Rochelle G. Saidel, PhD, Remember the Women Institute’s Founding Executive Director
On behalf of Remember the Women Institute and on a personal level, I mourn the passing of Gloria Steinem, whose contributions to bettering the lives of women are legendary. In addition to her extraordinary achievements that have been widely reported, she generously helped Remember the Women Institute’s work, especially regarding sexual violence during the Holocaust.
Gloria was involved with two of our projects. When Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, [link] the anthology edited by Sonja Hedgepeth and me, was published in 2010, she offered a blurb for the book’s cover. She wrote: “The Holocaust horrors suffered by males and females alike have been rightly memorialized in histories and museums, but the sexual violence suffered by females has rarely been recorded. Perhaps we would have been better able to prevent the rapes in the former Yugoslavia and the Congo if we had not had to wait more than sixty years to hear the truths that are anthologized in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust by Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel. We owe them and the authors they assembled a debt of gratitude for a well-documented warning that sexual violence is a keystone of genocide.” In addition, she connected us with the Women’s Media Center, which she co-founded, to help promote the book. In March 2011, she participated in a panel [link] and speak-out at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, to mark the publication of the book. That same month she named the book [link] as one of four “aha” books in her library.
In 2018 she was on the honorary committee for Remember the Women Institute’s international group art exhibition, VIOLATED! [link] Women in Holocaust and Genocide. She not only lent us her name, which attracted others, but she also helped with fundraising for the exhibit. We shall miss her trailblazing commitment to equality for women, as well as her sharp wit, her sense of humor, and her warm friendship.
In addition to everything that Gloria accomplished to make women’s lives better, she did something else that I have only seen reported on social media. She also believed in animal rights and had a number of cats in her life. When I visited her apartment in 2017, I met her three-legged cat. I was told that she found this cat on the streets of Cairo, adopted it, and brought the cat from Egypt to her New York home, undoubtedly saving its life and providing a new loving and luxurious one.
Rest in well-deserved peace, dear Gloria. Your battle will continue.