Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on August 3, 2021

Foremost among all these groups was Hadassah. The goals and objectives of Hadassah were akin to those that animated the other groups, and an analysis of the methods and style that Hadassah women employed to achieve their organizational aims reveals the distinctive role that womens organizations came to play in the unfolding and development of American Zionism. Hadassah had its origins in study circles organized by Emma Leon Gottheil, the wife of Richard Gottheil, an ardent Zionist and Columbia University professor of Semitics. Gottheil accompanied her husband to the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 and was charged by Herzl himself to organize American Jewish women on behalf of the Zionist cause. She responded by establishing chapters of the Daughters of Zion as an affiliate of the Federation of American Zionists. These study groups soon dotted the New York area and attracted to their ranks outstanding young women such as Jessie Ethel Sampter and Lotta Levensohn, who were destined in later decades to become prominent American Zionist figures. The women who participated in these study circles saw their devotion to Palestine and Zionism as a means of redress for the problems of social inequality that dominated the Progressive agenda and spirit of the time.

In 1907, the well-known and highly regarded Henrietta Szold became an active member of the Harlem study group known as Hadassah Circle. Szold traveled to Palestine in 1909. There she obtained a firsthand understanding of conditions in Erez Israel. Appalled by the lack of medical and sanitary facilities in the nascent and growing Jewish community in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. "Old Yishuv" refers to the Jewish community prior to 1882; "New Yishuv" to that following 1882.Yishuv [Jewish settlement], Szold resolved upon her return to the United States to alleviate the effects of disease, starvation, and homelessness that existed there by establishing health programs and facilities for Jews and Arabs alike. Though Szold served in 1910 as honorary secretary to the male-dominated American Federation of Zionists, that groups financial chaos caused her to ignore it and to turn instead to women Zionists in Daughters of Zion and Hadassah study circles for support. A constitution for the Hadassah organization was drawn up in 1912. While formally affiliated with the Federation of American Zionists, Hadassah insisted upon maintaining control of its own affairsmuch to the consternation of several male critics who found it inappropriate that women express their independence in this way.

Hadassah ignored these critics and built its programs and activities on a heritage of Jewish philanthropy as well as upon the charitable and organizational model provided by the U.S. womens club movement of the Progressive Era. Chapters were soon formed throughout the United States, and memoirs authored by women throughout the country during these years testify to the universal success and status Hadassah enjoyed throughout the American Jewish community. Membership in Hadassah and participation in its projects and activities became a fixed part of the civic duties in which thousands of American Jewish women engaged.

With the financial support of Nathan and Lina Straus, Hadassah sought to offer preventive health care to Jewish settlers and natives alike by sending two nursesRose Kaplan and Rachel [Rae D.] Landyto Palestine in 1912. Bertha Landsman, a public health nurse trained in New York, followed in the footsteps of Kaplan and Landy; she sought to reduce the soaring infant mortality rates that then obtained in Palestine by offering free layettes and pasteurized milk to parents who gave birth in Rothschild Hospital as well as by improving sanitary conditions at childbirth by educating midwives.

The success of these early endeavors caused the Federation of American Zionists to charge Hadassah in 1916 with responsibility for raising the then seemingly insurmountable sum of twenty-five thousand dollars for the creation of an American Zionist Medical Unit (AZMU) in Palestine. Undaunted by the challenge, Szold called on each Hadassah woman throughout the country to save on carfares and contribute fifteen cents in support of the project. Her fund-raising technique mobilized thousands of women on behalf of the Zionist enterprise, and Hadassah soon exceeded its goal by contributing thirty thousand dollars for the AZMU.

The participatory and grass-roots model of philanthropy established by this activity served as a model for the fund-raising projects of other organizations as well as for Hadassah itself. For example, Mizrachi Women held frequent luncheons where individuals offered small donations for the support of religious institutions and orphanages as well as childrens homes and religious A voluntary collective community, mainly agricultural, in which there is no private wealth and which is responsible for all the needs of its members and their families.kibbutzim in Palestine. The Womens League for Palestine, established in the early 1920s by Emma Gottheil, also utilized comparable fund-raising techniques for the creation of vocational schools and residences for young Jewish refugee women when they arrived in Palestine.

However, Hadassah retained its position as the preeminent organization of Zionist women in America throughout this entire period. In 19211922, Hadassah made an appeal to religious school pupils in the United States to give a penny so a child in Jerusalem can eat. By 1923, schools in Jerusalem were able to provide hot lunches for all their students. In the 1930s, Hadassah likewise garnered financial support for the Youth Lit. "ascent." A "calling up" to the Torah during its reading in the synagogue.Aliyah project designed to bring Jewish refugee children to Palestine by gathering its membership together in hundreds of weekly or monthly chapter tea or parlor meetings throughout the United States. At these meetings, each woman was asked to donate a few dollars until the chapter goal of $360 was achieved. In this way, Hadassah quickly reached its national goal of sixty thousand dollars. All of this reflects the central role women now occupied in American Zionism, and Hadassah became arguably the most powerful Zionist organization in the world by the 1930s.

The humanitarian and social concerns these organizations addressed were viewed as logical public extensions of traditional female domestic responsibilities, and through Hadassah and other groups women were allowed to take their skills and talents out of the home in a socially approved manner. Participants in these organizations eroded the boundaries between public and private domains by transforming issues originally of private concern into matters of societal import, in a particularly Jewish and political arena.

To be sure, such expansion did not receive universal approbation. From the outset, Hadassah had more than its share of male critics who were outraged by the independence it displayed. This attitude reached its zenith in 19261928, when Louis Lipsky, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), was enraged by the refusal of Hadassah and its president, Irma Levy Lindheim, to cosign a bank loan for the United Palestine Appeal of the ZOA. Lindheim publicly criticized the ZOA for what she regarded as its poor organization and fiscal irresponsibility, and she demanded increased Hadassah representation to the Congress of the ZOA. In response, Lipsky called for the National Board of the ZOA to rebuke Lindheim. The board rejected his request and even went so far as to express a vote of public confidence in Lindheim. Lipsky then turned to the pages of the Zionist journal New Palestine to attack Hadassah; he accused Lindheim of abandoning the principles of Henrietta Szold, who recognized the proper role of women within the ranks of the ZOA. Such gender-based critique caused Szold herself to respond, and she asserted that she saw nothing unwomanly in the positions Lindheim championed. Szold maintained that Hadassah had every right to play an independent role in Zionist affairs. In affirming their right to speak out autonomously on public issues, Lindheim and Szold expanded the range of appropriate public behavior for females. The entire affair testifies to the strength and power of Hadassah as well as the public role of authority conferred upon women in the American movement.

See the article here:
Zionism in the United States | Jewish Women's Archive

Category: Zionism
Tags: