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.
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
