Henrietta Szold

Maryland Historical Society

Born in Baltimore in 1860, Henrietta Szold was the oldest daughter of Rabbi Benjamin Szold of Temple Oheb Shaalom and his wife Sophie. Henrietta graduated from Western Female High School, but her father also taught her English, German, French and Hebrew as well as secular and Jewish studies. She was a teacher, editor, social worker, activist, Zionist, politician, and founder of Hadassah.

Large numbers of Russian Jews began immigrating to Baltimore in the 1880s, and found it difficult to adjust to the city and its culture. Szold helped establish a school for immigrants and served as superintendent and teacher at the Russian Night School, a model for Americanization programs to help new immigrants adapt to their new country.

Szold was a board member of the Young Women's Hebrew Association and an original member of the National Council of Jewish Women. She also volunteered for the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, and in 1892 she was hired as the secretary of the Literary Committee. In that capacity she translated Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews and with Cyrus Adler edited the American Jewish Year Book.

After the death of her father in 1902, Szold moved to New York with her mother and began taking classes at the Theological Seminary of America, the only woman to do so at the time.

In New York Szold became an active Zionist. In 1909, she took her first trip to Europe and Palestine. In 1910, she became Secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, and two years later, on February 24, 1912, 38 women joined the Hadassah Chapter of Daughters of Zion or Hadassah, a women's organization with headquarters in New York that promoted Jewish causes in Palestine. Szold was named the first president.

In 1917, Szold organized the American Zionist Medical Unit for Palestine, a group of medical professionals sent to Palestine to establish a hospital. In 1919 a nursing school, which now bears her name, was founded.

Between 1919 and the outbreak of World War II, Szold spent her time traveling between the United States, Europe, and Palestine. In 1927, she became the first female member of the Zionist Executive Committee of the Keneset Israel, at that time the union of Jewish communities in Palestine, and was responsible for education and healthcare initiatives in Palestine. In 1933 she laid the cornerstone for the Rothschild-Hadassah-University Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem.

An able administrator, Szold promoted women's suffrage, trained social workers, facilitated German youth immigration to Palestine during World War II, led the Youth Aliyah, worked to improve Arab-Jewish relations, and supported a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. In 1940, she was named one of the one hundred most outstanding women of the last century. She died on February 13, 1945, in Jerusalem.

Fineman, Irving. Woman of Valor: The Life of Henrietta Szold, 1860-1945. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

Kessler, Barry, ed. Daughter of Zion: Henrietta Szold and American Jewish Womanhood. Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Jewish Historical Society of Maryland. Baltimore: Jewish Historical Society of Maryland, 1995.

Kustanowitz, Shulamit E. Henrietta Szold: Israel's Helping Hand. New York: Viking, 1990.

Levin, Alexandra Lee. The Szolds of Lombard Street: A Baltimore Family, 1859-1909. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960.