Hadassah (Organization)

Hadassah connects an American volunteer membership network with medical, educational, and youth institutions in Israel, combining philanthropy with Zionist education and public advocacy.[2][6] Its stated mission emphasizes commitment to Israel’s land, people, and future, alongside opportunities for education, leadership, advocacy, and personal fulfillment.[2] Strengthening connections between American and Israeli Jewish communities and instilling Jewish values are also central to its purpose.[2]

The organization’s institutional work grew out of practical Zionism: addressing health and social needs as part of Jewish national development.[7] Its early program paired medical and social services in Palestine with the cultivation of Zionist ideals in America.[8] Hospitals, nursing education, maternal and infant care, preventive medicine, vocational training, and support for immigrant children subsequently became important fields of activity.[8][9]

Hadassah is distinct from the Hadassah Medical Organization, the medical institution that it owns and supports in Jerusalem.[6] That institution comprises Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem and Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus, providing emergency treatment, inpatient care, outpatient services, and community outreach.[6] The broader American organization also supports youth villages and Young Judaea programs and advocates on issues including Israel’s security, Jewish rights, antisemitism, and women’s health.[6]

Legally, Hadassah was identified in a 2012 court filing as a New York-organized 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in New York, with no parent corporation and no stock.[10] Its scale has been expressed through different membership categories over time: a 2002 description counted more than 300,000 members and 1,500 American chapters, while the 2012 filing counted more than 330,000 members, associates, and supporters.[10][11] Its 2025 network comprised nearly 300,000 members, donors, and changemakers across 610 chapters, units, and Evolve Hadassah communities.[12]

Henrietta Szold’s 1909 visit to Palestine exposed her to poor sanitation, starvation, disease, and the need for organized nursing services.[13] Returning to the United States, she sought to turn American Jewish women’s Zionist interests into practical assistance for the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine.[3][7] Hadassah emerged from a New York women’s Zionist study circle associated with the Daughters of Zion.[7]

Seven women invited others to discuss creating an organization on February 14, 1912, and more than thirty women attended the founding meeting at Temple Emanu-El on February 24.[7] The group initially became the Hadassah Chapter of the Daughters of Zion, elected Szold president, and chose nursing as its focus.[7][13] Five chapters—in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston—opened during its first year.[14] Its name was Queen Esther’s Hebrew name, Hadassah, which had also been used by Szold’s study circle; the founding gathering took place during the Purim season.[15]

At its first national convention, held in Rochester on June 19, 1914, the organization adopted the name Hadassah and the purpose “to promote Jewish institutions and enterprises in Palestine and to foster Zionist ideals in America.”[7] Israel Friedlander suggested its motto, Aruchat Bat Ami, rendered as “The Healing of the Daughter of My People,” and its seal depicted myrtle branches surrounding a Jewish star.[7]

In January 1913, Hadassah had 122 members and had collected $542 in dues when it agreed to support a nurse in Palestine for two years; Eva Leon raised another $5,000 for a second nurse.[7] With support from Nathan and Lina Straus, Rose Kaplan and Rae Landy traveled to Jerusalem and established a nurses’ settlement.[8][9] Their work among poorer residents included midwifery, first aid, hygiene education, home visits, and school examinations, particularly for early detection of trachoma.[9] They followed a settlement-house model associated with Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York.[9]

The first nursing initiative addressed maternity care, infant nutrition, and trachoma, including the provision of pasteurized milk.[13][16] Arab and Jewish residents received treatment, and local girls were trained as assistants as demand increased.[17] World War I interrupted the work, and the Jerusalem settlement closed in September 1915.[9]

Wartime conditions created a much larger medical emergency: Ottoman authorities requisitioned hospitals and medical stores and enlisted physicians, while a typhoid epidemic in the second half of 1916 compounded starvation and inadequate treatment.[9] Following a 1916 appeal for medical aid, Hadassah helped organize the American Zionist Medical Unit, or AZMU.[9] The organization then had approximately 2,000 members and undertook the task of assembling and transporting a substantial medical mission.[17]

