Raquela by Ruth Gruber

smelled of honeysuckle and roses. Miss Szold was in a frilly bed jacket, her long white hair brushed softly around her face. Pneumonia and a heart attack had left their mark. The gentle, compassionate face with huge brown eyes that Raquela had seen in newspaper photos was now sharper, lined. Only her hands were youthful, artistic, well cared for.
    Silently Raquela moved about the room, replacing the flowers, helping Miss Szold out of bed, into a chair, changing her sheets, trying to fathom how this frail woman had become the first lady of Palestine.
    In the next weeks Raquela learned some of her story. She had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1860, at the outbreak of America’s civil war. Her father, a rabbi from Hungary, treated her as the son he never had. He became her teacher, her guide, her mentor, instilling in her his spirituality, his scholarship, and his sense of the truth and beauty of Judaism. She became his secretary, his deputy rabbi, and his researcher. Many young men were attracted to the brilliant young woman, but when any of them came to the house in Baltimore, Henrietta would tell her sisters, “You take him off my hands; I’m busy.”
    When her father died, she moved to New York City with her mother and began to publish her father’s papers. To understand them better, she applied for admission to the Jewish Theological Seminary, the first woman allowed to enroll. She was accepted on the condition that she would not become a rabbi.
    She was at the seminary a short time when she met Dr. Louis Ginzberg, a newcomer from Germany, dark and bearded, like her father, and a great scholar, like her father. For Henrietta, it was love at first sight. She was in her early forties.
    As she had worked with her father, so now she worked with the man she loved, translating his material from German into English, editing it, polishing it, giving it her felicitous touch. Each Saturday he came to the apartment on Riverside Drive for lunch, and evenings they walked along the Drive while he tried out his ideas and let her shape them into publishable form.
    The first volumes of his Legends of the Jews acknowledged her role as translator and editor.
    For her, at least, the relationship meant fulfillment, commitment, happiness. She once wrote, “Why should one expect that a woman great in intellect should not love greatly, too?”
    Then, one summer, Dr. Ginzberg returned to Germany. Sitting in a synagogue, he looked up at the women’s section in the balcony. An attractive young woman caught his eye. After the service he arranged to meet her, and soon he asked her two questions: are you interested in keeping house, and are you interested in having children? Her answer to both was yes.
    He returned to New York and announced to Henrietta that he was engaged to a young German-Jewish woman.
    Henrietta ended her relationship with Dr. Ginzberg abruptly.
    Her mother, seeing her brokenhearted daughter grow depressed, suggested they go to Palestine. It was 1909. The two women, traveling through the Holy Land, were shocked by the neglected land, by the filth and poverty, by the women who died in childbirth, the infants decimated before they were one year old, the schoolchildren blinded by flies stuck to their white-filmed eyes.
    Henrietta’s pragmatic seventy-seven-year-old mother made a suggestion. “Here is work for you. You have a study group of ladies at home. Let your group do something for these children instead of talking, talking, talking.”
    They returned to America, where Henrietta organized her women. On February 24, 1912, they met in Temple Emanu-El in New York and created Hadassah. The meeting was held during the festival of Purim, and “Hadassah” was the Hebrew name for Queen Esther, who had saved the Jews. They took their motto from Jeremiah 8:22: Arukhat bat ami —“the healing of the daughter of my people.”
    Hadassah was to become the world’s largest