The First Lady of Hadassah - A New Biography

Does the name Henrietta Szold ring only a vague bell?

Fortunately, Dvora Hacohen's outstanding new biography To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah, masterfully rendered into English by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel, will make Szold's story accessible to a new generation. And deservedly so because Szold (1860-1945) was one of the few women in the pre-state Zionist pantheon and ought to be more widely known.

You can think of Szold in more than a few dimensions: inner-city settlement worker in Baltimore; the editor at the Jewish Publication Society; Zionist campaigner, and founder of what would become the largest Zionist membership organization in America – Hadassah. In Palestine, she was a public health pioneer, and, as Hitler's shadow cast its pall over Europe, Szold became the "mother of Youth Aliya." This was an agency created in 1932 which by 1934, was settling parentless, unaccompanied European Jewish children in Palestine. Many would be raised and educated on kibbutzim. Some had been smuggled in after the outbreak of WWII as British Mandate authorities continued to keep the gates of Palestine closed to Jews. In 1943, Szold welcomed a contingent of Polish Jewish children who had made it to Palestine via Teheran. Ultimately, 30,000 adolescents were brought to the country, housed, and educated by Youth Aliya.

I finished reading Hacohen's book while waiting for medical treatment in the out-patient day clinic at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Around me were patients getting infusions or waiting for colonoscopies or heart procedures. Most of the other patients were Jerusalem Arabs; the oncologist treating one of them was also Arab. The soft-touch technician who did my phlebotomy was an Arab; the nurses were Jews; their bantering was in Arabic, French, Russian, and Hebrew. A few Arab patients rely on the hospital's modest lunch as their main meal. I overheard the supervising nurse tell a man being treated for diabetes that he could come in the following day to pick up lunch even though he wasn't scheduled for treatment. I mention this scene only to illustrate that the ethos Szold created is alive and well.

The Mount Scopus Hadassah Hospital was built by Szold and underwritten by the under-appreciated – by average Israelis – Rothschild family. She died in the hospital in 1945 at age 85 and was buried at the nearby Mount of Olives. The book has some evocative pictures, including one of Szold's funeral procession from the hospital to the cemetery. Later, between 1948-1967, Jordan occupied much of east, north, and south Jerusalem, so it wasn't safe to get to the hospital. Hadassah built an even bigger medical campus in west Jerusalem at Ein Keren as a solution.

***

Szold was born five years before the US Civil War, one year after her Hungarian parents Sophie and Rabbi Benjamin Szold arrived in America. Her father came to take the pulpit of Temple Oheb Shalom in Baltimore. Henrietta was the firstborn of eight daughters and the apple of her father's eye. He saw that she received an excellent education that left her fluent in German, English, French, and Hebrew. By age 17, Szold had already begun contributing articles to a weekly Jewish newspaper. The only reason she did not enroll at nearby Johns Hopkins University is that they did not accept women. She did sit in on lectures, however.

In telling Szold's story, Hacohen also gives us insight into the turn of the century American Jewish émigré experience. "Every day on her way to work, Henrietta passed immigrants wandering the city to find a job. Many relied on charity from the Jewish community to survive. Henrietta saw charity as a stopgap form of assistance that was of little benefit and did not really help the immigrants better their situation," so she decided that they needed to learn English. She started a night school (for Jews and non-Jews alike) raising funds along the way. Her Baltimore experiences honed her fundraising and community organizing skills.

She followed news of the Passover Pogroms of 1881 in Czarist Russia in the pages of London's Jewish Chronicle. And she read Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation a Zionist polemic. After the May 1903 Kishinev pogroms, she organized a public protest meeting in Baltimore. Henrietta was impressed with Vladimir Jabotinsky's efforts in Odesa, Ukraine, to organize Jewish self-defense squads to confront the pogromists.

Telling Szold's story also allows Hacohen to highlight other key milestones in the American Jewish narrative. The Reform movement was the leading and best-organized Jewish stream, and the temple Henrietta's father Benjamin led was Reform. As the Reform moved further away from tradition and its leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise tendered – likely inadvertently, it transpires – what infamously came to be known as the "Trefa Banquet" of 1883, Rabbi Benjamin moved in the opposite direction to position himself with the camp that would emerge as the Conservative movement. When her father died in 1902, Henrietta insisted that a man could not replace her in saying Kaddish.

