Henrietta Szold

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Henrietta Szold (December 21, 1860 – February 13, 1945) was a U.S. Jewish scholar and Zionist leader.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a rabbi, she studied Talmud and established the first American night school, intended to provide English language instruction and vocational skills to Russian Jewish immigrants in Baltimore. Beginning in 1893, she worked for the Jewish Publication Society, a position she maintained for over two decades. Her commitment to Zionism was heightened by a trip to Palestine in 1909. She founded the Jewish women's organization Hadassah in 1912 and served as its president until 1926. In 1933 working with Hadassah in Palestine, she ran Youth Aliyah which rescued some 22,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. Szold lived the rest of her life in Palestine and died in Jerusalem on February 13, 1945.

The kibbutz Kfar Szold is named after her.

[edit] Women and the Mourners' Kaddish

Henrietta Szold was the oldest of eight daughters, and she had no brothers. In traditional Judaism, a woman was not permitted to say the Mourners' Kaddish, although rabbinical authorities differed as to whether this was merely custom or was prohibited by Jewish Law. In 1916, her mother passed away, and a friend named Haym Peretz offered to say kaddish for her mother, since Szold's mother had no sons to recite the prayer. In a letter, she thanked Peretz for his concern, but announced that she would take on the tradition herself.

I know well, and appreciate what you say about the Jewish custom; and Jewish custom is very dear and sacred to me. And yet I cannot ask you to say Kaddish after my mother. The Kaddish means to me that the survivor publicly and markedly manifests his wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community, which his parent had, and that so the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation, each adding its own link. You can do that for the generations of your family, I must do that for the generations of my family.

Szold's answer to Peretz is cited by "Women and the Mourners' Kaddish," a responsa written by Rabbi David Golinkin. This responsa, adopted unanimously by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of Conservative Judaism, permits women to recite the Mourners' Kaddish in public, when a minyan is present, in conditions where it had customarily been recited by men.