Henrietta Szold laid the cornerstone of Hadassah's hospital

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

The story

From the first visiting nurses Hadassah sent to Jerusalem in 1913, Henrietta Szold's vision had been to give the land modern medical care. In 1918 Hadassah's American Zionist Medical Unit made its base in the old Rothschild Hospital on Jerusalem's Street of the Prophets, founded in 1888, and Szold herself moved to Jerusalem in 1920 to lead the medical work. In the 1930s Hadassah began planning a new hospital to replace it: a major teaching hospital, linked with the Hebrew University, on Mount Scopus overlooking the city.

In October 1934 Szold, then in her seventies, laid the cornerstone of the new Rothschild-Hadassah-University Hospital, together with new quarters for Hadassah's nursing school. Two years later, for her 75th birthday, the school was renamed the Henrietta Szold Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Nursing, and in October 1936 she attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the hospital and medical school with David Ben-Gurion and the architect Erich Mendelsohn.

The hospital opened on 9 May 1939 as the first teaching hospital and medical centre in Palestine. It became a centre of medical care, research and training for doctors and nurses. Hadassah also funded a medical school, dental facilities and X-ray clinics as part of the same mission.

Szold remained connected to the institution until the end of her life. She died on 13 February 1945, aged 84, in the Hadassah hospital she had helped to build.

The hospital's story continued after her. Cut off by the fighting of 1948, Mount Scopus became an isolated enclave and the hospital had to close, so Hadassah built a new medical centre at Ein Karem, which opened in 1961. After 1967 the Mount Scopus hospital was reopened. Today the Hadassah Medical Center runs university hospitals on both campuses, with more than 1,300 beds, and schools of medicine, dentistry, nursing and pharmacology affiliated with the Hebrew University.