Henrietta Szold: Activist, Zionist, Humanist By Kayla Cohen ‘17 April wind passed us by like the smoke of men’s extinguished hookah pipes or the steam of goldenly-charred tea leaves in hot water. We were on the rooftop of a crumbling building. Our vantage point revealed the Judean hills-- rolling, rolling-- that separated the shiny buildings and white stone of our Jewish boarding school from the beaten rugs and dried soccer fields of surrounding Arab villages. Looking down, through a Jewish-American lens, I saw a conflict, a stark separation between Jewish and Arab communities. More than a century ago, activist and founder of Hadassah Henrietta Szold, through her own Jewish-American lens, saw a conflict older than the green line or Partition Plan of 1948. She did not see a conflict between ideologies, but the conflict that transcended them: poverty. Szold left New York to visit Palestine for the first time in 1909. In a horse-drawn carriage, she traveled to the blue Galilee and its struggling farm communities. Jerusalem, she knew, would reveal its strong connections with individual peoples: for Christians: the Holy Sepulchre, Jews: the Kotel, Muslims: the Qubbar Al Sakhrah. But outside of the Holy City, the communities of the three Abrahamic faiths, each lacking basic sanitation and plagued by disease, revealed a deeply common struggle. Upon her return to America, Szold’s Zionism was recharged. She formed Hadassah, and a more humanistic form of Zionism was born. Szold identified global injustice as the enemy and saw practical social programs benefitting all human beings as the means to combat such injustice. Within a year, Szold raised $2,500 for funding and moved to Jerusalem. Under her supervision, two nurses, the first of many, were sent to spread Western hygiene to the people of Palestine, Jew and non-Jew alike. Clinics were established, mothers were given pasteurized milk for their babies, and thousands with trachoma were treated. Eight years later, during the Arab riots of 1920, Hadassah nurses rushed to treat all citizens regardless of race or religion, shaping Hadassah’s medical philosophy. Today, Hadassah’s hospital system, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, reverberates Szold’s message and commitment to equality. It is this commitment to all human life, born out of a humble Hadassah meeting in America, that has inspired global progress in the advancement of basic human rights. When I find myself revisiting the roof of the shackled apartment building in my memory, or find myself struggling to defend Zionism, a now politically-charged term, I think of Henrietta Szold. Her work has revealed to me Zionism’s potential to promote peace in all impoverished and culturally-polarized areas. While Israel still lacks harmony in its borders and peace of mind with its neighbors, Szold’s activism is what keeps me, a young American Jew and Zionist, singing HaTikvah, an anthem of hope for our future. .