Have you heard of Rivka Anikster, the first woman writer of the Old Yishuv?
The story behind her sefer will break your heart.
From a young age, Rivka Anikster was drawn to writing. Her father and five brothers used to write and print their works. She herself was a merchant and lived in great wealth with her husband, Rabbi Meir Anikster. They lived in the town of Krakynova, where they lost seven of their children.
In 1862, the couple decided to immigrate to the Land of Israel alone, because living in the Holy Land was considered a segulah for long life. They believed that through this segulah, their remaining children would stay alive.
They parted from their young children, who remained in the town and were raised by other relatives. “Our journey to Jerusalem was very heavy. The "nisayon" was like the binding of Yitzchok… and this "nisayon" is equal to the trial of the Akedah… and through these troubles we merited to come here,” Rivka wrote.
She described leaving her children:
“And what shall I say, when you were little chicks whose feathers had not yet grown. And when I went far from you, my compassion overflowed and I wondered where I had left my motherly mercy, for I left you small, and from my great sorrow my old illness was awakened.”
She traveled from Krakynova to Slonim, to Ruzhin, then to Karlin, and from there to Odessa, from which she sailed to the Land of Israel, docking in Jaffa.
Upon arriving in the Land of Israel in 1862, she and her husband immediately went to Jerusalem. They visited all the holy sites.
After reaching the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, her husband was appointed director of the Vilna Kollel and was responsible for distributing most of the charity funds in the city. He was also the financial manager of the Talmud Torah and the Etz Chaim Yeshiva.
In the Land of Israel, the family experienced great poverty. They lived in a small house with no light or air, next to the home of Rabbi Shmuel Salant, the rabbi of the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem.
Like many women of the Old Yishuv, Rivka devoted herself to acts of kindness. She made sure to feed and clothe widows and orphans, spun tzitzit threads for the children of the Talmud Torah, and more.
Five years after her arrival, Rivka traveled to Tiberias and the Galilee to pray at “the grave of our holy relative, the Ari, of blessed memory, and his son Moshe who is buried beside him.”
She visited more than ten graves of tzaddikim in Safed and the surrounding area, which made her feel energetic and healthy. Bathing in the hot springs of Tiberias also contributed, she said, to improving her health.
In the Tiberias region she visited additional graves: the Rambam, Rabbi Akiva, Yitro, and others. She felt a deep closeness to the prophets, Tannaim, and sages buried in the Land of Israel.
Rivka was a sickly woman even before immigrating, and the fact that she survived twenty years after her arrival was, in her eyes, a miracle.
As her surviving children grew older, they left their hometown and emigrated to America. Contact with them was lost, and she did not know their addresses.
Rivka came up with a remarkably original idea for how to reach them — to publish a sefer, hoping that one copy would somehow reach them and awaken them to write back to her.
This was an extremely unusual step in the Old Yishuv. Only men wrote and published books — not a woman.
Thus Rivka became the first woman in the Old Yishuv to publish a sefer:
Kuntres Zekher Olam.
The sefer was written in Yiddish and translated into Hebrew by an anonymous translator. The first edition was published in both languages in 1882.
The book was a huge success. Within two years the edition sold out, and she added more pages and published a second edition in 1884.
Those copies also sold out, so in 1891 she published a third edition.
Such a thing had never been seen in the Old Yishuv — a woman publishing a religious sefer, and three printings.
So what is the sefer about?
Zekher Olam is a collection of Rivka’s guidance and teachings for her children, after they had emigrated to America and contact with them was severed.
She embedded her educational and religious messages within autobiographical writing about her experiences in the Diaspora and in the Land of Israel.
She hoped that the printed booklet would reach her lost sons and that she would receive letters from them.
Rivka Anikster’s groundbreaking project, as the first woman author, made waves in the Old Yishuv of Jerusalem. Two other women were inspired by her: Reitze Chen-Tov and Toibe Pesil. Both published printed booklets not long after her. The first, Reitze, explicitly mentioned Rivka Anikster in her book.
In her later years, Rivka lived in Jerusalem with her daughter Rachel, who was born in the Land of Israel, and with her grandchildren, after her husband passed away in 1885.
Rivka died in 1893 in Jerusalem. After her death, additional editions of Zekher Olam were published.
