Founded beginning in the 1880s in impoverished urban neighborhoods, settlement houses provided recreation, education, and medical and social service programs, primarily for immigrants. Jewish women played significant roles as benefactors, organizers, administrators of, and participants in these institutions.

Frieda Schiff Warburg’s determination to carry on her father’s philanthropic traditions led her to support and shape major Jewish institutions in America and Israel. Warburg became a director of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA) and later its president.

Therese Loeb Schiff used her wealth to address a wide range of needs in the American Jewish community. She was a paradigm of the intellectual, religious, and cultural activities and also the social service of upper-middle-class German Jewish women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.