SZOLD, HENRIETTA

SZOLD, HENRIETTA (1860–1945), was a Zionist leader and a founding president of Hadassah, the leading women's Zionist organization in the United States. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest child of Benjamin Szold and Sophia (Schaar) Szold, she was educated by her father, a rabbi, and in local schools, graduating first in her high school class. She subsequently taught, wrote articles in the Jewish press, and organized night classes for east European Jewish immigrants in Baltimore before leaving for Philadelphia in 1893 to work for the Jewish Publication Society of America (founded 1888). There, she edited and translated important volumes of Judaica, indexed Heinrich Graetz's History of the Jews, and for a time compiled the American Jewish Year Book. In 1903 she attended classes at Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. In 1909, after her first love, Louis Ginzberg, professor at the seminary, married another woman, she traveled to Palestine, where her Zionist commitments were renewed. In 1910, she became secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, and two years later joined with other women to found Hadassah on a nationwide basis. After 1916, she devoted her full attention to the organization and spent considerable time in Palestine involved in its medical and educational endeavors as well as broader Zionist affairs. She spent her last years directing the efforts of Youth Aliyah, the movement established to save Jewish youngsters in Nazi-occupied Europe by bringing them to Palestine.

Henrietta Szold espoused a Jewish way of life that was at once deeply religious, strongly ethical, and broadly tolerant. Her religious practices and outlook were shaped by Conservative Judaism, but she followed an independent course, evinced considerable interest in Jewish religious writings by women, and insisted on her right to recite the Qaddish prayer in memory of her mother, as well as to fulfill other Jewish religious obligations traditionally restricted to men. Impelled by her religious values as well as her lifelong pacifism, she associated during her last years with Jewish thinkers in Palestine who sought Arab-Jewish rapprochement and advocated a binational state. Her example of Jewish social activism coupled with her fostering of traditional Jewish ideals has inspired Jewish women throughout the world, particularly those associated with Hadassah.

Bibliography

Henrietta Szold's writings and letters remain scattered; for a small selection, see Marvin Lowenthal's Henrietta Szold: Life and Letters (New York, 1942). A brief but penetrating overview of Szold's life and career by Arthur Hertzberg appears in Notable American Women, edited by Edward T. James et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). Full-length studies include Alexandra Lee Levin's The Szolds of Lombard Street: A Baltimore Family, 1859–1909 (Philadelphia, 1960), which covers her early life, and two critical biographies: Irving Fineman's Woman of Valor: The Life of Henrietta Szold, 1860–1945 (New York, 1961) and Joan Dash's Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold (New York, 1979).

New Sources

Gidal, Nachum Tim. Henrietta Szold: A Documentation in Photos and Text. Jerusalem, 1997.

Jonathan D. Sarna (1987)

Revised Bibliography