Henrietta Szold
(1860-1945)
Educator,
humanitarian, zionist, mother of the yishuv
The following article is reprinted from the American
Jewish Historical Society's American
Jewish Desk Reference: The Ultimate One Volume Reference to the Jewish
Experience in America, published by Random House.
Szold Was Her Father's Intellectual Heir
The remarkable Henrietta Szold was born in 1860 in
Baltimore, Maryland, the child of Rabbi Benjamin Szold and his wife Sophie. A
political liberal and a religious traditionalist, Rabbi Szold taught his
daughter German, Hebrew, and the Jewish sacred texts to supplement her public
school education. In her teens she began to work as a translator and an editor.
She later became a teacher and wrote for a number of Jewish journals.
In 1888 she was chosen to be one of the nine members of the
publication committee of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS). The only woman
on the committee, she collaborated with Cyrus Adler on a contribution to JPS's
first publication, Outlines of Jewish History. She also helped to edit
Heinrich Graetz's classic History of the Jews. In 1893 she became
executive secretary of the publications committee and, for over two decades,
was instrumental in the editing, translating, and publication of some of the
most important works in American Judaism.
Founding the Largest American Zionist Organization
One of the first proponents of Zionism, she gave a speech in
1896 outlining her philosophy—Jews should be allowed to return to their ancient
homeland and Jews should work to revive Jewish culture. In 1898 she
became a member of the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ) executive
committee, the only women in the group.
In 1909 Szold visited Palestine and became intensely
involved in the work to reconstruct the Jewish homeland. At the age of
forty-nine she had discovered her vocation. She devoted the rest of her life to
Palestine—the promised land. Back in America she founded Hadassah, the Zionist
organization for women. This group was by no means a "ladies
auxiliary" to male Zionist organizations. Under Szold's leadership, in
fact, it became larger and more powerful than any other Zionist group in the
country. Among its projects was providing medical care and education to the
Jewish community in Palestine. During the 1930s, Hadassah expanded its work to
include the Youth Aliyah programs for settling and educating young refugees
from Nazi Europe.
In 1920 Szold arrived in Palestine to personally take charge
of Hadassah's medical unit. She settled there and devoted the remaining
twenty-five years of her life to humanitarian work with the Jews of her adopted
land. Her work, both in providing health care and educational services to the
residents of Palestine and in rescuing children from the Holocaust, earned her
the title, "mother of the yishuv" (the Jewish community in
Palestine). The Youth Aliyah program could not have succeeded to the extent
that it did without her mastery of the administrative complications involved in
"liberating " children from Europe, transporting them to a new
country, and ensuring that their physical and emotional needs were met in this
strange, new land.
Although her cultural roots were clearly in the United
States (at her last Passover seder in 1944 she sang African American
spirituals), Szold had clearly become a "resident" of her adopted
homeland. She died in 1945, three years before the creation of the State of
Israel, which she had done so much to make possible.
The American Jewish
Historical Society is the oldest ethnic historical organization in the
United States and the first systematic collector of archival, published and
artifactual sources depicting the religious, communal, cultural and political
life of American Jewry. Often referred to as the "national archives"
of American Jewry, its holdings are the preeminent resource for scholars,
students, genealogists, curators, filmmakers and publishers who want to
document American Jewish life from the 1500s to the present.
