American Health Methods to Be Applied to Polish Jewish Institutions

Two Jewish girls from Poland are due to arrive in this country early in September for the purpose of entering Columbia University for a year’s training in public health care, nurses’ administrative work, and direction of hospitals. After a year’s study, they will return to Poland.

These young women are the first of the graduates of the Jewish Nurses’ Training School in Warsaw to be sent to this country for post-graduate study, and it is planned to follow this procedure with possibly larger groups of students.

With the aid of 85 graduates of the school who are now occupying responsible positions in the Jewish hospital and other health institutions in Warsaw, and the 75 students now in training, Miss Amelia Greenwald, founder and first director of the school, who is now in this country, plans that the institution obtain the best that the world has to offer in public health care.

Despite the gratifying success of the school, Miss Greenwald stated that her work in Poland is still far from being completed. “What we had in mind when the Joint Distribution Committee started this school,” she declared recently, “was to create an institution that would be the nucleus for spreading throughout every province in the country the knowledge and methods of the highest type of public health prop? aganda through workers trained at this school, and thereby gradually raising the health standards of the Jews all over Poland. We have not come to that yet. The nurses that have so far graduated from the school were immediately offered positions in Warsaw at the Jewish Hospital or other institutions and have proved themselves such a great asset to these institutions, that they have had to remain in the capital. And as is to be expected, the overcrowded city of Warsaw with a great Jewish population had to receive first attention.

“We hope that among those nurses to be graduated in the near future, there will be many who will return to their native cities and do there what their colleagues are doing for the institutions in Warsaw. And with the wide recognition of the school by government authorities, the graduates are more likely to gain the confidence and support of the officials in their home cities as well and should have no difficulty in getting subsidies for the introduction of their public health services.

“Since it is the highest type and kind of public health information which we want to sponsor throughout Poland, we hope that these two girls now on their way to America are just pioneers of larger groups to follow in their footsteps from year to year and so, in an ever-widening circle, spread their knowledge to every Jewish community, large and small.

“At present,” continued Miss Greenwald, “the Joint Distribution Committee contributes only twenty-five percent of the budget of the Nurses’s Training School. Fifty per cent is granted by the City of Warsaw, and the balance is contributed by the local Jewish community. We need more funds for expansion, for improvement, and especially for these post-graduate courses in this country. What the school really needs is an endowment fund of about a half million dollars which would permit of further development and, in time, the completion of our original plan to raise the public health work in Poland among Jews to the level of our own standards in America. The funds of American Jewry administered by the Joint Distribution Committee,” Miss Greenwald concluded, “have helped to build the school we now have. I hope that for the good of Polish Jewry, American Jews will continue to help us so that we may bring our present work to a successful conclusion.”