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Henrietta Szold
(1860 - 1945)

Hadassah was at one time the largest Jewish organization in the United States. It remains one of the largest with roughly 330,000 members.

Had Henrietta Szold been born in 1960 instead of 1860, she probably would have become a rabbi. Born on December 21, 1960, one of eight daughters of a Baltimore rabbi, Szold was a passionate and accomplished student of Judaism.

In 1877, Szold graduated from Western High School. For fifteen years she taught at Miss Adam’s School and Oheb Shalom religious school, and gave Bible and history courses for adults. Highly educated in Jewish studies, she edited Professor Marcus Jastrow’s Talmudic Dictionary. To further her own education, she attended public lectures at Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Institute.

She was given permission to study Jewish texts at the then male-only Jewish Theological Seminary in 1902, on condition that she never agitate to be granted rabbinic ordination. Later, she translated Heinrich Graetz’s monumental multivolume History of the Jews from German into English

Szold established the first American night school to provide English language instruction and vocational skills for Russian Jewish immigrants in Baltimore. Beginning in 1893, she worked as the first editor for the Jewish Publication Society,...

In 1896, one month before Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), 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 the only female member of its executive committee. During World War I, she was the only woman on the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs.

In 1899, she took on the lion’s share of producing the first American Jewish Year Book, of which she was sole editor from 1904 to 1908. She also collaborated in the compilation of the Jewish Encyclopedia.

In 1949, Hadassah inaugurated the Henrietta Szold prize, which was awarded that year to Eleanor Roosevelt.

In Israel, Mother’s Day is celebrated on the day that Szold died, on the 30th of Shevat.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/henrietta-szold