Szold, Henrietta

(1860–1945)

   Founder of Hadassah and Head of Youth Aliyah. Daughter of a Baltimore rabbi, Henrietta Szold was given a sound Jewish and Hebrew education. She worked for many years as literary editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America, helping to translate and publish GRAETZ’S History of the Jews and other important European works of Jewish interest.

   She was an early pre-HERZL Zionist, and her convictions were fortified by contact with the Russian Jewish immigrants for whom she conducted night classes. In 1909 she visited Palestine with her mother and was appalled by the low standard of health services.

   In 1912 Miss Szold was one of the Women’s Zionist Organization. It was called after Queen Esther’s Hebrew name in the Bible, and took as its motto the phrase from Jeremiah, ‘…for the healing of the daughter of my people’. Hadassah grew into the largest Zionist body in the world, with 325,000 members in over thirteen hundred chapters throughout the United States. It built the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, and when that was cut off in 1948, constructed the great Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre at Ain Kerem, to the west of the city. At Miss Szold’s instigation Hadassah later developed vocational training centres as well.

   At the end of World War I, she organized the American Zionist Medical unit sent to Palestine which in 1922, became the Hadassah Medical Organization. Henrietta Szold herself settled there in 1920. She became a highly respected figure in the yishuv, and was active in its social concerns. In 1927 she was the first woman to be elected a member of the Jewish Agency Executive, in charge of health and social welfare. She was given similar responsibilities in the Va’ad Leumi (Jewish National Council).

   After the rise of Hitler to power, Miss Szold helped organize and then directed Youth Aliyah, the remarkable movement for the rescue and immigration of children and minors from Nazi Germany, and from Arab countries where the Jews were oppressed. In the twelve years that she directed it, Youth Aliyah saved and settled in Palestine about 30,000 children, a great number of them orphans. They were placed in children’s villages and learnt agricultural skills as well as doing a regular school syllabus. Miss Szold supervised every detail, and personally met whenever possible each incoming group. A special stamp was issued in Israel on the centenary of her birth, depicting Hadassah and the Hebrew University Medical Centre in the background, Many memorials to Henrietta Szold exist in Israel.