Forty-four personnel—physicians, dentists, sanitary engineers, and nurses—sailed from New York on June 12, 1918, carrying 400 tons of supplies, including equipment for a fifty-bed hospital, vehicles, and ambulances.[17] The unit included twenty-two nurses and had an operating budget of $400,000.[9] After reaching Alexandria on August 11, some nurses remained to care for Jewish refugees, while the others continued toward Jerusalem; the unit arrived in Palestine on August 18.[17][9]

An outbreak of cholera in Tiberias prompted an emergency dispatch of staff and supplies and the establishment of a permanent hospital there.[17] Jerusalem’s Rothschild Hospital became the central hospital of the developing system, expanding when demand exceeded its original fifty beds.[17] Between August 1918 and June 1919, the unit established or renewed hospitals in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, and Safed, alongside laboratories, sanitation inspections, and nursing schools in Jerusalem and Safed.[9] The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided $200,000 annually for Hadassah’s work during 1918–1921.[18]

The Nurses’ Training Institute opened at Jerusalem’s Rothschild Hospital in 1918 as Palestine’s first professional school for women.[5] Twenty-two women graduated on December 7, 1921, and by August 1940 a total of 276 women had received nursing degrees.[5] Graduates staffed Hadassah hospitals in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed, Tiberias, and Haifa.[5] At the first graduation, Szold urged them to unite “intellect and sentiment” and “knowledge and sympathy” in their nursing practice.[5]

Szold traveled to Palestine in early 1920 to address administrative and public-relations problems within the medical unit and to study local health needs, including malaria among pioneer immigrants.[15] In September 1921, the Zionist Congress decided to turn the temporary unit into an independent medical association directly accountable to Hadassah, developing the permanent Hadassah Medical Organization.[9] Its expanding services included hospitals and clinics, rural and visiting medicine, immigrant health care, sanitation, home obstetrics, school hygiene, anti-malaria campaigns, and maternal and child care.[17]

Hadassah’s American membership grew from 34 chapters and 2,100 members when the United States entered World War I to more than 12,000 members in 1922 and more than 37,000 in 1928.[7] It joined the restructured Zionist Organization of America in 1918 but subsequently sought greater control over its own program, attaining virtual autonomy by mid-1926.[7] Junior Hadassah, organized in 1920, supported children’s welfare, the Meier Shfeyah rural school, and nursing education.[8]

During the 1920s, Hadassah developed school lunches, playgrounds, hygiene programs, and infant-welfare services.[9] Bertha Landsman established a Tipat Halav, or “drop of milk,” station in Jerusalem’s Old City in 1922, offering pregnancy supervision, nutrition advice, infant weighing, and developmental monitoring.[9] Milk kitchens supplied prepared milk for babies, sometimes delivered to mothers’ homes by donkey.[9] A photograph from 1921–1922 also preserves an example of preventive education: five mothers with their babies attending a child-care course taught by a Hadassah nurse in Jerusalem.[18]

In the 1930s, Hadassah increasingly concentrated on university medicine in Jerusalem while transferring some institutions elsewhere to municipalities and the General Sick Fund.[9] This policy, known as devolution, treated its projects as models that local institutions could eventually sustain.[9] In 1929, Szold appointed Haim Yassky as the hospital’s first non-American director-general, expanding the role of local leadership and personnel.[9]

Hadassah and the Hebrew University agreed in 1936 to develop medical teaching and research, and the Hadassah-University Medical Center opened on Mount Scopus in May 1939.[17] The complex included a 340-bed hospital, the Henrietta Szold-Hadassah School of Nursing, and the Nathan Ratnoff Building for postgraduate teaching and research.[17] It also became a professional destination for senior doctors who had fled Nazi persecution in Europe.[19] In 1943, the Mount Scopus hospital recorded average bed occupancy of 94.2 percent and 8,357 discharges, treating Jews, Muslims, and Christians.[17]

