Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Szold, an educator and social pioneer, was one of nine inductees to the hall in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in ceremonies held Oct. 6-7. The hall now has inducted 217 women since its founding in 1969.
Another Jewish inductee was Dr. Eleanor Baum, the dean of engineering at Cooper Union in New York City and the executive director of the Cooper Union Research Foundation.
Szold founded Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, in 1912 following a trip to prestate Israel. Hadassah today has a membership of 300,000.
In the mid-1930s she became the first director of Youth Aliyah, the operation that brought thousands of children from Europe to Israel on the eve of World War II.
Szold, who grew up in a Hungarian immigrant community in Baltimore, became the first editor of the Jewish Publications Society, a major publisher of Jewish liturgical and secular texts. She also is credited with “inventing” the concept of night school in America and creating a model for immigrant absorption in the United States.
Baum is the first female engineer to be named dean of a college of engineering in the United States.
