Prologue

Summary

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, 24 February 1912, at the Temple Emmanuel Reform synagogue in New York City, thirty-eight American Jewish women gathered, led by Henrietta Szold—a woman who personified a rare combination of spirit, vision, idealism, and an extraordinary organizational and practical ability. On the basis of a profound understanding of the nature and dilemmas of American Jewry and the feminist views of that time on ‘woman's nature’ and her needs, these women founded Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, which in time became the largest Zionist organization in the Diaspora, a pillar of the entire Zionist movement, the largest women's organization in the United States, and possibly even the largest and most active women's organization in Jewish history.

The study group that became Hadassah's founding core was one of those groups of Zionist women—albeit different in its social make-up from other such groups— which developed in the United States even before the First Zionist Congress to study the ideas of the first Zionist thinkers. It took its name from the beautiful Jewish woman in the biblical book of Esther who saved her people, named there as ‘Hadassah, that is, Esther’ (Esther 2: 7). The choice of name was unanimously approved at the organization's first annual convention, as a symbolic expression of several of its ideological fundamentals: it was an organization of Jewish women; it had a profound bond with Jewish tradition and Jewish history; and it was dedicated to saving Jews. The focus of Hadassah's activity from its inception was to serve the needs of Palestine, and right up to the present day its work in Israel has been in the sphere of health; to reflect this, the organization's motto since its foundation has been arukhat bat ami, ‘the health of the daughter of my people’, from the verse ‘Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?’ (Jer. 8: 22).

Henrietta Szold, who was both the spiritual and the organizational progenitor of Hadassah, envisioned it as a way to harness the unique capabilities of American Jewish women to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. She saw its contribution as importing the ‘American healing art’, providing ‘help for the sick’, and developing ‘public, preventive health institutions for the people at large’.