The Best School in Jerusalem: Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900–1960

Epilogue: Lessons Learned

236 Epilogue Lessons Learned WhenAnnie Landau arrived in Jerusalem in 1899,she found it to be in a pitiful state.She believed that the poverty,disease,dirt,and lack of initiative that characterized the Jewish community of the city were a result of the woeful neglect of the education of its girls, and she devoted her life to changing the situation,developing a curriculum focused on Jewish values and modern texts. She was often accused of educating her pupils to be unfit for their surroundings . She happily pleaded guilty to the charge, convinced that her graduates would change the city for the better. Landau, and later Levy, prepared the pupils for leadership roles in their communities and in their professions. The young women who graduated in the 1930s and 1940s were aware that they attended an unusual school that expected much of them. They did not disappoint their headmistresses and their teachers. As the decades passed, the graduates pursued careers, nurtured families, and built their homeland.Many maintained contact with one another,rejoicing together in their successes and grieving at their losses.Slowly they retired from their professional roles and began to think of the legacy they would leave to their children,their grandchildren,and the nation they had helped to create.All the alumnae contacted for this book appreciated the opportunities they had as citizens of a modern society,opportunities that were denied their parents, who had grown up in more restrictive settings.All expressed disappointment that their children were still fighting for the safety and security of their homeland. Some wondered whether they could have prevented some of the current problems by making different choices. Others wondered what they could do today to facilitate dialogue among hostile groups. Epilogue · 237 The women profiled in this section were selected from a larger group of women interviewed,all of whose stories enriched this study.Each was selected because she had thought deeply about the influence of the school on her life and because she had contributed to the foundation and the development of the state of Israel. Each expressed appreciation for the unique education she had received that prepared her to act boldly, with confidence, and with skill when called on to respond to a myriad of challenges. Each spoke of role models—Annie Landau, Ethel Levy, and several teachers—as important sources of personal strength and determination. Each, like her mentors, was devoted to educating and caring for others. Many histories of Israel have been written since the foundation of the state.Few focus on the achievements and contributions of women.Fewer still examine the thinking of women who helped to put into place the building blocks of the state.This epilogue is part of the effort to redress this lamentable lacuna in the historical narrative. Shulamit Kishik-Cohen Shulamit Cohen was born in 1919 in Buenos Aires,Argentina, where her father was the chief Sephardi rabbi.She was the third child and eldest daughter of a family of eight children.Her mother,Allegra Harush,had graduated from the Evelina School before World War I. The family returned to Jerusalem in the summer of 1926.Landau agreed to admit three of the Cohen girls because she remembered that Allegra had been a very good student. Shulamit adjusted rapidly to her new school and classmates. Her school experiences remained vividly alive for her decades after they had taken place. She commented frequently on their importance to her way of thinking. One of her strong memories involved a personal interaction with Landau.Shulamit and her friends were preparing for a test and continued studying during their recreation time in the garden. At the appointed hour, a prefect rang the bell to indicate that the girls should form their lines to return to class. Shulamit, absorbed in her studies,didn’t move quickly enough to suit the prefect.Consequently ,she was instructed to write“I must obey orders”one thousand times. She asked for a diminution of the punishment in order to complete studying for her test, but the prefect was firm. Seeking a way out of her dilemma, Shulamit asked five of her friends 238 · the best school in Jerusalem to share the punishment, suggesting that they each write the sentence two hundred times.When they refused,Shulamit was disappointed,but she soon devised a different approach. She wrote“I must obey orders” once and then added 999 rows...