February 13: Henrietta Szold

Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, died in Jerusalem at 84 on this date in 1945. The eldest of five daughters of a prominent Baltimore rabbi, she led a lifetime of service to the Jewish community that included two decades of (overworked and underpaid) work for the Jewish Publication Society, the founding of the first school in Baltimore to provide English instruction to Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and the launching of Hadassah in 1912, three years after Szold made her first trip to Palestine. The organization, which today has a quarter of a million members, was dedicated to providing a health-care infrastructure for both Jews and Arabs in Palestine, where Szold lived for most of the last twenty-five years of her life. During the Nazi years, Szold also directed Youth Aliya, which brought thousands of children from Germany and Europe to Palestine (see Jewdayo for January 30, 2010 at https://jewishcurrents.org/january-30-youth-aliya-634). She was a pacifist and a binationalist, joining with Judah Magnes and others to promote Arab-Jewish rapprochement in a unified state, even when her organization was advocating partition.”

“It was Judaism which brought me to Zionism and I cannot but believe that Judaism . . . bids us to find a way in common with the Arabs living in this country. . . . The more I return to this matter, the more do I become convinced that politically as well as morally, the Jewish-Arab question is the decisive question.” —Henrietta Szold