by Ruth Gruber
Each morning, Raquela saw a tall handsome woman with raven hair enter Miss Szold’s room. She was Emma Ehrlich, who had come in 1921 as a young woman from Boston and started working immediately as Miss Szold’s secretary. She was now her confidante.
“Since none of you can sail the Atlantic and visit me, because of the war,” Miss Szold had written her family, in Baltimore, “Emma has become my sister, my friend, my mother.”
Raquela soon discovered that to Emma, who knew her better than anyone in Palestine, Miss Szold was “a saint and a genius.”
Another daily visitor was Miss Szold’s beloved disciple Hans Beyth, director of Youth Aliyah, the Children’s Migration. Since 1933 Youth Aliyah had been rescuing children from Hitler’s Germany. Now, Germany and Europe were sealed; no one knew how many millions of children were in danger of annihilation—perhaps already annihilated.
Yet, despite the war and despite the White Paper, children were still being smuggled into Palestine—many of them filtering in across the northern frontiers, from Syria and Lebanon.
One day Raquela overheard Hans Beyth describing how these children had walked hundreds of miles, fleeing from Arab lands where there were Nazi sympathizers and where Jews were now in danger.
“How do you tell if these children are Arabs or Jews?” Miss Szold asked him.
“When they come to the border, I meet them,” he answered, “and I begin by saying ‘Sh’ma.’ If they continue, ‘Sh’ma Israel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad—Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One’—I know they’re Jews, and we take them immediately to a Youth Aliyah village.”
Miss Szold leaned back in the bed, and shut her eyes. She breathed a sigh of contentment. Of all her myriad activities, rescuing children during these war years was closest to her heart.
The student nurses were given two assignments. The first was the special privilege of arranging the flowers and tropical plants that admirers sent and cutting fresh flowers for her from the garden. The second assignment, a rotating one, was to change Miss Szold’s sheets, their reward for the backbreaking hours they had spent learning to make beds properly.
The first time it was Raquela’s turn to change the sheets, she entered the room with trepidation. Would the distinguished patient be remote, austere? With no patience for a young admirer, or for small talk?
Miss Szold looked up from a book and smiled.
The room smelled of honeysuckle and roses. Miss Szold was in a frilly bed jacket, her long white hair brushed softly around her face. Pneumonia and a heart attack had left their mark. The gentle, compassionate face with huge brown eyes that Raquela had seen in newspaper photos was now sharper, lined. Only her hands were youthful, artistic, well cared for.
Silently Raquela moved about the room, replacing the flowers, helping Miss Szold out of bed, into a chair, changing her sheets, trying to fathom how this frail woman had become the first lady of Palestine.
In the next weeks Raquela learned some of her story. She had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1860, at the outbreak of America’s civil war. Her father, a rabbi from Hungary, treated her as the son he never had. He became her teacher, her guide, her mentor, instilling in her his spirituality, his scholarship, and his sense of the truth and beauty of Judaism. She became his secretary, his deputy rabbi, and his researcher. Many young men were attracted to the brilliant young woman, but when any of them came to the house in Baltimore, Henrietta would tell her sisters, “You take him off my hands; I’m busy.”
When her father died, she moved to New York City with her mother and began to publish her father’s papers. To understand them better, she applied for admission to the Jewish Theological Seminary, the first woman allowed to enroll. She was accepted on the condition that she would not become a rabbi.
She was at the seminary a short time when she met Dr. Louis Ginzberg, a newcomer from Germany, dark and bearded, like her father, and a great scholar, like her father. For Henrietta, it was love at first sight. She was in her early forties.
As she had worked with her father, so now she worked with the man she loved, translating his material from German into English, editing it, polishing it, giving it her felicitous touch. Each Saturday he came to the apartment on Riverside Drive for lunch, and evenings they walked along the Drive while he tried out his ideas and let her shape them into publishable form.
The first volumes of his Legends of the Jews acknowledged her role as translator and editor.
