Panel: WOMEN OF FAITH IN TIMES OF CRISIS: SURVIVAL, SOLIDARITY, AND EMPOWERMENT



596.5 - "THE REBBE CALLS YOU": WOMEN'S RELIGIOUS MOBILITY TO WARTIME UKRAINE

AUTHORS:
Marchenko A. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem ~ Jerusalem ~ Israel)
Text:
This paper examines Jewish women's wartime pilgrimage to Ukraine as a gendered religious response to crisis shaped by affect, lived religion, and moral interpretations of risk. Building on my recent analysis of religious perceptions of danger and crisis in contemporary Jewish pilgrimage (Marchenko 2026), I explore how women interpret the dangers of traveling to wartime Ukraine not through securitized logics but as a divinely mediated calling. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025, including participant observation at pilgrimage sites, semi-structured interviews with women pilgrims and trip organizers, and analysis of multilingual social-media discussions, I analyze how narratives of protection and trust in sacred figures transform fear and insecurity into religious action. Rather than offering a direct comparison, I place these mobile practices in analytical dialogue with the everyday religious agency of Jewish women living in Ukraine who mobilize faith locally as emotional endurance during war, revealing parallel logics of resilience across distinct religious settings. Engaging theories of lived religion (McGuire 2008), liminality and crisis (Turner 1969; Thomassen 2015), and gendered religious agency (Mahmood 2005; Stadler 2009), I show how women's religiosity becomes an affective infrastructure sustaining faith beyond institutional frameworks.