Youth rescue became another major responsibility during the Nazi era.[4] Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in Germany in 1932 to bring Jewish teenagers to Palestine for agricultural training, and the Jewish Agency established a Jerusalem head office under Szold in November 1933.[4] Szold’s responsibilities included seeking British immigration certificates and supervising the placement and training of arriving groups.[4] Hadassah became the sole American fundraiser for the program in November 1935, and Szold headed its work until her death in 1945.[9]

By the outbreak of World War II, 5,010 teenagers had reached Palestine through Youth Aliyah, often without their parents, and were placed in kibbutzim and youth villages.[9] Entertainer Eddie Cantor raised half a million dollars for the program in 1938 alone.[9] During the ten years preceding January 1946, Hadassah sent $6 million to Palestine for the maintenance and education of Youth Aliyah wards.[17] In 1943, Hadassah representatives Denise Turover and national president Tamar De Sola Pool participated in negotiations enabling the Tehran Children—about 800 children, young people, and babies who had fled Poland through the Soviet Union and Iran—to continue to Palestine, where they arrived on February 18.[9]

Educational work also expanded during the war.[9] Hadassah established the Alice L. Seligsberg Trade School for Girls in 1942 to educate and train poor girls and challenge assumptions about women’s inferior professional status.[9] Vocational schools for boys and a Vocational Guidance Bureau followed in 1944.[9] By 1945, the organization’s membership was nearing 200,000.[15]

The War of Independence profoundly reshaped Hadassah’s Jerusalem medical work.[20] On April 13, 1948, Arab terrorists attacked a medical convoy traveling to Mount Scopus, killing 78 people, including director-general Haim Yassky.[16][21] The convoy carried doctors, nurses, staff, and patients, and its vehicles bore medical markings.[20] Hadassah evacuated the hospital and dispersed its operations among older buildings in western Jerusalem, retaining its commitment to the city despite proposals to relocate to the coastal plain.[9][16]

Hadassah and the Hebrew University established Israel’s first medical school in 1949, using a model based on American medical education.[9] Hadassah also opened a hospital in Be’er Sheva that year, serving the Negev until its transfer to the General Sick Fund in 1960.[9] In 1952, it transferred many preventive-health services to Israel’s Ministry of Health, retaining some Jerusalem services for medical-student training.[9]

A replacement medical center at Ein Kerem was planned in 1950, and construction began on June 5, 1952.[9][22] Designed by Joseph Neufeld, it opened in 1961 after years in which the hospital operated from five rented Jerusalem locations.[22] Its original plan included 430 beds, medical and nursing schools, outpatient clinics, laboratories, and a medical library.[9] A 1969 account recorded 647 beds, nearly 1,000 daily outpatients in consultative clinics, a heliport, and a medical school jointly operated with the Hebrew University; these figures describe the hospital at that historical moment.[23]

Following the Six-Day War in 1967, Hadassah regained access to Mount Scopus, and national president Charlotte Jacobson traveled there to receive the hospital’s keys.[16] The renovated hospital was rededicated in 1975 and its services reopened to the public in 1976.[16][9] Hadassah College opened in 1970 to help meet demand for skilled workers in Israel’s technological, industrial, scientific, and economic sectors, while Hadassah International and Hadassah-Israel were founded in 1983.[21]

The organization’s 2012 centennial included the dedication of the Sarah Wetsman Davidson Hospital Tower at Ein Kerem, a nineteen-story facility with 500 beds and twenty operating theaters.[21][20] A severe hospital financial crisis later led to a recovery agreement signed in 2014, involving NIS 1.4 billion in state support and tighter oversight; the recovery plan concluded in 2020.[24]

