Founding Mother
Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah.
by Joan Dash.
Harper & Row. 348 pp. $12.95.
Zionism has fallen on hard times of late. Many Israelis find Zionist ideology irrelevant; many American Jews find it either obsolete or, on occasion, downright embarrassing; liberals and leftists—Jews and non-Jews alike—find it chauvinistic; Sunday schools have replaced Zionism with a new growth industry, the Holocaust; and the United Nations has called it out-and-out racism. This is a curious and lamentable state of affairs for the most productive movement in Jewish life since Moses Mendelssohn left the ghetto in the mid-18th century.
The strengths of the Zionist enterprise were twofold: Zionism offered a profoundly accurate analysis of the role and ultimate fate of the Jew in the European Diaspora, and, like no other movement in modern Jewish history, it had the capacity to harness the variegated powers (and, in some instances, the weaknesses) of its adherents. Summoned to Jerusalem, a biography of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah in America, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and a network of social and medical services in Palestine in the interwar era, is a well-told tale of the capacity of the Zionist enterprise to bring immortality to a woman who would otherwise have lived and died in the obscurity of her self-inflicted limitations.
A core of values—in part Victorian, but largely Jewish—and a series of flights dominated the trajectory of Henrietta Szold’s life. At the root lay a commitment to the values of her parents, and particularly her father, a learned Hungarian rabbi who came to Baltimore with his bride in 1859 and served that community until his death, four decades later, in 1902. This relationship—or, as Miss Szold’s biographer strongly suggests, this fixation—colored much of Henrietta Szold’s adult life and, as matters turned out, with both positive and negative consequences. An intelligent, devoted, hard-working yet socially immature young woman, Miss Szold spent much of the half-century after her father’s death fulfilling the commitments he had left her and in search of a relationship to replace the one they had shared.
The commitments were to Jewish scholarship and to Jewish survival. This combination brought Henrietta Szold to Zionism early in life, and to a series of posts which she served with a high degree of social consciousness even as they left her personally unfulfilled. While in her twenties, she organized and headed a school for the Jewish immigrants from Russo-Poland who were streaming into the port city of Baltimore after 1881. In the 1890’s, and for two decades to follow, she served as editor, translator, and secretary to the newly-founded, but meagerly funded, Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia—for the munificent sum of $85 per month. After the turn of the century, Miss Szold, with special permission from Solomon Schechter, enrolled as a student at the all-male Jewish Theological Seminary, for the ostensible purpose of acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to edit her father’s unpublished manuscripts. All these roles, Miss Szold’s biographer Joan Dash suggests, represented a succession of flights from heavy—and, at times, unwanted—burdens, and were accompanied by a gnawing sense of social isolation and of her own psycho-sexual immaturity.
The years at the Seminary were climaxed by a particularly wrenching episode for Henrietta Szold: an unconsummated love affair with Louis Ginsberg, the young and charismatic prodigy of the Talmud, thirteen years her junior, who had been brought onto the Seminary faculty by Schechter. At the age of forty-three, heartbroken over Ginsberg’s decision to marry another, younger woman, Henrietta Szold, in typical Victorian fashion, fled the country, with her mother at her side, on an extended trip to Europe and then to Palestine, the latter soon to become the locale of her ultimate apotheosis.
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The Zionism espoused and practiced by Henrietta Szold, both here and in Palestine, was, as one might expect, singularly American—practical, humanitarian, and philanthropic rather than ideological or political. Like other middle-class Zionists in the United States—her childhood friend, Dr. Harry Friedenwald, her cousin, Robert Szold, and her subsequent sponsors, Louis D. Brandeis and Julian Mack—Henrietta Szold did not have a “European” need for a new identity as a Jew, or for that matter for a Jewish state. Her Zionism tended to be a redefinition in Jewish terms of the Social Gospel as practiced by Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with the difference that in Palestine she often had to respond to needs far greater than any that had faced her American counterparts.
From 1920 on, when she left for Palestine to head the American Zionist Medical Unit there, until her death in her eighty-third year, in 1943, the aging spinster played a central role in the social, medical, and humanitarian programs inaugurated in Palestine by Zionists based in the United States and Europe. It was a role that brought her into considerable conflict as well. As her biographer points out, Miss Szold’s interwar efforts to establish a professional level of social and medical service in Palestine clashed with the goal of the Labor Zionists and other halutzim who, for the most part, looked upon the programs she headed either as extensions of halukah, the much-hated system of handouts from the Diaspora, or as an equally despised form of Western philanthropy. In their determination to set up a system of self-help programs and socialized medicine, the settlers in Palestine resented the more professional ministrations that Miss Szold’s programs provided, even as they needed and used them.
These ideological and institutional conflicts, together with the poverty of the countryside, the failure of Zionist fund-raising in Europe and in America, the Machiavellian power plays that characterized the movement in the period between the two wars, and her own institutional and political naiveté, added to the burdens of an already overtaxed woman entering the twilight of her life. All these factors intruded on, and hampered, even so noble and crowning an enterprise as Youth Aliyah, the program to rescue Jewish children from Nazi Europe in the 1930’s and during World War II.
Henrietta Szold’s strengths and weaknesses are clearly etched by Joan Dash in the final segment of her biography. Even as she devoted the last ounce of her stamina to the effort to save Jewish children from the Nazis, it remained somehow beyond the capacity of this enduring woman, born in 1860, one year prior to the Civil War, to come to grips with the 20th-century world of Adolf Hitler. Operationally, she succeeded; ideologically and psychologically, she failed. In contrast to Recha Freier, the rebbetzin from Berlin who initiated the Youth Aliyah movement in Germany because she foresaw the ultimate destiny of German Jewry, Henrietta Szold, despite the all-consuming quality of her rescue work, “never understood,” as her biographer notes, “what the Nazis were doing.”
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It is hard to know which element is the more striking, the professional or the personal, in the life of this singular woman. To emphasize the first is to lay stress on her career as the editor and translator of now-classic works of Jewish scholarship, as the founder and guiding light of Hadassah, and as the very spirit of altruism in purposeful action. To accent the second, and more poignant, element is to bring into focus the eldest daughter of the Szolds of Lombard Street, her two sisters dead in childhood, unfulfilled in love, making her anxiety-laden way to Philadelphia, New York, and Palestine, aching for that measure of personal recognition and warmth which seems continually to have been denied her. Joan Dash provides us with a detailed narrative of Henrietta Szold’s career, along with an informative if occasionally simplistic “life-and-times” account of the Zionist movement, but the real strength of her volume lies in the honesty and perceptiveness of her portrait of this revered member of the Zionist pantheon.
