Henrietta Szold ran a pioneering night school for immigrants

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

The story

Henrietta Szold was born in Baltimore in 1860, the eldest of eight daughters of Rabbi Benjamin Szold, who educated her in languages, religious texts and secular learning. She graduated from Western Female High School in 1877 with an outstanding record and was hired straight away as a teacher, teaching French, German and algebra at a girls' school and Judaism at her father's congregation, Oheb Shalom. For fifteen years she taught, also giving Bible and history courses for adults.

In the 1880s, Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire began arriving in Baltimore in growing numbers. Many spoke no English and had no way to find skilled work. Szold responded by helping to establish a night school that offered English lessons, civics and vocational training, so that newcomers could work by day and study by evening. It is credited as the first such school in America to serve Russian Jewish immigrants in this way.

The school grew quickly. The Jewish Women's Archive records that by 1894 more than nine hundred immigrants, Jews and non-Jews alike, were enrolled. According to the National Women's Hall of Fame, more than 5,000 people had attended by 1898, when the city of Baltimore took the programme over.

For Szold, teaching newcomers English was not a way of making them give up their Jewish identity. The Jewish Women's Archive explains that she saw Americanisation not as the opposite of Jewish life but as a way of empowering people who had been shut out.

The school reflected a pattern that ran through Szold's whole life: a love of learning joined to a practical instinct to put it to work for people in need. Decades later in Palestine she brought the same conviction to her work with new immigrants, insisting that they needed emotional and intellectual support, and to the care and schooling of the young refugees of Youth Aliyah.

Why it matters

Szold's night school helped thousands of immigrant families build new lives in America, and its success led the city of Baltimore to take it over as a public programme.