Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture

On Behalf of Mothers and Children in Eretz Israel: The Activity of Hadassah, the Federation of Hebrew Women, and WIZO to Establish Maternal and Infant Welfare Centers—Tipat Halav, 1913–1948

J Shifra Shvarts and Zipora Shehory-Rubin On Behalf of Mothers and Children in Eretz Israel The Activity of Hadassah, the Federation of Hebrew Women, and WIZO to Establish Maternal and Infant Welfare Centers—Tipat Halav, 1913–1948 The Activities of Nathan Straus and “Daughters of Zion—Hadassah” on Behalf of Mothers and Children toward the End of the Ottoman Period In 1908, Henrietta Szold visited Eretz Israel. Henrietta Szold (1860–1945), a native of Baltimore, daughter of a Zionist rabbinical family, one of the founders of the Hadassah organization and its first president, arrived in the country after a trip to Europe. She was shaken by the misery, poverty, and filth in which the people of Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Safed were steeped, and especially by the low state of hygiene that she felt directly affected the public’s general state of health. So Szold conceived a comprehensive plan for public health that would bring relief to the women and children. Her plan began to move toward becoming a reality with the founding of Hadassah , the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, in 1912. Hadassah set for itself the goal of helping the Yishuv in Eretz Israel in the fields of education and health and also strived to work for “a healthy population that would be able to function properly on the personal and public levels, and for the benefit of society that makes possible pleasant motherhood and happy childhood.”1 Implementation of Szold’s plan began in 1913 with the assistance of the Jewish philanthropist Nathan Straus, who already had earned a reputation as experienced in establishing centers in the United States for the distribu- tion of pasteurized milk to needy mothers who could not nurse. Straus visited Eretz Israel with his wife Lina in 1912 on his way to Rome to attend an international conference devoted to the war on tuberculosis. On this visit, Straus set up a soup kitchen and a health center that had three departments: hygiene education, eye diseases, and bacteriology.2 Upon his return to America , Straus urged Henrietta Szold to begin the immediate application of her plan. So the Hadassah members chose two New York nurses, Rose Kaplan of Mount Sinai Hospital and Rachel Landy, a nurse-supervisor at Harlem Hospital , and sent them to Jerusalem to open a Maternal and Infant Welfare Center on the pattern of the highly successful centers operating in the United States. The two nurses arrived in Eretz Israel in early 1913, accompanied by Straus and his funding; they settled in Meah She’arim in an apartment that he rented for them. The apartment served also as a clinic where they gave guidance to pregnant women and mothers. The center was open to all, regardless of religion or race, and focused on providing the services of midwives, health and hygiene education, home visits to needy mothers, and treatment for schoolchildren suffering trachoma. The nurses worked in cooperation with Dr. Abraham Ticho, an ophthalmologist, and in coordination with the health center. Following Straus’s instructions, the nurses patterned their work according to the model developed in New York for the operation of the mother and child welfare centers. So this became the first Maternal and Infant Welfare Center established in Eretz Israel that trained midwives and offered professional guidance by nurses and physicians to mothers and pregnant women in their own homes. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Rose Kaplan left the country and Rose Landy continued the project with Dr. Helena Kagan, a pioneer in pediatrics, who immigrated to Eretz Israel from Switzerland in 1914.3 In September 1915, when funding had run out, Landy was forced to return to the United States and the clinic was closed. Dr. Kagan continued to provide medical assistance in the clinic she opened in her home near the Meah She’arim neighborhood, and even trained Jewish and Arab young women to serve as nurses at the municipal hospital. She trained local nurses to work in the schools and continued to manage the midwifery services that the two Hadassah nurses had founded. In 1916, owing to the economic difficulties in the Yishuv during World War I, Dr. Kagan expanded the midwifery services to the city of Jaffa, too, and for that purpose obtained a contribution from the Committee on Palestine Welfare of Chicago. shvarts & shehory-rubin: Mothers & Children in Israel 181 The American Zionist Medical Unit A...