In February 1934 a ship docked at Haifa carrying about sixty Jewish teenagers from Germany. Waiting for them was a small, white-haired American woman who was supposed to be retiring, and who would go on to greet every ship of children that followed.
A knock on the door in Berlin
The idea began in a living room in Berlin. In 1932 Recha Freier, a poet, writer of children's stories and the wife of a rabbi, met a group of Jewish teenage boys who had lost their jobs as antisemitism spread through Germany. She could find them no work at home, so she imagined something bolder: sending them to Palestine, where they could study, work on the land and build a future.
Freier raised the money herself, and late in 1932 a first group of 12 boys set out for the Ben Shemen youth village. On January 30, 1933, she and a circle of young Zionist leaders formally launched the project that became known as Youth Aliyah, the immigration of the young. By chance it was the same day Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Within months, a small plan to help unemployed teenagers had become a way to carry children to safety.
The woman who said yes
Among the people Freier had written to was Henrietta Szold. Born in Baltimore in 1860, Szold had already lived a remarkable life. She had been the first woman editor at the Jewish Publication Society, had studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary at a time when it admitted only men, and in 1912 had founded Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, which brought nurses and then hospitals to the people of Palestine.
At first Szold thought the plan could not work. Money was scarce and she was approaching her 73rd birthday, ready to step back from public life. But in 1933 the Zionist Congress asked her to lead the new Youth Aliyah office in Jerusalem, and by October she had agreed. She travelled to Berlin herself to arrange the first large group of girls and boys.
Szold never married and never had children of her own. Over the next eleven years she became, in effect, the guardian of thousands.
A welcome at every ship
That first group of about sixty young people went to Kibbutz Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley. Szold met them as they landed at Haifa, and according to Hadassah she met every Youth Aliyah ship that came after.
The welcome was carefully designed. Children lived together in groups of about forty, each with a counsellor and a house mother who looked after their feelings as well as their schooling. They spent roughly half the day studying and half working on the farm or in a workshop, so that they would leave with both an education and a trade. By the middle of 1935, 600 young people were living and learning in eleven kibbutzim, four agricultural schools and two training centres. At the end of that year Hadassah, the organisation Szold had founded, took on the job of funding the work.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, more than 5,000 children had been brought to Palestine through Youth Aliyah, most of them from Germany and Austria. Thousands more were helped to reach Britain and other countries in Western Europe. In 1943, some 800 children from Poland who had found their way to a refugee camp in Tehran were brought on to new homes, most of them orphans.
“Make my eyes look to the future.”Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah and leader of Youth Aliyah, Her request to a sculptor, as recounted by Hadassah
Children from everywhere
Szold died in Jerusalem in February 1945, aged 84, having never retired. The work she had shaped kept growing. Between 1945 and 1948 Youth Aliyah brought about 15,000 more children from Europe, most of them survivors of the Holocaust who needed not just a roof but people who would care for them.
After Israel's independence in 1948 the doors opened wider still. Between 1948 and 1970 about 93,500 young people passed through Youth Aliyah's care, more than half of them from countries across Asia and North Africa. In later decades young people came from Latin America, the Soviet Union and Ethiopia. In 1958 Youth Aliyah received the Israel Prize for education, the first time the prize was given to an organisation.
In time the villages also opened to Israeli-born children whose families were struggling. A rescue effort born in an emergency had become a permanent promise: no young person who arrived alone, or who needed a second chance, would be left without a home.
The villages today
According to Hadassah, more than 300,000 students from 80 lands have graduated from Youth Aliyah since 1934. Hadassah today supports two Youth Aliyah villages, Meir Shfeyah and Hadassah Neurim, where young newcomers and Israeli teenagers at risk receive a home, meals, counselling and a full education, alongside music, art, sport and vocational training. In the autumn of 2022 Meir Shfeyah welcomed a record 678 students.
The old promise still holds. In March 2022, teenagers fleeing the war in Ukraine arrived at Meir Shfeyah and were greeted with comfortable rooms and a peaceful Sabbath. Around the same time a group of the village's own graduates was carrying supplies to refugees who had reached Moldova, young people who had been welcomed now welcoming others in turn.
Eyes on the future
In Israel, Mother's Day is marked on the anniversary of Henrietta Szold's death, an honour for a woman who had no children of her own and yet mothered so many. Her real memorial is harder to measure: the families, careers and communities built by children who were given a safe place to grow.
When a sculptor was making a bust of her, Szold asked him to give her eyes that looked to the future. More than ninety years after that first ship docked at Haifa, the future she looked towards is still arriving, one young person at a time.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- Good Harvest, Hadassah Magazine, October 2022
- Youth Aliyah, Encyclopaedia Judaica, via Encyclopedia.com
- Youth Aliyah, Jewish Virtual Library
- Youth Aliyah, Wikipedia
- Henrietta Szold, Wikipedia
- Our History, Hadassah
- Youth Aliyah Villages, Hadassah
- Young Refugees Arrive at Hadassah's Meir Shfeyah Youth Village, Hadassah, March 2022
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
