Henrietta Szold founded Hadassah and saved children

Person: Henrietta Szold
Lived: 1860–1945
Field: Activism
From: American-Israeli

The story

Henrietta Szold was born in Baltimore in 1860, the eldest daughter of Rabbi Benjamin Szold. As a young woman she helped set up one of the first American night schools to teach English and job skills to Jewish immigrants from Russia, and for more than two decades she was the editor who kept the Jewish Publication Society running.

In 1912 she and six other women founded Hadassah, which recruited American Jewish women to improve health care in Palestine. Its first project was a visiting-nurse programme in Jerusalem. Over time Hadassah funded hospitals, a medical school, dental and X-ray clinics, infant welfare stations and soup kitchens serving both Jewish and Arab inhabitants. Szold led it as president until 1926, and from 1920 she spent most of her life in Palestine, later taking charge of social welfare for the Jewish community there.

On 30 January 1933, the day Hitler took power, Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in Berlin to bring Jewish teenagers to safety and a new life in Palestine. Szold, then 72 and short of funds for her existing social services, was at first doubtful. When a youth village agreed to take the first twelve children, she changed her mind, and the Jewish community's governing council appointed her the first director of Youth Aliyah. In 1935 Hadassah became its sole American sponsor.

Szold oversaw the children's reception, schooling and care. When the first 43 arrived at Haifa in 1934, she met them at the dock and travelled with them to Kibbutz Ein Harod, and greeting new arrivals became a lifelong practice. She also travelled to Nazi Germany for the programme. The young people spent two years on kibbutzim learning Hebrew and farming. About 5,000 teenagers reached Palestine before the Second World War, and after it some 15,000 more, most of them Holocaust survivors, followed. Szold continued the work until her death in 1945.

The Jewish Women's Archive notes that her work rescuing and caring for these children earned her the name "mother of the Yishuv". Youth Aliyah later became part of the Jewish Agency and has continued to help young immigrants to Israel from many countries.

Why it matters

Hadassah still runs major hospitals that treat patients of every background, and Youth Aliyah gave tens of thousands of children a future when their families could not escape.