Hadassah’s Jerusalem hospitals combine clinical care, medical education, and research, serving more than one million people annually through emergency departments, inpatient wards, outpatient clinics, and community outreach.[6] Care is provided regardless of religion, race, or nationality.[6] Ein Kerem shares a campus with the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Medicine, where scientists from both institutions collaborate, while Mount Scopus serves the greater Jerusalem community through services that include pediatric chronic-disease care, hospice, and rehabilitation.[25] Areas of medical expertise include cancer, cardiac care, trauma and emergency medicine, women’s health, genetics, and personalized medicine.[25]

As of February 2020, the two campuses together had approximately 1,000 beds in seventy departments, with about 900 physicians and 1,600 nurses.[9] Earlier measures indicate the institution’s development over time: in 2002, its medical organization comprised two hospitals, ninety outpatient clinics, and community health centers and treated about 600,000 patients annually.[11] Hadassah also conducts international training programs for medical personnel and students and has participated in international medical assistance.[9][26]

Youth Aliyah support has continued through changing immigration and social needs.[9] By 1958, Hadassah had contributed $35 million to support 75,000 immigrant and Israeli young people, and in 1990 it contributed $3 million for the needs of young immigrants from Ethiopia.[9] Its current youth-village program identifies Meir Shfeyah and Neurim as its two supported villages, offering shelter, food, counseling, education, Hebrew and Jewish heritage instruction, arts, athletics, and vocational training.[27] Training includes high-tech automotive repair, precision tool-making, and wine making.[27]

Hadassah Neurim, near Netanya, was founded in 1948 and is operated by the Jewish Agency for Israel.[28] In 2022 it was a joint Jewish Agency–Hadassah program, in partnership with the Jewish Federations of North America, housing and educating 300 students aged twelve to eighteen facing severe emotional or behavioral problems or difficult family circumstances.[29] Its programs include sound and audio workshops, carpentry, animal therapy, special-needs education, pre-army preparation, and sports for athletically gifted young people.[28]

An automotive program added in 2004 followed a meeting between Countess Mathilde von Stauffenberg and Youth Aliyah officials in Germany.[28] Students receive preliminary instruction in Israel before studying at an automotive training college in Frankfurt.[28] Other practical and therapeutic activities include caring for dogs with behavioral problems and preparing them for adoption.[29] Youth-village residents include native-born Israelis and immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and receive schooling, counseling, and a supportive residential environment.[28][29]

Hadassah’s American educational work includes study guides on Jewish history and culture, periodicals, local Zionist youth activities, and resources for American Jews considering immigration to Israel.[1] Its support for Young Judaea includes camps, Israel programs, and year-round activities connecting young people with Jewish life and Israel.[6] Education, community service, scholarships, health-awareness work, and support for disadvantaged children also form part of its broader program.[11][26]

Domestic civic activity expanded during World War II through war-bond sales, blood banks, donations of supplies, and volunteer work.[30] Members subsequently engaged in voter registration, grassroots advocacy on American-Israeli relations, and volunteering in domestic-violence shelters.[30] In 1963, Hadassah adopted a resolution supporting what became the Civil Rights Act and organized members to lobby local politicians.[31] Its organizational positions include opposition to discrimination and support for religious liberty, equal protection, women’s rights, and the protection of the American Jewish community.[10]

Contemporary advocacy priorities encompass Israel’s security, combating antisemitism, safeguarding Jewish rights worldwide, and women’s health.[6] Hadassah participated in creating the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism in 2004 and played a leadership role in the bipartisan effort behind the Never Again Education Act, signed on May 28, 2020.[6] Approved policy statements establish its official advocacy priorities.[6] During 2025, more than 8,500 advocates sent over 56,000 letters to policymakers, while nearly 120 leaders and members held more than fifty meetings with members of Congress, administration officials, and state policymakers.[12]

Environmental work has accompanied its medical and educational commitments.[1] Hadassah began supporting the Jewish National Fund in 1927, and its projects included swamp drainage, water development, reservoirs, and forestation.[9] By 1968, its contributions included 83 million trees and reclamation of approximately 156,250 acres.[9] Later projects included the Eshet Dam in 1987 and American Independence Park in 1998.[9]

