She Never Had a Child of Her Own, So She Saved 30,000 of Them

They tried to tell her that her life was over. She was a spinster, they whispered, a rabbi's daughter growing gray in Baltimore, a woman who had loved a man who did not love her back and would now fade quietly into the ordinary sadness of a life unlived. What those whisperers did not understand is that the Jewish story does not end where the world expects it to. Henrietta Szold was only getting started, and before she was finished she would become the mother of more children than any queen in history.

Portrait of Henrietta Szold, digitally enhanced (Wikimedia)

Remember her name, because most people have forgotten it, and that is a scandal.

She was born in Baltimore in the winter of 1860, the oldest of eight daughters of Rabbi Benjamin Szold, a scholar from Hungary who filled his home with books and taught his girls to think. She graduated at the top of her school, then taught for years, then edited nearly every important Jewish book coming out of America, quietly, without a title worthy of the work. When waves of Russian Jews poured off the boats fleeing the pogroms of the czar, Henrietta did not write a pamphlet about their suffering. She opened a night school and taught them English and a trade with her own hands, one of the first schools of its kind in the entire country.

In her forties she fell deeply for Louis Ginzberg, a great Talmudic scholar. She poured herself into his work, and he took the devotion and gave her friendship in return, then married a younger woman. Henrietta was shattered. Her mother, watching her grieve, did the wisest thing a Jewish mother has ever done. She took her broken daughter on a trip to the Land of Israel. What Henrietta saw there rearranged her soul. She walked through Jerusalem and saw children with diseased eyes, mothers dying in childbirth, filth and fever in the alleys of the holy city. Any tourist could have wept and gone home. Her mother turned to her and said the sentence that built a nation's medicine. Stop writing about it, she said. This is what your Hadassah women should be doing.

So in 1912, on the holiday of Purim, Henrietta gathered a small circle of women in New York and founded an organization she named Hadassah, the Hebrew name of Queen Esther, the woman who saved her people when everyone assumed she was powerless. It was the perfect name, because that is exactly what these women were about to do. Hadassah sent two American nurses across the ocean to Jerusalem to fight blindness and disease in the streets. From that seed grew clinics, then hospitals, then the medical miracle that today treats Jew and Arab and Christian side by side and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Am Yisrael Chai does not only mean the people of Israel live. It means we make the living better for everyone around us.

MRS. HENRIETTA SZOLD SPEAKING DURING THE OPENING OF THE HADASSAH MEDICAL CENTER IN THE LIBRARY ON MOUNT SCOPUS IN JERUSALEM (Wikimedia)

Saving Jews Before The Holocaust

She could have stopped there and earned her place in history. She did not stop.

In 1933, as the shadow of Hitler fell across Germany, a woman had a desperate idea to smuggle Jewish teenagers out of Europe and plant them safely in the soil of the Land of Israel. That woman needed someone to actually run it, someone with iron will and an accountant's precision and a heart the size of the sea. Henrietta Szold, by then in her seventies, packed up her life and moved to Jerusalem to lead Youth Aliyah. Think about that age. Most people her age were being cared for. She became the guardian of a rescue.

She met the trains herself. When the children arrived, frightened, seasick, torn from parents they would never see again, an old woman was standing on the platform to greet each one. She learned their names. She worried over their shoes and their schooling and their broken hearts. She became, in the truest sense, the mother of thousands of orphans of the storm. By the time the fires of Europe burned out, Youth Aliyah had saved roughly 30,000 Jewish children from the Nazis.

There is one more story you must know, because it tells you who she was. When her own mother died, a family friend named Haym Peretz kindly offered to say the Mourner's Kaddish in her place, since she had no brother and no son to say it for her. Most women of that era would have thanked him. Henrietta wrote back and gently refused. She would say the Kaddish herself, she explained, because she would not let the chain of her family's faith pass her by simply because she was a woman. That letter is still quoted in synagogues a century later. She was an Eshet Chayil, a woman of valor, and she knew it, and she claimed it.

She died in Jerusalem in the winter of 1945, at the age of 84, in a hospital her own hands had built. They carried her up the Mount of Olives and buried her looking out at the city she had saved from the inside. She never held a baby that was born to her. She held a nation instead.

The Jewish people do not measure a life by what it was given. We measure it by what it gave. Am Yisrael Chai.