ABSTRACT
Androcentric studies of the Holocaust are oblivious to what Sara Horowitz calls the "gender wounding" of Jewish women: namely "a shattering of something innate and important to her sense of her own womanhood" which was distinct from the gender wounding of men. The distinctively 'female' character of relationship among 'camp sisters' was, according to Judith Tydor Baumel, characteristic of cultural patterns of nurture among women's extended families in the pre-war Jewish communities in Eastern and central Europe. Traditional religious means of resisting the Nazis' gross profanisation of Jewish personhood would have been differently available to women than they were to men. Jewish mysticism is helpful to a feminist theology of relation because it is premised on two basic notions. When women identify themselves as manifestations or reflections of Shekhinah then the femaleness of God is restored to God because she can behold herself in her creation.
