Civil War in the United States Like their gentile neighbors,
North and South, Jewish women figured in the history of the
Civil War (1861–1865) in two ways. As the wives, mothers, and
daughters of men in military service, they shouldered a range of
responsibilities brought on by wartime exigencies. As community
activists, they involved themselves in home-front activities to
minister to the soldiers directly and to raise money for the
troops. Both of these classic forms of women’s participation in
war tended to generate little in the way of documentation, and
thus historians studying the involvement of Jewish women in the
Civil War and the impact of the war on Jewish women have a
sparse body of primary sources upon which to draw. Approximately
ten thousand Jewish men served in the armies of the United
States and the Confederacy. With seven thousand soldiers
enlisted in the Union forces and three thousand on the side of
the Confederacy, Jews served in the military far out of
proportion to their number in the pop