For her, at least, the relationship meant fulfillment, commitment, happiness. She once wrote, “Why should one expect that a woman great in intellect should not love greatly, too?”
Then, one summer, Dr. Ginzberg returned to Germany. Sitting in a synagogue, he looked up at the women’s section in the balcony. An attractive young woman caught his eye. After the service he arranged to meet her, and soon he asked her two questions: are you interested in keeping house, and are you interested in having children? Her answer to both was yes.
He returned to New York and announced to Henrietta that he was engaged to a young German-Jewish woman.
Henrietta ended her relationship with Dr. Ginzberg abruptly.
Her mother, seeing her brokenhearted daughter grow depressed, suggested they go to Palestine. It was 1909. The two women, traveling through the Holy Land, were shocked by the neglected land, by the filth and poverty, by the women who died in childbirth, the infants decimated before they were one year old, the schoolchildren blinded by flies stuck to their white-filmed eyes.
Henrietta’s pragmatic seventy-seven-year-old mother made a suggestion. “Here is work for you. You have a study group of ladies at home. Let your group do something for these children instead of talking, talking, talking.”
They returned to America, where Henrietta organized her women. On February 24, 1912, they met in Temple Emanu-El in New York and created Hadassah. The meeting was held during the festival of Purim, and “Hadassah” was the Hebrew name for Queen Esther, who had saved the Jews. They took their motto from Jeremiah 8:22: Arukhat bat ami—“the healing of the daughter of my people.”
Hadassah was to become the world’s largest organization of Jewish women.
In 1920, at the age of sixty, when most women might retire, Henrietta Szold brought a team of American doctors and nurses to Palestine. They established hospitals all over the country; they opened outpatient clinics; they built laboratories attached to the hospitals. Miss Szold insisted that they must establish a school for nursing as an integral part of medical care. Her approach to teaching was, “Work and study, theory and practice: the two must go hand in hand. You must not stop studying because you work, and you must not stop working because you study.”
Some of the established male doctors in Palestine looked upon her nursing school with contempt. Why did a nurse need to study for three years? A month of practice in a hospital should be sufficient. And why do women need to become so professional? We never had this under the Turks; we don’t have it under the British. And no self-respecting Jewish mother will let her daughter leave home for three years.
Miss Szold was adamant. Her answer to her critics, delivered in her firm, carefully controlled voice, was, “You can’t expect a girl to support herself honorably and earn a living unless she is trained professionally and on a professional standard. You cannot train a nurse in one month. Our school will be of the highest standards of nursing and medicine in America.”
And now here she was, convalescing in the nursing school she had built, cared for lovingly by the nurses whose professionalism she had fought for and secured.
Raquela helped her walk out of her room to the large rounded terrace at the front of the building. She settled her into a soft lounging chair, and watched her smiling with pleasure as she looked down at the Old City.
Work and study. The words kept ringing in Raquela’s ears. Miss Szold had gone on, carving a legend as she pulled medicine in her adopted land into the twentieth century.
The Jewish leaders o
f Palestine recognized her impact and in 1927 chose her to be a member of the Zionist Executive. Three years later she was elected a member of the Vaad Leumi (National Council for Palestine) and was put in charge of social welfare. She revolutionized the social services as she had revolutionized medicine.
Then, in 1933, when Hitler came to power, she saw, long before most people were willing to accept the reality, that he was bent on extermination. Jews would be trapped and annihilated.
At seventy-five, she had gone to Hitler’s Germany. “If we cannot save all the Jews,” she cried, “let us at least save the children.”
Youth Aliyah, first created by Recha Freier in Berlin, became Henrietta Szold’s obsession and love. In Germany, she brought her organizational talents and skills to the Children’s Migration, which would eventually bring thousands of children to Palestine. They were never called orphans, though most of their parents died in concentration camps.
Home in Palestine, rain or shine, winter or summer, Miss Szold drove from Jerusalem to Haifa. She stood on the dock to meet every ship and shake the hand of every parentless child she had rescued.
Around the world, people began calling her “the mother of ten thousand children.”
She protested. “A child has only one mother,” she said.
