Female Leadership in the American Jewish Community: Bessie Gotsfeld and the Mizrachi Women’s Organization of America (review)

Although many historians have written about American Zionism, most of them have concentrated on male leaders and organizations. The past decade has seen a correction of this omission.¹ But while a few dissertations and full-length books dedicated to Hadassah and Henrietta Szold appeared over the past few decades, few scholars have studied the women of Pioneer Women or Mizrachi with the same zeal. Many authors, including Shargel and Joan Dash,² have written about the life of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah, for example, but only now is there a full-length book on Bessie Gotsfeld, founder and early leader of Mizrachi Women’s Organization of America. Shargel’s book contributes to the canon of American Jewish women’s crucial roles in establishing and maintaining the Jewish state and supporting Zionism both in the U.S. and in Israel.

Shargel presents an intimate portrait of Bessie Gotsfeld through interviews, letters from and to Gotsfeld, and other archival materials that bring Gotsfeld’s personality and persona to life. Shargel’s extensive use of personal stories and quotes throughout the narrative allows the reader to understand Gotsfeld as a Mizrachi leader and as a daughter, wife, aunt, and confidante. Although she gives historical context and background to the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel, Shargel quickly passes over these frameworks to get to the story of Gotsfeld and Mizrachi Women’s Organization of America (MWOA).

Born in Galicia in 1888, Bessie Goldstein moved to the United States a few years after completing high school as valedictorian. She married Mendel Gotsfeld in 1909 and moved to Seattle in 1911, where she formed a Mizrachi women’s chapter and served as its vice president. Upon her return to New York in 1919, Gotsfeld joined the Achios Mizrachi in Williamsburg, one of the women’s auxiliary groups of the American Mizrachi Movement, and soon became irritated by Mizrachi men who expected the women to collect money and then hand it over to them. In 1924, Gotsfeld and her stepmother Adele Goldstein reorganized the Achios Mizrachi in Williamsburg and Eastern Parkway into a larger group with the new name Mizrachi Sisters of Brooklyn. At the 1925 National Mizrachi convention in Cleveland, Gotsfeld led other women to form a national organization, Mizrachi Women’s Organization of America, and they adopted a charter that explained the call for autonomy by Orthodox Jewish women by stating that they “desire . . . self-expression and self-assertion in [their] work for Palestine . . .” The charter, however, did not spell out a specific cause or project to which the women would dedicate themselves; Gotsfeld would soon find one. Adele Goldstein assumed the presidency of the new organization, while Gotsfeld became national secretary. All knew, however, that Gotsfeld “set policy and developed tactics” for the organization.

Gotsfeld volunteered to go to Palestine to seek out a project for MWOA, just as Hadassah sought out health care as its niche. She settled on creating a vocational high school for religious girls and volunteered to be MWOA’s permanent on-site representative in Palestine. Gotsfeld envisioned a vocational school to serve under-privileged girls in Jerusalem that would provide religious education along with technical training in cooking, sewing, laundry, and housework. Shargel surmises that in order to garner support from the Orthodox community, Mizrachi leaders touted the “technical training” in traditional terms, as useful for homemaking. However, “the curriculum subverted the purposes it purported to perpetuate. Graduates . . . would prove eligible for employment in the public arena.” Bet Zeirot Mizrachi opened in Jerusalem in 1933 with twenty-four students. With Nechama Leibowitz at the head of the education department, MWOA’s school provided an unprecedented level of education for girls in Judaic subjects. Leibowitz’s world-renowned weekly Torah commentaries and questions grew out of the teaching she began at BZM. With one project safely off the ground, Gotsfeld and MWOA...