Another nugget from the book is that though institutionally the Reform movement opposed Zionism (as did most leading Orthodox rabbis), influential Reform rabbis were instrumental in promoting Zionism in America. At her father's (Zionist) table, and later through her work in Philadelphia at the Jewish Publication Society until 1916, and her studies in Manhattan at the Jewish Theological Seminary (where she learned Talmud but had to promise she would not be a rabbi), Henrietta encountered a Who's Who of Jewish notables such as Mayer Sulzberger (of The New York Times clan), JTS president Rabbi Solomon Schechter, JTS-educated Joseph Herman Hertz (later British chief rabbi), Rabbi Marcus Jastrow (of dictionary fame), Julian Mack (a founder of the AJCommittee), and philanthropist Nathan Strauss.

At the Jewish Publication Society, starting in 1904, Szold was founding editor and chief writer of the American Jewish Yearbook though her official title was "secretary." Let's just say that JPS did not overpay Szold for her services. She was also engaged in the 1904 Jewish Encyclopaedia.

                                 ***

Szold made her first trip to Palestine, then under Ottoman Turkish control, in 1909, accompanied by her mother. The journey was intended to help Henrietta get over unrequited love. They traveled through Lebanon into Palestine and took the train from Jaffa to Jerusalem, arriving at – what is today – the First Station. The trip was long, five hours, unpleasant, cramped, and full of boisterous uncouth passengers.

With feet planted squarely on the ground, she asked herself if this was really to be "the land of our dreams?" Rather than being turned off by Palestine's stark reality, she became an even more committed Zionist. She and her mother visited with pioneering doctors who tended to the Yishuv. It was her mother who encouraged Henrietta to take practical steps to help the Zionist enterprise by focusing on public health.

In 1912, Henrietta helped establish Hadassah in the US to develop healthcare delivery and public health education services for Palestine.

In 1920, with WWI over and Britain having been granted the League of Nations Mandate to fulfill the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Szold came back to Palestine. She was 60 years old and henceforth would be dividing her time between Palestine and America. Her daily routine began at 4:30 AM and ended around midnight. She lived ascetically, never owned an apartment, and plowed whatever money supporters gave her into her projects – healthcare, nurses training, settlement, and youth aliya.

She traveled the country's roads, despite the danger posed by Arab gunmen along the way, to visit sites Hadassah was funding. During the Arab May Day riots in Jaffa of 1921, she volunteered to nurse the wounded. Szold championed public health education in hygiene, maternal health, and preventive medicine. The public health situation was precarious. In 1926 a typhus epidemic struck the Yishuv; in 1927, a severe earthquake challenged the Yishuv's limited capacity to care for its sick.

***

The Zionist movement was fragmented. Chaim Weizmann against David Ben Gurion; Labor-leaning factions against those inspired by Jabotinsky; the American Zionists led by Louis Brandeis against the Yishuv Zionist apparatus led by Ben-Gurion. In Palestine and America, all the Zionist notables were men (some of whom wanted to usurp control over Hadassah). Szold sought to navigate a pragmatic non-partisan course as best as possible. She did not crave political power, according to Hacohen, but political responsibility was sometimes thrust upon her. Zionist powerbrokers gave Hadassah a seat (1927) on the Jewish Agency's Executive, meaning Szold was often the only woman in the room in a position of influence. In 1930, Zionist bigshots placed her on the Va'ad Leumi of Palestinian Jewry in charge of social welfare.

While she was on one of her extended visits in the US, in 1925, she got herself enmeshed with Brith Shalom alongside her friends Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Arthur Ruppin, and Judah Magnes operating in Jerusalem. These well-meaning intellectuals realized that the Palestinian Arabs, (Christian and Muslim) would never accede to a national homeland for the Jewish people anywhere in Palestine. Brith Shalom, therefore, proposed Zionists abandon political claims if the Arabs would accept a binational state (with an Arab majority) and agree that Eretz Israel could be developed as the cultural center of the Jewish people. The idea fizzled because there was no Arab partner, and after the Arab riots of 1929, even Brith Shalom dreamers recognized a binational state was a nonstarter.

***

One of the virtues of Hacohen's book is that it is a comparatively easy read and seamlessly tells Henrietta Szold's personal story and that of her public career while also contextualizing events in American Jewish and Palestinian Zionist history. 

Indeed, Henrietta’s private side is poignant. She fell in love with scholar Louis Ginzberg, who comes across in these pages as a real piece of work. After he matter-of-factly told her he had gotten engaged – to someone else, Henrietta suffered a breakdown. To the end, she was a solitary figure adored by her admirers and colleagues yet without a soulmate. On her deathbed, she said, "I lived a rich life, but not a happy life." 

