Hadassah (The Women's Zionist Organization of America) - excerpt from Lee O'Brien, American Jewish Organizations and Israel, 1986

This page is an extract, reproduced with permission, from Lee O'Brien, American Jewish Organizations and Israel, Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986.

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Year established: 1912 President: Ruth Popkin Address: 50 West 58th Street, New York, NY 10019 Publications: Update, Headlines, Hadassah Magazine

General Background

Hadassah (a Hebrew word for ‘myrtle,’ the name of the biblical Queen Esther) was established in 1912 when a twelve-member group of the Daughters of Zion Study Circle decided to expand into a national organization, under the leadership of Henrietta Szold. Their twin goal at the time was to foster Zionist and Jewish education in the United States and to begin public health nursing and nurse training in Palestine. Henrietta Szold leadership and ideas led to the creation of the Zionist organization with the largest membership in the world, now said to number 370,000 in the United States and Puerto Rico.

Henrietta Szold started her first career as a teacher and educational administrator in Baltimore, where she taught school for sixteen years and organized and ran a night school for Russian Jewish immigrants. Her second career, as the secretary of the editorial board of the Jewish Publications Society, lasted twenty-three years. Then, in 1916, at the age of fifty-six, she began her third career, as ‘a full-time propagandist for Palestine and a vigorous booster of Hadassah.’ In 1920, she went to Palestine, and except for a three-year stay in New York, she remained in Palestine until her death in 1945. The vigorous membership organization Szold created has been continuously involved in Zionist activities and fundraising since its founding'; unlike the other American Zionist organizations, it did not experience a decline in membership after 1948.

Structure and Funding

Hadassah is incorporated in the state of New York as a non-profit, tax-exempt membership organization. For the purpose of the New York State law, it is registered as a ‘religious’ organization, a status that exempts it from submitting an annual report, which would be publicly available.

Hadassah is perhaps the only genuinely mass-membership Zionist organization; its ranks include Jewish women of all ages and occupations, who belong to more than fourteen hundred local chapters organized around age and interest groups.

Indication of its mass outreach are the Hadassah posters in the New York subway and buses. They read

Some of man's greatest achievers have been women. Join Hadassah.

Its highest policy-making body is the national board, which is composed of about 140 members and meets twice a year to consider major. Minor policy decisions are made by the executive board in New York and transmitted to local chapters and members. A recent study compares the national president of Hadassah to the president of a major corporation

The Hadassah president must supervise a multimillion dollar yearly budget, a constituency of over 350,000 members, a national board, and thirty regional presidents.

As a Zionist organization, Hadassah is a member of the AZF in the United States and is related to the world Zionist movement through the non-party World Confederation of United Zionists (WCUZ). In its promotional literature, Hadassah stresses that it is independent of any political party in Israel.

Hadassah has a volunteer representative in Washington who attends State Department briefings. The organization also holds non-governmental organization status at the United Nations and is an accredited observer at the U.S. Mission to the UN.

According to its Internal Revenue Service Form 990 for 1981, Hadassah received a total revenue for the year 1 July 1981 to 30 June 1982 of $10 million. Of that, about one-half came from "direct public support, $2.8 million from membership dues, $1.1 million from dividends and interests, and about $900,000 from programs. On the other hand, of the total expenditures of $9.1 million, 45 percent went to program services, 43 percent for fundraising, and 12 percent for management. Hadassah's net worth at the end of the year was put at $22.8 million. In 1982-83, Hadassah raised close to $49 million.

Until 1983, Hadassah was an American Zionist organization with a membership of American citizens. At its sixty-ninth annual convention (August 1983), however, the national board decided that Hadassah would become an international organization and create membership and fundraising groups outside the United States. To protect its tax-exempt status under U.S. law, Hadassah's non-American membership and fundraising units were to be affiliated with its parallel corporate entity, the Hadassah Medical Relief Association, for purposes of channeling funds for Israeli projects.

Israel Support Work

Like other American Zionist organizations, Hadassah performs two general tasks: it provides information on Israel to the American people, and it raises funds for specific programs in Israel. By far Hadassah's most important role since its establishment has been supporting and creating health institutions in Israel, particularly the Hadassah University Hospital and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem. In addition, Hadassah has helped create schools of nursing and dental medicine, outpatient clinics, and community health centers.35 It is also involved in raising funds for a variety of other programs in Israel, including Youth Aliyah, a vocational training program for disadvantaged Jewish youth in Israel. Hadassah is one of the largest organizational contributors to Youth Aliyah in the world.40 In cooperation with the Absorption Department of the JA and the Israeli Ministry of Labor, Hadassah has built six day care centers.

Hadassah also identifies itself as "an integral partner of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and it is the JNF's ‘largest single contributor ... in the world.’ Since 1926, Hadassah has committed itself to the support of twenty JNF special projects and now supports a new JNF project every three years. On the American scene, Hadassah provides

Factual information on the development and security of Israel to the American public.

In practice, this information is often a reiteration of official Israeli pronouncements enhanced through Hadassah's public standing and medical connections. On 18 July 1982, for example, while Israeli planes were bombarding Beirut, Hadassah sponsored a full-page ad in the New York Times signed by eleven medical doctors from, leading universities and medical centers. Under the heading, these members of the Medical Advisory Board of Hadassah would like to share the following facts with the American people: The text of the ad indicated that the 1975 civil war in Lebanon had devastated the health care system, specially in the south, and that in 1976 the Israeli government and organizations like Hadassah had stepped in to provide badly needed health care to the people in southern Lebanon. These statements did not mention the massive Israeli devastation of an existing health care infrastructure that had been effectively provided by the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Lebanese National Movement since 1975.

At the sixty-ninth annual convention in August 1983, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, U.S. permanent representative to the UN, opened the first plenary session and received the Henrietta Szold Award, Hadassah's highest honor. The convention banquet was addressed by Israel's ambassador to the United States, Meir Rosenne, and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware. Costa Rica's permanent representative to the UN, Jorge Urbina, was presented with a Hadassah citation ‘for his country's friendship to Israel and for transferring its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.’

Like other Zionist organizations, Hadassah pays particular attention to youth. According to ‘Facts about Hadassah,’ Through its youth movement, Hashachar (The Dawn) with its Youth Judean summer camps, year-round clubs, leadership training seminars and Israel programs, Hadassah offers young people a varied program of Jewish identity within a Zionist framework. A national peer-led youth movement, it has 8,000 members on two levels: Young Judea, for boys and girls 9 through high school; Hamagshimin (the l<'ulfillers) whose college age through 30 members provide Zionist centers on college campuses and aliyah support groups. Younger members receive the Young Judean, oldest Jewish children's magazine in the United States. Camp Tel Yehudah, the national senior leadership camp and five regional Young Judea camps are summer extensions of Hashachar.

Hadassah's Zionist Youth Movement reports that over two thousand students have signed up for its six Young Judea Camps, and that in 1983 eight hundred enrolled at Camp Tel Yehuda. Hadassah also sponsors summer leadership training seminars and "Destination Israel" summer tours for teenagers.