and closed the door in their face. Besides, the men did not want to take an active role in the life of the family and the household, forcing women to face a cruel choice – avoid family life entirely, or leave the rearing of children to nannies or the kibbutz children’s home and entirely disavow the motherly role.
In some places, things were so bad that women took their own lives, unable to cope with the gap between their duties and their desires.
These were Rachel’s first few years in the country, and she experienced every aspect of the pioneering lifestyle: She worked on the farm at Kinneret and other kibbutzim, was a partner in establishing another farm with Berl Katznelson in Jerusalem, and even taught Hebrew at the “Maiden’s Farm” (Havat Ha’Almot) where she was sent shortly after making Aliyah.
This farm was founded by Hana Meisel, an agronomist and pioneer who bought farmland on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, where she trained women in farm labor alongside “normal” household duties.
When Rachel was sent there to serve as a Hebrew teacher, she felt inferior compared to the male immigrants who had also just arrived and who were also teaching Hebrew. She wrote to her close friend Berl Katznelson, who had encouraged her to apply for a teaching position at the farm: “Berl, it’s a hard thing for me to write a letter like the one I wrote to Hana Meisel. I wished her to know that I should not be compared to a real teacher who taught in heder [a traditional Jewish school] and so on. Do it for me. Tell her all this. I’m especially pained at not having gotten around to going over the whole Bible.”
It was in that atmosphere that she started to form her feminist outlook, which differed from those of other women of her generation.
While other Zionist activists like Manya Shochat and Golda Meir believed the ultimate goal was to emulate the successful men around them, Katznelson believed in equal opportunity while also seeing benefit in fundamental differences between men and women, with the idea that it was these differences which would allow female pioneers to contribute even more to Zionist society.
She was especially sad to see how women were pushed aside when they formed families and became mothers: “Is it not absurd that such a young woman, when she enters into a family life, thinks with complete seriousness that she will organize her life as her mother and grandmother did and be happy – serving the children and the husband? Why does her husband organize his life openly and she in concealment? Why is it that he simply lives his life, while she lives only during the breaks – after satisfying the needs of the home, the needs of the child, and his needs? Why is the stream of her life but a side stream?”
Based on that same sense of missed opportunity and public marginalization, the female pioneers of the Second and Third Aliyahs founded the Va’ad Hapo’alot or Female Workers’ Council in 1921, one year after the establishment of the Histadrut or General Organization of Workers in Israel. The council operated under the Histadrut, but with openly feminist goals – with a special emphasis on the image of the Hebrew, Zionist female pioneer.
Meanwhile, alongside her work, Rachel turned to building up her personal life, marrying Zalman Rubashov, the man she loved, in 1920. Her life with Zalman had its ups and downs: Rachel was already in the country as Zalman, who spent much of his life working for the Zionist cause, toured Europe as a Zionist activist and diplomat.
A year after their marriage, Rachel joined her husband in Vienna, where he was appointed a member of the offices of the Poale Zion movement (“Workers of Zion”). It was in Vienna that she gave birth to their only daughter – Roda.
Already from the start, Rachel felt that Roda was not like all the other infants. The “ordinary” difficulties of motherhood combined with Roda’s uniqueness led to a real crisis- for Rachel. “I cannot hide from you,” she wrote Zalman, who was far away on a mission in Berlin. “I live in a nightmare world. Day and also night, there is no rest. My heart is not silent, different thoughts pass and I cannot even let them leave my mouth. I am not afraid of evil, but rather of the hardening of the heart.”
When Roda was three, she was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome. The concern and duties of caring for her accompanied the Shazars for the rest of their life. Unlike many others during that period in time, they did not turn their back on their daughter. They did not send her off to be taken care of by someone else, or feel ashamed of her.
Throughout her life, Roda Shazar was treated with love and devotion, but there is no doubt that the difficulties and the sense of missed opportunities left their mark on her mother, Rachel. Although she believed, contrary to most female pioneers of her time, that motherhood was not a handicap but rather a privilege and even a virtue, she was disappointed at the failure of women in getting men to share more of the family burden: “I have long since ceased to see the idyll of the worker’s family life. I see the suffering … the young mother is entirely mired in her private life and she is blind and deaf to the affairs of our lives. This blindness does not mean that she takes excellent care of the child. Every woman feels she is sinning: [not fulfilling her duties] to the child, the home, the floors. She works a great deal and always lists her sins. The woman is an echo of the life of the male comrade.”
