Henrietta Szold

• Born: December 21, 1860
• Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: February 13, 1945
• Place of death: Jerusalem, Palestine (now in Israel)

Educator, writer, and philanthropist

An early American Zionist, in 1912 Szold formed Hadassah, a philanthropic and educational Zionist organization for American Jewish women. When Szold moved to Palestine in 1920, she strengthened Hadassah’s medical program and founded Youth Aliyah, an organization dedicated to rescuing Jewish children from Nazi Europe.

Areas of achievement: Education; activism

Early Life

Henrietta Szold (hehn-ree-EHT-tah zhohld) was the first child born to Benjamin and Sophie Schaar Szold, a year after they arrived in the United States from their native Hungary. Szold’s father, a rabbi for the German-speaking Oheb Shalom synagogue in Baltimore, powerfully influenced his daughter through his attraction to social justice, his love of scholarship, and his dedication to Judaism. From him she learned German, Hebrew, and Talmudic study. She graduated from Western Female High School in 1877, the top student and the only Jewish member of her class.

Szold yearned to attend college, but close family ties drew her to stay in Baltimore. When Johns Hopkins University opened there in 1876 it banned female students. Szold’s love of learning led her to divide her time among teaching classes at a girls’ school, writing for the Jewish Messenger (a New York weekly paper for Jewish American readers), and leading adult-education classes at her father’s synagogue. Increasingly, Szold studied the problems of discrimination against Jews in Europe and against women globally.

Life’s Work

Violent anti-Semitism in Russia in the 1880’s led to significant Jewish immigration to the United States, and Szold grew close to the growing Russian Jewish community in Baltimore. This shaped two important aspects of her career. First, she embraced the new field of social work as a response to the poverty and the disease that the immigrants faced. Szold taught evening classes for Jewish immigrants from 1888 to 1893. Second, from Russian Jews she learned about Zionism, the argument that Jews should form a new nation in Palestine, one free from anti-Semitism. Although most American Jews were skeptical about Zionism (including Szold’s father, initially), Szold became convinced that it would strengthen what she saw as the vital Jewish ideals of universal peace and of justice. In 1897, she and her father joined the new Zionist Association of Baltimore.

Aware that few American women were Zionists, Szold quietly acquired the skills needed to promote Zionism in the United States. As secretary of the editorial board of the Jewish Publication Society from 1893 to 1916, Szold became a respected translator and writer. Serving on the executive committee of the Federation of American Zionists (formed in 1897), she experienced levels of leadership that few women reached. When her father died in 1902, she moved to New York with her mother and studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary (although women could not become rabbis). Wanting women to have more influence on international Zionism, she joined a Daughters of Zion group in New York.

In 1912, Szold led the formation of a national organization of Zionist women in the United States. She envisioned Hadassah (as it was named) as a major avenue for American Jewish women to contribute to Zionism. Having visited Palestine in 1909, Szold knew that the region lacked medical services. As she traveled around the United States to recruit members for Hadassah, she shaped the group’s initial focus on supplying health care to Palestine’s residents.

During World War I, the British announced support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and then defeated Turkish troops in Palestine. American Zionists seized the opportunity to help shape Palestine’s future. In 1920, Szold, by then one of the best-known American Zionists, moved to British Palestine to direct Hadassah’s medical programs and to represent the American Zionist Organization.

Although Szold returned to the United States periodically between 1920 and her death in 1945, she spent those years mostly in Palestine, where she played a major role in building an infrastructure for public health and for education. She resigned as president of Hadassah in 1926 (remaining its honorary leader) to assume greater prominence in the budding Zionist government. Her selection in 1927 to a two-year term on the Zionist Executive Committee confirmed Szold’s status as a leading American Zionist. In 1931, when Jews in Palestine formed a National Assembly, Szold took office to coordinate health and education services. In the 1930’s, she helped create Youth Aliyah, a movement to bring endangered Jewish children to Palestine. She led it until her death from pneumonia in 1945.

Significance

Szold’s legacy is complex, and evaluators today often praise her selectively rather than comprehensively. Szold is recognized for major contributions to children’s welfare and to public health in Palestine. Israel’s Henrietta Szold Institute (an educational research center) is named in her honor. Her work in building Hadassah is generally widely admired, but Szold’s specific vision of Zionism as a stimulus for world peace and justice is less praised. She argued for a binational Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would live as equals, and this remains especially controversial.

Bibliography

Dash, Joan. Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. A thorough biography of Szold, using many archival records.

Gal, Allon. “The Zionist Vision of Henrietta Szold.” In American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, edited by Shulamit Reinharz and Mark A. Raider. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2005. Detailed analysis of Szold’s distinctive vision of Zionism as a commitment to a richly humanistic Judaism that would interact peacefully with other cultures and religions.

Krantz, Hazel. Daughter of My People: Henrietta Szold and Hadassah. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987. Centers on Szold’s work in developing Hadassah and Youth Aliyah.

Sochen, June. “Both the Dove and the Serpent: Hadassah’s Work in 1920’s Palestine.” Judaism 52, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring, 2003): 71-83. Discusses the American approaches to public health that Szold established in Palestine.