Hadassah helped build medical and educational infrastructure for the Yishuv and subsequently supported the development of Israel’s health-care system.[3][9] Its institution-building extended beyond operating hospitals: nursing education, laboratories, sanitation, preventive care, school health, and maternal and infant services developed professional capacity and models that could later be maintained by local authorities.[9] Transfers to municipalities, the General Sick Fund, and the Ministry of Health made this institutional handover an explicit feature of its work.[9]

Women’s professional opportunity was central to that contribution.[8][9] The nursing school provided training and employment for young women, while later programs developed expertise in nutrition, home economics, occupational therapy, and vocational fields.[8][9] Hadassah’s American structure likewise offered women opportunities for leadership, fundraising, education, and public advocacy.[2] Hadassah currently describes itself as the largest Jewish women’s organization in the United States.[6]

Its medical center has also contributed to Israeli clinical innovation, with milestones including Israel’s first successful kidney transplant in 1967, its first MRI in 1977, and its first heart transplant in 1988.[9] The combination of hospital practice with university teaching and research established a continuing connection between patient treatment, professional education, and scientific development.[9][25]

Nonsectarian care has been a longstanding institutional principle, from early services for Arab and Jewish residents to the present commitment to treating patients without regard to religion, race, or nationality.[8][6] The Jerusalem hospitals were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for using medicine to build bridges to peace; they did not receive the prize.[16] Recognition as a nongovernmental organization by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 2001 also provided a channel for contributing medical and social expertise internationally.[16]

Hadassah’s support for Youth Aliyah linked American Jewish philanthropy with the rescue, settlement, education, and rehabilitation of endangered Jewish children and adolescents.[4][17] Its continuing youth-village work extends that commitment to immigrant and at-risk Israeli children through residential education, counseling, vocational preparation, and Jewish cultural instruction.[27] Across these fields, the organization has maintained the paired purposes established at its founding: practical work in the Jewish homeland and Zionist education in America.[7]

Hadassah’s emphasis on urban nursing and social welfare initially drew criticism from some male Zionist leaders, who preferred rural settlement and regarded its projects as insufficiently political.[32] Hadassah’s leaders considered health and welfare integral to national development and sought to retain control of the projects and funds they raised.[32]

Youth Aliyah’s wartime administration involved difficult disagreements over rescue priorities and procedures.[4] European organizers sought faster departures, sometimes using illegal routes or relaxing age and medical requirements, while the Jerusalem administration under Szold emphasized screening, preparation, placement arrangements, and the use of Hadassah funds for activities in Palestine rather than Europe.[4] Published rescue totals vary with the periods and populations counted; approximately 6,000 children reached Palestine from Nazi-occupied Europe between September 1939 and early 1945.[4]

The medical center’s early-2010s financial crisis produced significant disputes over responsibility, funding, and governance.[9] A reported $90 million loss in Bernard Madoff’s fraud and the wider 2008 financial crisis reduced Hadassah’s ability to support the hospital, whose accumulated deficit reached about NIS 1.3 billion in February 2014.[9] When hospital salaries were reduced in 2009, the hospital characterized the reductions as repayable loans and attributed them to the economic crisis rather than specifically to the Madoff losses.[33]

In January 2014, Hadassah offered a one-time $25 million donation on conditions that government assistance take the form of a grant rather than a loan and that Hadassah remain sole owner.[34] The Gabbay Committee subsequently criticized Hadassah’s hospital management and recommended an independent board with only one organization representative.[35] Hadassah’s stated position in those negotiations was that it should remain sole owner, a condition attached to its proposed $25 million contribution.[34] A further fundraising dispute arose in 2015 when the organization raised its overhead charge on hospital donations from 8 to 14 percent, retroactively covering donations received since August.[36] Hadassah defended the charge as necessary to support fundraising operations and its other Israeli educational and welfare activities.[36]