Friday, February 18, 2022

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

 

 

 

 

 

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I am open to running your criticism if it is not ad hominem. I prefer praise, though.