Hadassah Leader Will Move to Palestine After Convention

Mrs. Samuel W. Halperin, national president of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, will end her second term in office at the twentieth annual convention of the organization in Washington next week and will leave shortly after for Palestine to make her permanent home there. With her young daughter, she will join her husband and son who are already in Jerusalem.

Mrs. Halperin’s address at a banquet that will close the three-day convention on Tuesday will also be her final public leave-taking of the 40,000 members of Hadassah who will be represented by 1,500 delegates and alternates at the Washington meeting. She will continue her close association with Hadassah in Palestine.

LEADER AT 35

Serving national Hadassah first in the capacity of chairman of publicity and publications in 1927, then as chairman of the Palestine committee, Mrs. Halpern rapidly demonstrated the qualities that brought her, at the age of thirty-five, to the leadership of the largest single Zionist group in the world. She applied to her work in Hadassah a rich background of Jewish learning.

Brought up in the Zionist school of thought from childhood on, her whole pattern of thinking has been influenced by the conception of a revitalized Jewish life on Jewish soil. Born in New York, she is the daughter of Philip Luria, who was a disciple of Mendel Menahem Ussishkin in Russia fifty years ago when the Jewish National Fund head first began to gather pioneers for settlement on the land of Palestine.

A STRONG SPEAKER

During her two terms as president of Hadassah Mrs. Halprin became known throughout the country, in non-Jewish as well as in Jewish circles, as a strong public speaker. She has appeared on the platform in scores of American cities in every part of the United States. She is even better known in Palestine where she and her family lived for nearly a year in 1929. Last Summer she went to Jerusalem as a delegate to the meeting of the Actions Committee of the World Zionist Organization, the only woman representative from the Occident at that gathering.

“Americans who go to Palestine can take with them the distinctive quality that comes with long living in a liberal and progressive atmosphere,” Mrs. Halprin said yesterday. “We can do more than merely transplant the best of American ideals to Palestine; we can tie them up with our own heritage and integrate them with the soundest ideals that motivate the upbuilding of Palestine.

“The social philosophy of a liberal like President Roosevelt is after all, not new but very, very old. It is not unlike the philosophy preached by leaders in Palestine more than 2,000 years ago. So I go, feeling that what I have learned from the pages of Jewish history and what I have gained from American training gives me a background of equipment for a useful life in Palestine.”