The Institute for Religious and Social Studies, meeting at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, today concluded its sessions with a discussion on Henrietta Szold as one of the “Builders of World Culture.”
Mrs. Rose G. Jacobs, the only woman member of the executive of the Jewish Agency and former national president of the Hadassah organization, led off the discussion with a paper on Miss Szold covering the period of her life from 1860 till 1944, which she called “The Road from Maryland to Judea.”
“A happy synthesis of East and West as personified in Henrietta Szold, may yet put the world on the road to redemption,” Mrs. Jacobs said. Picturing Miss Szold as “a mother to thousands” of Jewish youths who were brought from Nazi Europe to Palestine through the Youth Aliyah, Mrs. Jacobs declared; “She exemplified what was best in Jewish traditions and the flowering American ideals. They gave her the moral fiber which radiates the light of her rare personality against the murk of the Jewish tragedy of modern times.”
Mrs. Jacobs also noted that “through Henrietta Szold the adaptability and pliability still left to an ancient people are clearly indicative when ready to follow the West in the best it has to offer without forfeiting its own deeply ingrained idealism.”
Professor F. Ernest Johnson, professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University summed up the course on “Wellsprings of the American Spirit,” over which he presided for the current year, in the final lecture on “The Spiritual Role of America.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
