Henrietta Szold

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Henrietta Szold (December 21, 1860 – February 13, 1945) was a U.S. Jewish scholar and Zionist leader.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a rabbi, she studied Talmud and established the first American night school, intended to provide English language instruction and vocational skills to Russian Jewish immigrants in Baltimore. ^[1] Beginning in 1893, she worked for the Jewish Publication Society, a position she maintained for over two decades. Her commitment to Zionism was heightened by a trip to Palestine in 1909. She founded the Jewish women's organization Hadassah ^[1] in 1912 and served as its president until 1926. In 1933 working with Hadassah in Palestine, she ran Youth Aliyah which rescued some 22,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. Szold lived the rest of her life in Palestine and died in Jerusalem on February 13, 1945.

The kibbutz Kfar Szold, in Upper Galilee is named after her. The Palmach, in recognition of her commitment to "Aliyat Hanoar" [Youth immigration to Israel], named the illegal immigration (Ha'apalah) ship "Henrietta Szold" after her. The ship, carrying immigrants from the Kiffisia orphanage in Athens, sailed from Piraeus on July 30th, 1946, with 536 immigrants on board, and arrived on August 12, 1946. The passengers resisted capture, but were transferred to transport for Cyprus.^[2] The commander of the ship was Shmuel Yanai.

In 2007, Szold was inducted into the American National Women's Hall of Fame.^[1]

1 Henrietta and Hadassash
2 Women and the Mourners' Kaddish
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Henrietta and Hadassash

Her deepest passion, however, was Zionism. In 1896, one month before Theodor Herzl published his magnum opus, Der Judenstaat, Szold described her vision of a Jewish state in Palestine as a place to ingather Diaspora Jewry and revive Jewish culture. In 1898, the Federation of American Zionists elected Szold as its only female member of its executive committee. During World War I, she served as the only woman on the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, which helped hold together Zionists living in nations at war with each other.

In 1909, at age 49, Szold traveled to Palestine for the first time and, as historian Michael Brown observes, "found her life's vocation: the health, education and welfare of the Yishuv [the pre-state Jews of Palestine]." Szold joined with six other women to found Hadassah, which recruited American Jewish women to implement and support medical improvements throughout the Holy Land. Hadassah's first project, started in 1913, was an American-style visiting nurse system in Jerusalem. Contributions from Hadassah funded hospitals, a medical school, dental facilities, x-ray clinics, infant welfare stations, soup kitchens and other services for Palestine's Jewish and Arab inhabitants. Szold persuaded her colleagues that practical programs open to all were critical to Jewish survival in the Holy Land. Regardless of the changes in Israeli politics and population since 1948, Hadassah still follows this philosophy.

[edit] Women and the Mourners' Kaddish

Henrietta Szold was the oldest of eight daughters, and she had no brothers. In traditional Judaism, a woman was not permitted to say the Mourners' Kaddish, although rabbinical authorities differed as to whether this was merely custom or was prohibited by Jewish Law. In 1916, her mother died, and a friend named Haym Peretz offered to say kaddish for her mother, since Szold's mother had no sons to recite the prayer. In a letter, she thanked Peretz for his concern, but announced that she would take on the tradition herself.

I know well, and appreciate what you say about the Jewish custom; and Jewish custom is very dear and sacred to me. And yet I cannot ask you to say Kaddish after my mother. The Kaddish means to me that the survivor publicly and markedly manifests his wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community, which his parent had, and that so the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation, each adding its own link. You can do that for the generations of your family, I must do that for the generations of my family.

Szold's answer to Peretz is cited by "Women and the Mourners' Kaddish," a responsum written by Rabbi David Golinkin. This responsa, adopted unanimously by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of Conservative Judaism, permits women to recite the Mourners' Kaddish in public, when a minyan is present, in conditions where it had customarily been recited by men.