Hadassah and heartbreak
Most travellers to Jerusalem are familiar with the name, Hadassah, probably one of the best hospitals in the Middle East. For American Jews, the name has a special resonance, for it is the name of the powerful women’s organisation founded in 1912, a national phenomenon to which hundreds of Jewish women have belonged. The name of the founder of Hadassah — Henrietta Szold — is perhaps not so familiar. Born in Baltimore in 1860, Szold had a long, event-filled life (she died in February 1945), full of good works and achievements. She was also the founder and director of Youth Aliyah, rescuing thousands of children from the shadow of the Holocaust and bringing them to Mandate Palestine to settle in Youth Aliyah villages.
Bar-Ilan University academic Dvora Hacohen has produced a comprehensive life of this almost unknowable woman. One of the last actions of the revered Supreme Court judge, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before her death, was to write a foreword to the book. The judge was a life member of Hadassah and a great admirer of Henrietta Szold.
Professor Hacohen, in her introduction, says she could not understand why there was no major biography of Szold until now. Unfortunately, it was probably because Szold’s life appears to have been one of thwarted emotional relationships, none of which ended in happiness. Accordingly, she threw herself into work, shuttling back and forth between America and Palestine. Hacohen details the minutiae of the various political fights Szold had with the international Zionist organisations — but at times it reads like an over-inflated Wikipedia entry.
If there was one thing, however, at which Henrietta Szold was adept, it was setting her sights on unsuitable Jewish men. The pattern appears to
have been set by her father, a rabbi who trampled on his eldest daughter’s academic ambitions but didn’t mind using her as his unpaid translator and linguistic slave. An early romantic attachment, when she was 28, came to nothing, and thereafter the clever Szold, the eldest of eight daughters — four of whom died in infancy — was obliged to remain nobly silent as her younger sisters found husbands.
In the early 1900s, however, Szold encountered a brilliant talmudic scholar, Louis Ginzberg, who was teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Inevitably, he noticed Szold’s well-ordered mind and immediately got her doing unpaid work for him. “She was flattered by Ginzberg’s frequent requests for her assistance”, writes Professor Hacohen. At which point, I was tempted to shout at the book “Get out of there, Henrietta! He’s a user!”
But of course, she did not. For five years, she continued working — again, without payment — on translation projects for Ginzberg, including his mammoth work, Legends of the Jews, and, by 1908, was almost sure he was going to propose. Instead, cruelly, Ginzberg asked for a private word with her. “You will be surprised, I am engaged”, he said. Seeing the effect this announcement had on Henrietta, he said: “You’ll get over it,” and departed.
“I had been blind”, Henrietta wrote despairingly in her diary. “I had been mistaken, he had never loved me”.
And so, what became a “family joke” among the Ginzbergs — “Louis Ginzberg was the father of Hadassah” — came to pass. The 34-year-old Ginzberg rationalised his spurning of the 47-year-old Szold because of the age difference, and the fact that he wanted children.
The heartbroken Szold poured her considerable energies into Hadassah, Youth Aliyah, and Zionist politics. Only history can judge who was the ultimate beneficiary. On this painful reading, the extraordinary Henrietta Szold longed for nothing so much as to be ordinary.
Jenni Frazer is a freelance writer and reviewer