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

Foreword

xiii Foreword Given the sophistication of contemporary Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Israel,it is difficult to imagine that a little more than a century ago,the holy city to which Jews face three times a day in their prayers was in truth a city of squalor. Beggars and disease were rampant. Food was unhygienic and in short supply.As historian Laura Schor explains, the city suffered from social problems as much as from physical ones. Jerusalemites were divided sharply between Sephardi andAshkenazi communities; girls in both ethnicities married at twelve or thirteen with almost none of them having received any education at the time of their weddings; and 50,000 of the 60,000 Jews who lived in Jerusalem were supported by welfare. Into this maelstrom of misery stepped Annie Landau (1873–1945), an Orthodox Jewish British optimist who believed in“the critical role to be played by women in the development of the Jewish people” (8). Guiding the activity of the rest of her life was the belief that the only way to harness the untapped potential of women was to educate the girls! Current attitudes toward education in the twenty-first century are generally so positive that, again, it challenges the imagination to think that the people of Jerusalem did not welcome Landau’s commitment to build a school that truly educated girls. And yet she succeeded. Her ability to implement her mission-driven work rests on her intelligence, extraordinary energy, singlemindedness , and perhaps also the fact that she remained unfettered by a family of her own.Like theAmerican Zionist Henrietta Szold,Annie Landau never lived to see the State of Israel declared.Nevertheless,the State of Israel is deeply indebted to both of them. Annie was one of eighteen children born to her father whose first wife bore himthefirstfive.Anniewastheoldestof thechildrentowhomthesecondwife, xiv · Foreword Chaya, gave birth. Again, stretching the bounds of the plausible, the Landau familywascommittedtoeducatingeverysingleoneof thosechildreninsecular subjects while simultaneously imbuing them with Jewish knowledge at home. Neither of her parents—Chaya and Marcus—saw any contradiction between high-quality secular and Jewish education. Annie adopted this approach in all of her subsequent educational enterprises. It is notable that Marcus and his friends were highly critical of the standard of Jewish education in London and developed a plan for a strong alternative. Annie’s views as an adult mirrored those of her father. As he wrote in an editorial in the Jewish Standard, a newspaper he founded,“There is no reason to assign to woman an inferior position either in religious or intellectual matters” (20). Not surprisingly, the nine daughters of the Landau family achieved as much as did the nine sons. Both in Great Britain and the United States,the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century were preoccupied by discussions of girls’ education. This is no surprise since it was also the period when people were wrestling with competing concepts of women’s roles in society, specifically their right to vote.Prominent physicians argued that educating young [white] women represented race suicide,as educated women would not marry or have children. Others argued that exposing women to liberal ideas would make them irreligious and promiscuous. Added to this was the general confusion among Jews concerning the appropriate response to modernity. Should they embrace or shun new opportunities? The Hirsch School thatAnnie attended as a teenager came down clearly on the side of integration, an approach she would later advocate in Jerusalem. Her subsequent training to become a teacher underscored this approach and also taught her the essential and complex skills of school administration. Supported by funds from the Ladies’ Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and regularly evaluated by prominent figures of the London Jewish community, the Evelina de Rothschild School existed long before Anne Landau arrived in Palestine. The school, like many institutions in the early twentieth-century yishuv,reflected effective partnerships between the Jews in the diaspora and those in the holy land. These outside influences compelled earlier administrators in the school to decrease crowding, enhance healthy behaviors, and upgrade instruction. The growing excellence of the school, it was also hoped, would protect Jewish students from the missionary institutions always eager to baptize Jewish girls. Foreword · xv As the nineteenth century came to a close, Annie was offered a teaching position in the Evelina School in Jerusalem. Soon after she took her place among...