Author Dvora Hacohen is a professor of 20th-century history at Bar-Ilan University here in Israel, a prolific award-winning author and scholar. She traveled to Baltimore, London, and elsewhere to research this book and unearthed previously untapped archives and diaries. That is why To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold Founder of Hadassah will be appreciated by general and academic audiences and is an important contribution to Zionist history.

 

To Repair a Broken World

The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah

By Dvora Hacohen

Foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Harvard University Press

400 pages $35

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674988095

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering my mother Yvette Jager on her 25th Yahrzeit

 

                                                                        זיכרונה לברכה‎

WHAT IF WE GAVE MANSOUR ABBAS A CHANCE?

On Monday, at Hebrew University, I attended a talk by Dr. Mansour Abbas, the Arab Knesset member who – remarkably – sits in the Zionist government and Knesset while heading the Islamist party RAM. The discussion was smartly moderated by Channel 12 journalist Rina Matzliach and sponsored by the dovish-leaning Truman Institute headed by Prof. Vered Vinisky-Seroussi. Matzliach, who on TV sometimes comes over as a prima donna did not make the event about herself.

Mansour Abbas’s argument, in a nutshell, is that the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist enterprise is intractable. We need to live with that and find workarounds to make day-to-day life better for every citizen.

Abbas mentioned the influence the late Rabbi Menachem Froman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Froman had on him. Rabbi Froman was among the first in the settler movement to articulate the need for coexistence rooted in religious grounds and to reach out to Muslim religious leaders to convince them to embrace the idea of tolerance and coexistence. Now, Abbas works together with the principled and admired Rabbi Michael Melchior https://www.rabbimichaelmelchior.org/welcome a strictly Orthodox Jerusalem rabbi of dovish leanings.

Abbas is an HU alum and expressed his gratitude to the university not only for the opportunity to learn dentistry but for doing so in a Hebrew-speaking environment. He said mastering Hebrew was an essential tool in his campaign to improve conditions for Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens.

To the crux of the matter. I don’t think the message of coexistence and tolerance is much promulgated by Arab leaders to an Arab audience in Arabic. I am unaware of any coexistence group that is not funded by foreigners. So when a home-grown Arab leader who has street creds comes to promulgate coexistence and tolerance I put my cynicism on hold.

There has never been a reformation in Islam. There are no reform mosques. Muslim civilization does not find it easy to play second fiddle to any other civilization. Hence the partition of India, for example. Palestinian Arab society is socially conservative. Arab leaders tend not to come from the world of the humanities and liberal arts. Indeed, Abbas is, as noted, a dentist. His political nemesis is the crafty, charismatic, and uncompromising gynecologist and Knesset Member Ahmed Tibi.

Parenthetically, beyond the Green Line, Hamas was co-founded by the now-departed pediatrician Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. One of its current leaders, Khaled Mashal, studied physics. Granted, Yehiya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh were educated more as Arabists, but I doubt in any liberal arts sense.

The Arab educational emphasis is practical. Naturally, there are social workers and teachers. However, pedagogically, the best and the brightest students tend to gravitate to the hard sciences. These are useful professions but don’t offer much space to inculcate the message of tolerance. The Palestinian Arabs we Israelis generally encounter are on the one hand pharmacists, doctors, nurses, and on the other construction workers, and unskilled laborers.

Something tells me most imams are not preaching acceptance of the other from the minbar.

Thus, having Mansour Abbas preach tolerance – not of the vacuous Kumbaya “why-can’t-we-all-get-along" sort – but a pragmatic self-interested broadmindedness legitimized by his authoritative reading of the Koran is hugely valuable.

“I don’t speak in coexistence jargon,” he granted – but I live coexistence, he implied. 

As for the Islamic Sharia Council that his party supposedly answers to – he said it is elected and that there are term limits. This gives his stance for coexistence unique legitimacy. He characterized the Sharia Council of his Islamist stream as a democratic model for religious politics.

His coexistence impulse came early. Abbas told his HU audience that he grew up in a mixed Arab town with Druze and Christians. This was where he learned real-world broadmindedness — which presumably predisposed him to embrace Froman’s line.

He also reminded us that the Arabs in this Land are deeply fragmented – maybe even more than the Jews. Nonetheless, RAM’s decision to join the Israeli government has substantial popular support.