And sadly, she sometimes added, “I am not a mother.”
How had she done it all—medicine, the nursing school, the hospital, Hadassah, the women’s Zionist Organization of America, social welfare, Youth Aliyah?
Early one morning, Raquela, arranging an armful of flowers she had cut in the garden, worked up the courage to ask. She found Miss Szold sitting on the terrace, wrapped in a robe, with a blanket around her feet. In the early light, the Old City was sharply outlined, as if someone had taken a soft crayon and defined each building, the white granite tower of the Rockefeller Museum, the synagogues, the churches, the mosques, and even the embattlement walls. The houses inside the walls cast long early-morning shadows upon one another. Even the sky seemed to frame the Old City in pale blue with tints of pink and turquoise.
“Do I disturb you, Miss Szold?” Raquela asked.
Miss Szold turned her eyes away from the morning panorama and looked at Raquela. Her brown eyes seemed to Raquela to be filled with wisdom.
How should she begin? How could one ask a woman as important as Henrietta Szold how she had achieved so much, and still kept herself so carefully groomed, her hair always shining, her hands young?
In her last letter to Carmi—somewhere on the Italian front, fighting the Nazis—Raquela had told him of Miss Szold. “Someday,” she wrote, “I’ll ask her the questions that keep churning around in my brain.”
This was the day.
“Miss Szold,” she blurted out, “how did you do it?”
“Do what?” Miss Szold asked. Her soft white hair was combed in a precise center part, her well-formed lips drawn in a smile.
“Everything.” Raquela tossed her head. If Miss Szold refused to answer, she would turn and race down the stairs. The words tumbled out. “I mean, I heard you got up before dawn, and worked eighteen hours a day, and did everything, and on Shabbat had open house in your room in Pension Romm on 11 Rambam Street, right across from the second windmill, the windmill that really works, not like the one at Yemin Moshe, where my grandmother lived. I mean—how did you do it?”
Raquela put her hands to her mouth. The questions were out now—not all, not the personal ones, the love affair with the scholar in New York. Did she feel about him the way Raquela felt about Carmi? They too had fallen in love at first sight. No, she would not ask questions that invaded her privacy.
“If you don’t want to answer, if you don’t feel like talking, it’s all right. Really.”
“I don’t mind,” Miss Szold said.
Raquela stood, waiting.
“The body is a machine through which we function,” Miss Szold said. “Years and years ago, I decided I must keep the machine in good working order. A machine, like any tool, needs care every day. I knew if I didn’t massage my hands every day, they would become twisted and gnarled like the hands of many women, and I would not be able to write, to keep up with my correspondence with my family and all my friends.”
Raquela nodded silently. She had seen her writing in her room, or on the terrace, hours at a time.
“And your hair?” Raquela barely breathed the words. She had often watched Miss Szold brush her white hair forward, then back, then side to side.
“I had no time to go to beauty parlors,” Miss Szold answered seriously. Perhaps the questions were not so trivial after all. “I brushed—and I still brush my hair one hundred strokes a day. I used to use a sturdy brush; now in the hospital, I use a baby brush and a fine comb. I’ve even stopped using soap these last months. Someone told me hair should be cared for the way you groom a horse or a dog. And I believe it.”
Raquela was relaxing; Miss Szold had put her completely at ease. “Did you have a routine—one you stuck to every day?”
“Of course.” She smiled again. “It’s the only way to keep the machine well tooled. I got up at quarter to five every morning. Those first two hours of the day were mine. That’s when I did my regular setting-up exercises, brushed my hair the hundred strokes, massaged my hands, took my bath, dressed and had my breakfast.” She laughed a little. “Then I was ready for a day’s work to begin.”
Raquela felt a sudden impulse to bend down and kiss Miss Szold’s cheek, but she didn’t dare.
Some weeks later, at eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, February 13, 1945, Miss Szold fell into a coma. That afternoon, she died as she had lived: quietly, with consummate dignity, and in the nursing school she had created and loved.
