ABSTRACT
In ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’, a liturgical Holocaust poem written in Hebrew after the Second World War, a group of Orthodox adolescent young girls and their teachers commit suicide together rather than endure sexual violation. Ordered to ‘satisfy the lustful desires’ (lemaleh ta’avat libam) of Nazi soldiers, the young women instead ‘poured out their hearts in prayer and swallowed poison and returned their breath to God’ (shafkhu et liban betfi lla shatu kos ra’al veheshivu ruhan lelohim). Together with an introductory narrative, this story about female Jewish martyrdom during the war was interpolated into the Yom Kippur Martyrology service in American synagogues as early as 1948.1 Composed by Hillel Bavli in New York and fi rst published in 1943,2 the poem is utilized now in liberal Jewish American synagogues on Yom Kippur, as well as during commemorations on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The episode that the poem commemorates is taught as a piece of history to Orthodox Jewish schoolchildren, however the poem has not been integrated formally into Orthodox liturgy. Although the poem was composed in Hebrew, its regularized liturgical use is unique to North American Jewry. Insofar as The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ has become part of an American Holocaust canon, examining it tells us something about the shaping of collective memory in an American Jewish context.