In 1924, the Shazars returned home, and Rachel was selected for a position on the cultural committee of the Female Workers’ Council. This was further proof of her uniqueness in the pioneering milieu – she believed culture was an inseparable part of the shaping of Zionist society, just as important as farming and security.
She also consciously chose to remain with the Female Workers’ Council. While other female activists like Golda Meir and Manya Shochat viewed it as nothing but a springboard to the main political arena, Rachel believed that the cause of the female worker was just as important.
After a few years at the Histadrut, she began editing the first edition of Kovetz Divrei Ha’Poalot [“The Collected Words of the Female Workers”]. After its publication, she was even elected to the secretariat of the Female Workers’ Council in 1930. She did all this while she and her husband continued their shared Zionist work in Europe and America.
But in 1934, she left to found a new paper – Dvar Hapo’elet [“The Word of the Female Worker”], and a new era began for Rachel Katznelson-Shazar.
Already in 1926, Rachel strove to found a paper which would give voice to the women of the Zionist movement, speak in their name and bring more women closer to the Zionist idea and existing institutions in the country.
Journalism and writing were not foreign to the Shazars. Both worked in writing, translating and editing journals or newspapers over the course of their lives. Zalman Shazar wrote the first draft of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, while Rachel edited and collected articles, books, and works of Zionist thought.
In those years, members of the Female Workers’ Council founded Ha’Isha or “The Woman”, an independent publication addressing current events from a female perspective. “The monthly Ha’Isha aims to create a new type of Hebrew woman, who does not see her home and work as an end in itself but rather as part of the public and national building enterprise in general,” read the editorial in the publication’s sixth monthly issue. But the paper did not last long and ultimately closed down.
Now it was replaced by Rachel Shazar’s life’s work – Dvar Hapo’elet. The paper started as a supplement of the leftwing workers’ paper Davar, with the aim of helping it reach new audiences. Only in the early 1950s did it become an independent paper in its own right.
Aside from Rachel, who was the editor-in-chief who brought all the other writers on board, women like Devorah Dayan, Moshe Dayan’s mother, Rivka Aaronsohn, a relation of the founders of the Nili underground, Manya Shochat and more were part of its roster.
All, aside from Rachel who earned a pittance, wrote for free. Rachel considered the paper to be a means for educating women and delivering messages, knowledge, and information to female workers in Israel: “(The female worker) must stress her independence and originality and add to the intellectual culture of the whole movement.”
Finally, Rachel had found a real home where she felt she could act and express herself freely. After years of public and political activity during which she never felt like she fit in, being forced to adopt male airs or ignoring her feminine traits, she now found her place in the pages of a newspaper, which she would edit for twenty-seven years.
Years passed, and more crises befell the Jewish People at home and abroad. During WWII and the Holocaust, Rachel supported the idea of women enlisting in the British Army, in the hope that their practical participation in the defense of the country and the Jewish community would make its own contribution to advancing their social status.
Once the state was founded, her husband joined the provisional government and served as its Education Minister. He also served in a variety of positions in the Jewish Agency and other Zionist institutions.
Rachel continued to edit the paper while engaging in activism to advance the cause of women. On Israel’s tenth Independence Day in 1958, she received the recognition she so richly deserved when she was awarded the Israel Prize.
Among the reasons for her selection were “…her work among society and its systems, for her work close to fifty years in the field of the educational and cultural absorption of the working woman in the country. She should be seen as the soundboard and the collector of the literary expression of the pioneering woman.”
In 1963, Zalman Shazar was elected President of Israel, a role he filled for a decade. Rachel continued her public activity alongside him, this time as the President’s wife.
Naturally enough, this role left its mark on how the two were remembered. Rachel Katznelson-Shazar is known today primarily as the wife of the fourth President. But before that, she was an enthusiastic pioneer and Zionist, a journalist and an author, and a staunch feminist in the days when the feminist struggle was still in its infancy. Even if it seems that true equality is still far off, her ideas and writings were the solid foundation from which generations of women set out to pave the path of the Israeli woman for recognition and equality.
