WIFE, LOVER, WOMAN: THE IMAGE OF HANSI BRAND IN ISRAELI PUBLIC DISCOURSE Sharon Geva This gender-oriented historical study analyzes the image of Hansi Brand (Budapest, 1912—Tel Aviv, 2000), a member of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest during World War II. After the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Brand—together with Rezso Kasztner and Joel Brand—took part in the negotiations with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi officials for halting the deportation of Hungarian Jews. In the 1950s, these negotiations were at the center of a major public controversy that became known as the Kasztner Affair. Despite the central role she played in these events, Hansi Brand was marginalized in the Israeli public discourse. She was described as depending on men—her husband, Joel Brand, and her so-called lover, Kasztner. I explore the reasons for this dissonance and demonstrate that Hansi Brand’s public image corresponded to and engaged with the gender roles prevailing in Israeli society and with its memory of the Holocaust. In the early years of the State of Israel, the Israeli public encountered a woman with a personal Holocaust story that differed from Holocaust stories told in Israel until then. She told her story in the first person. When she described her actions as a member of the Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest, and her own part in operations aimed at rescuing masses of Jews from the transports to Auschwitz, she often felt that an explanation or almost an apology was required. She was eager to show that Jewish individuals who acted to rescue their fellow-Jews by negotiating with German officials had defied the reality imposed on Jews in Hungary during the war, in adherence to the biblical precept to “choose life” (Deut. 30:19). Hansi Brand had spent the war years in Budapest, a married woman with two small sons. After the war she moved to Israel, where she worked as a housemother in a children’s home. In 1964 she lost her husband, and one of her sons died at a young age. She never remarried, and she stayed in her small apartment in south Tel Aviv, where she died on the eve of Passover, 2000, aged 88. Throughout her years in Israel, Hansi Brand told her story in public several times: She appeared as a witness in an NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues. © 2014 97