Months before, she had prepared her own shroud. That, too, was typical: to cause as little inconvenience as possible, she had told Emma Ehrlich where to find the shroud inside her wardrobe at home.
Cables were sent to her family in America, but the war in Europe made transportation impossible, and not one of them could come to her funeral.
Miss Szold’s body, wrapped in the shroud, lay in state on the floor of the lounge. A navy-blue cloth covered her; two tall candelabra with lit tapers stood near her head. The white-cowled student nurses kept vigil, the honor guard whose leader had fallen.
Raquela’s watch came at midnight. Silently she said farewell.
In the morning the heavens opened. “Even God is weeping,” Judith said, wiping the tears from her eyes.
Thousands of mourners came to Mount Scopus. Solemnly, they stood in line in the pouring rain, then entered the school and filed past her body. Above the Hadassah Hospital, the flag of Zion, with its star of David, flew at half mast.
All through the dark morning the mourners came, and on into the early afternoon. At three o’clock the cantor intoned the memorial prayer. There were no speeches. In the somber, darkened lounge, Raquela leaned against the wall, surrounded by doctors and nurses; Emma Ehrlich, weeping as if her heart would break; Hans Beyth, his eyes rimmed with sorrow; Jewish, Arab, and British political leaders, paying their last respects.
Dr. Judah Magnes, the American-born president of the Hebrew University, recited the Kaddish, the prayer in praise of God.
Now the pallbearers carried Miss Szold up the road along the ridge of Mount Scopus to the university campus. Raquela walked with the student nurses in the procession of leaders and workers, of the famous and the obscure, and of thousands of Miss Szold’s beloved Youth Aliyah children.
The heavens ceased weeping. The sky was a sheet of gray.
At the university the pallbearers gave up their burden. Miss Szold’s body was placed in a hearse and carried to the sacred burial place on the Mount of Olives, where for thousands of years pious Jews had buried their dead.
The long endless procession approached the grave.
Tears formed in Raquela’s eyes.
SIX
MARCH 1945
Raquela was in the labor
room, mopping the forehead of her sister-in-law, Meira, Jacob’s wife.
Meira’s soft, pretty face was chalky, her dark hair stringy and wet. A scream exploded; her body trembled. Then she lay back, exhausted.
“I’ve been here all night, Raquela,” she said weakly. “What time is it?
“Eight o’clock, Meira.”
“My God, it’s more than thirteen hours. How much longer, do you think?”
Raquela tried to comfort her. “It can’t be too much longer. First babies are always the hardest. By the time you and Jacob have had—who knows—three, four, five, you’ll be dropping them like a peasant in the fields.”
She sounded more reassuring than she felt. She was worried; the water bag had burst. The contractions had started, then stopped. Started again. Then stopped. Meira was weak with fatigue. Raquela changed the wet gown.
Meira looked at Raquela gratefully. “I’d go out of my mind if you weren’t here,” she said with a sigh. “I’m so glad you could get out of your class.”
Raquela chuckled. “I had to do a real selling job with Mrs. Margolith to do it. You know, she’s Mrs. Cantor’s top assistant, and she doesn’t believe in third-year students’ missing a single class.”
Meira leaned back wearily. Raquela tried to make her laugh.
“Did I tell you what happened to me the other day with Miss Landsmann? She’s the director of nursing services, an American, and she never learned Hebrew. She speaks to us in English with some Yiddish and a few Hebrew words. A few days ago she caught me, with another student, sunbathing on the terrace. She scolded us. ‘Girls, don’t stand nekket on the balcony. Three policemen are standing over there on the kveesh (road) kooking (looking) at you.’”
Meira laughed, holding her swollen belly.
She and Jacob had been married a little more than a year, a simple wartime wedding with only a handful of relatives present. Most of the young men in the two families were at the front.
Raquela knew how Jacob adored his vivacious wife. Searching for something to divert her, Raquela felt for a letter in her apron pocket. “Would you like me to read you Carmi’s last letter? It’s all about Italy when the Jewish Brigade landed.”