So, Mansour Abbas’s line is: I have my views, but I am prepared to accept that you don’t share them. And religion just might be a bridge for everyday coexistence where secularism has failed.

He acknowledges that Israelis distrust and suspect him of ulterior motives. Abbas said we all have multiple, maybe even contradictory, identities. He explained that he expresses his loyalty to Israel simply by participating in the system and swearing allegiance to the Knesset and state.

To my mind, this is a big deal. Consider that here in Jerusalem most Palestinian Arabs, 40 percent of the population at least, refuse to vote in municipal elections. So they do not have any representation on the city council. They reject the existence of Israel and its control over the city. In the past municipal election, one Arab slate bucked this trend to compete but Jerusalem Arabs obstinately did not go to the polls.

So I am pleased to take allegiance where I can get it.

Mansour Abbas is also a sociological ambassador – both ways. He instructs Arabs who want to figure out Jewish politics to factor in Jewish existential fears. Unlike PLO and Hamas leaders, Abbas is no Holocaust denier.

Most importantly, his recurrent theme is there is no point in emphasizing our very real – I would add zero-sum – differences since doing so leads to a dead end. His constituents want real services and tangible results. That requires engaging in politics, which necessarily involves compromise.

Speaking of tolerance, as deputy Knesset speaker, Abbas says he has been shocked by the lack of civility – especially between Jewish members. Anyone who watches Channel 99 (Israel’s C-SPAN) knows precisely what he means. 

On a personal level, Abbas is dismayed at being denounced by ultra-right Jews as a Hamasnik and by the anti-Zionist firebrands such as Ayman Odeh (a supposed progressive) and the aforementioned Ahmad Tibi (a nationalist) as a collaborator.

He says we are all changing and evolving.

He even wants Jewish votes if he can get them. The audience at HU was mostly Jewish even though there are loads of Arab students on campus.

I can’t help but think of Abbas in the context of Palestinian Arab history. In the 1930s and 1940s, some Arab clans and leaders grudgingly accepted the Zionist enterprise as an unhappy fait accompli. They thought it best for their people to cooperate, to be practical. They were all silenced or murdered. So when people ask where the Arab moderates are, the answer is – in the cemeteries. See https://www.amazon.com/Army-Shadows-Hillel-Cohen/dp/0520259890   

Abbas’s line also recalled somewhat of the West Bank Village Leagues leaders Menachem Begin sought to cultivate https://www.memri.org/reports/story-palestinian-village-leagues  They might have delivered autonomy to West Bank Arabs had the PLO not bullied them out of existence.

So in a sense, Abbas may just be the inheritor of a Palestinian Arab stream of realpolitik presumed extinct. He is not abandoning any aspect of his identity or political, religious, or cultural beliefs and demands but is open to compartmentalizing them, willing to be nuanced. Ready to find workarounds.

He told us what we already knew: that Netanyahu begged him to throw his support to him and Likud and he would have wanted to, but the ultra-right blocked Netanyahu, and moreover Abu Yair lost all credibility – so Abbas took his chances with Naftali Bennett.

On a human level, Abbas presents as respectful and warm exhibiting a winning self-deprecating humor.

May Allah continue to guide him on the path of coexistence and tolerance and keep him safe.

 

 FOR MORE ON ABBAS see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansour_Abbas

 

 

 

 

Bye-Bye New York Times

I did it. I just canceled my subscription to The New York Times.

I have been a reader of the NYT since high school. Yes, I was aware of the paper’s hostility toward Zionism and its non-coverage of the Holocaust.

And over the years, no matter my distaste for some of its Israel coverage and the tendentious columns by Tom Friedman, Roger Cohen, and Anthony Lewis, I did not want to stop getting the paper.

Overall the scope and breadth, and elegance of its coverage were unsurpassed. Moreover, I wanted to expose myself to views that made me question my positions.

However, in recent years the Times has deteriorated as a serious newspaper/outlet.

I can cope with grossly slanted coverage.

I can even cope with the condescending and relentless “how-to” pieces … of the how-to peel a banana or wipe your ass variety.  

But when the newspaper/outlet presents principally as a viewspaper, when editors dictate that woke rule virtually every facet of coverage from books to soft features – it is time to stop being a chump subscriber.  

At some stage, The Times embarked on a didactic endeavor to program, North Korean-style, a generation of readers to imbibe the propaganda of intolerance and the myopia of woke. Newer readers probably don’t even know they are being manipulated. Veteran readers may be too sluggish to make a move.

But not this old geezer. Bye-bye, New York Times.