On Niemiecka Street, in the heart of Vilna’s Jewish quarter, a unique kitchen hummed with life. Fania Lewando, a visionary chef, stood watch over her bustling restaurant. It was 1938. Across Europe, the skies were darkening for Jewish communities, yet inside Lewando’s warm dining room, a quiet revolution was simmering. The famed painter Marc Chagall and the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger sat at tables adorned with fresh flowers, discussing art and politics over plates of hot, meatless dishes.
Even political activists took note of the pristine environment. Socialist leaders Nathan Buxbaum, Khayim Shloyme Kazdan, and Shloyme Mendelson signed her guestbook with a mixture of praise and lament, writing that the food was truly clean, nice, and delicious, and wishing they could say the same for the rest of Vilna. Nearby, on a bookshelf, copies of Lewando’s Yiddish vegetarian cookbook were displayed prominently. Framed by a curtain, they resembled sacred Torah scrolls in an ark.
This was more than a culinary trend. It was a domestic battleground. As authoritarian regimes rose and antisemitic laws began targeting Jewish daily life, Jewish women across Germany and Poland turned their kitchens into sites of political defiance. By substituting vegetables for beef, they redefined what it meant to live Jewishly in a hostile world.
The simple act of preparing a meal became deeply politicized. The blow fell first in Nazi Germany in April 1933, when the regime outlawed kosher slaughter. Poland followed suit in 1936. By 1938, Germany went further, banning the import of kosher meat entirely.
These laws were campaigns of state-sanctioned harassment. By targeting kashrut, the ancient dietary laws, the state sought to isolate and degrade Jewish life. Traditional families faced a painful choice. They could pay exorbitant prices for smuggled meat, risk malnutrition, or abandon their dietary heritage.
But Jewish women, historically the guardians of the home and the primary transmitters of Jewish culture, found another way. If the state outlawed kosher meat, they would simply remove meat from the equation. Through vegetarianism, they could maintain kosher households while rejecting the restrictions imposed upon them.
In Vilna, often called the cradle of Eastern European Jewish culture, Lewando proved that a meatless diet did not mean a life of deprivation. Her restaurant and her cooking school became centers of a vibrant diaspora movement. Her masterpiece, the Yiddish-language Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh, featured four hundred recipes made entirely from vegetables. Lewando did not just offer simple salads. She audaciously recreated the heartiest, most meat-centric staples of Jewish cuisine.
Her schnitzels were made of cauliflower and peas, fried in butter and served with new potatoes. Her Sabbath cholent, a stew traditionally slow-cooked with beef for twelve hours, was reinvented as a rich, meatless dish that cooked in half the time.
For Lewando and her contemporaries, this was a matter of public health as well as cultural survival. Working with public health advocates like Dr. Tsemah Szabad, who edited the Yiddish journal Folksgezund, Jewish vegetarians promoted nutrition as a way to combat the poverty and inflammatory diseases of the Polish ghettos. Lewando even reproduced an article by physician Dr. B. Dembski in her cookbook, detailing the medical benefits of a plant-based diet.
The movement quickly captured the imagination of the Yiddish press. Writing in the Warsaw daily newspaper Haynt in April 1938, art critic Leo Kenig praised vegetarians for holding strongly to their noble ideals during times of persecution. In the same newspaper, humorist and singer Menakhem Kipnis published a piece explaining why he became a vegetarian, declaring that eating meat was a non-Jewish habit and tying plant-based eating directly to Jewish identity.
Essays inside Lewando’s cookbook, such as one by Ben-Zion Kit, went even further. Kit argued that vegetarianism was the original Jewish way of life, tracing it back to the garden of Genesis before God permitted meat. They claimed the diet was noble, modern, and profoundly Jewish.
Across the border in Nazi Germany, the struggle took on a different but equally urgent tone. As the regime forced independent vegetarian societies to disband or integrate into Nazi-controlled organizations, advocating for a meatless diet in Jewish publications became a daring act of survival.
Historians of the Holocaust often use the Hebrew word amidah, meaning to stand up against, to describe unarmed acts of resistance. This resistance was about maintaining human dignity, keeping families healthy, and keeping Jewish culture alive.
In May 1933, just weeks after the ban on kosher slaughter, activist Ida Wolf wrote in the Frankfurt Jewish community’s newspaper. She urged housewives to embrace the challenge and relearn how to cook. Women had to provide nutritious, cost-effective meals without meat.
By 1935, the League of Jewish Women published a cookbook dominated by vegetarian recipes. Their newsletter regularly shared meatless menus, featuring stuffed cabbage and steamed apples. Later, in November 1937, Stephanie Forchheimer, a close colleague of the league’s founder Bertha Pappenheim, shared winter recipes in the newsletter. She offered meatless lunches and dinners to help families cope with the devastating economic costs of Nazi persecution.
The Jewish press continued to champion this domestic defense. In 1938, Toni Benario published a meat-free nutrition guide in the Central-Verein-Zeitung. She challenged the traditional notion that meat was the ultimate staple of the Jewish diet, suggesting that a meat-free lifestyle allowed for a lighter, healthier existence during a hostile climate.
These German Jewish women were not middle-class hobbyists. They were practical survivalists. By keeping their families nourished on budgets devastated by Nazi laws, they kept the flame of Jewish daily life burning in the face of systemic erasure.
While French writers of the same era romanticized Eastern European Jewish food as a quaint relic of a bygone era, Jewish women in Poland and Germany were busy modernizing it. They did not allow their traditions to be crushed by fascist legislation. Instead, they adapted.
The history of interwar Jewish vegetarianism reveals that the domestic sphere was never truly private. The kitchen was a political space, and the dining table was a front line. In the hands of these innovative women, the simple act of choosing vegetables over meat became a powerful declaration of endurance, a way to stand tall when the world tried to tear them down.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism
- Subtitle: Studies and New Directions
- Editors: Jacob Ari Labendz and Shmuly Yanklowitz
- Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany
- Publication Year: 2019
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN: 978-1-4384-7361-1 (hardcover), 978-1-4384-7362-8 (e-book)
- Historical Period Covered: Biblical/Talmudic Antiquity, the Medieval Era, Interwar Europe (Poland and Nazi Germany), the late 20th Century (the rise of Jewish punk and environmental organizations), and the early 21st Century (contemporary Jewish farming and vegan advocacy).
- Main Subject Areas: Jewish Ethics, Animal Welfare and Rights, Food Studies, Religious Studies, Yiddish Literature, Art History, Sociology of Religion, Rabbinic Literature, and Ecocriticism.
[Chapter 2, p. 24, 31, 35]