Rabbi and military chaplain Bonnie Koppell Profiled

August 31, 1990

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Rabbi Bonnie Koppell

On August 31, 1990, in the midst of the build-up to the first Persian Gulf War, the Omaha, Nebraska, Jewish Press profiled Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, the first female rabbi to serve in the U.S. military. Koppell joined the U.S. Army Chaplaincy Corps in 1979, while still a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. After a poster promoting the program caught her eye, she signed up for a six-week stint at Fort Hamilton, New York, thinking that "it sounded like a different way to spend the summer."

Rabbi Koppell served as the chaplain for the 112th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Huachaca in Arizona, and in other postings. In 1991, she was placed on active duty at 5th Army Headquarters near San Antonio, Texas. In 2003, the Army sent her to Germany for a month, to the headquarters of the United States Army Europe. She served a year of active duty in support of Operation Noble Eagle in 2005. She spent Hanukah with Jewish service members in Kuwait and Afghanistan, and she was deployed to Iraq in 2006, bringing Passover seders to soldiers in Baghdad and Taji.

While fulfilling her reserve duty obligations through weekend training, Koppell also served for many years as the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom, and later as the rabbi to the Temple Chai community, both in Phoenix, AZ. She told reporters that both the military and the synagogue had accommodated her dual career. For instance, the military had released her from Saturday training in honor of her Shabbat observance, and had also let her split her Sundays between training with the army and running Sunday School programs in Phoenix. Similarly, her congregation filled in for her while she was on duty with the Army in faraway places. Koppell saw the congregation's lay leadership in her absence as an expression of patriotism.

Koppell, who holds the rank of colonel, has been appointed Command Chaplain of the 63rd Regional Support Command. She has received many awards and citations from the Army, including a National Defense Service Medal (1992) and a Meritorious Service Medal (2002). She also received an award for Outstanding Volunteer Service (2000) and the Global War on Terrorism medal (2005). She received her Doctor of Divinity degree in 2006, and was invited to offer the opening prayer at a White House meeting of Jewish leaders with the President of the United States in 2007. She recently returned from a Passover trip to Kuwait in 2010.

To learn more about Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, visit In Focus: Jewish Women in the Military: Chaplains: Bonnie Koppell.

See also: Rabbi Bonnie Koppell's website; On Jewesses with Attitude: "A Filmmaker, a Rabbi, and Iraq" and "Taking Stock on Veteran's Day".

Sources:The Jewish Press (Omaha), August 31, 1990; Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, August 1, 2003, June 24, 2005; jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/military/chaplains/koppell.html; www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/bonniekappell.html; www.azrabbi.com.

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Birth of entertainer Kitty Carlisle Hart

September 3, 1910

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Kitty Carlisle Hart.
© Jill Krementz, all rights reserved.
Used with permission of the photographer.

Born on September 3, 1910 [some sources say 1911, 1914], Kitty Carlisle Hart began a musical career at a young age and kept performing into her nineties. Though she was born in New Orleans, she was raised partly in Paris and London, where she studied singing and acting with private tutors. She began a stage career in New York, and was then tapped by Hollywood. She made her first movie, Murder at the Vanities, in 1934.

While acting in the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera (1935), she met Moss Hart, who would go on to write the plays You Can't Take it With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, and to direct the landmark Broadway production of My Fair Lady. The two were married in 1946, and later had two children. Moss Hart died in 1961.

After her husband's death, Kitty Carlisle Hart continued to perform, appearing in the movies Radio Days, Six Degrees of Separation, and Catch Me If You Can. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1967, as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus. From 1956 to 1991, she became known to a broad audience as a regular astute panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth. She also had a significant career offstage. From 1976 to 1996, Hart served as chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts. In that role, she lobbied for arts funding, once testifying before the legislature in defense of the controversial work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. When she stepped down from the Council, Albany named a theater in her honor.

Hart was also an active philanthropist, serving on the boards of the Visiting Nurse Service and the Girl Scouts, and hosting fundraisers for the Manhattan School of Music, refugee children, American Indian causes, and democratic politicians. She published an autobiography, Kitty, in 1988.

In her 90s she performed a one-woman show entitled My Life Upon the Wicked Stage, in which she sang classics from American musical theater and told stories of working with Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, and—of course—Moss Hart. A review of the play described Hart as "a woman who has seen it all, almost done it all, and still remains sincerely curious about the world." In January, 2006, she performed a 95th birthday show. She died at her home in Manhattan in April 2007.

To learn more about Kitty Carlisle Hart, visit We Remember.

See also: "Kitty Carlisle Hart Sings Out".

Sources:New York Times, August 11, 1976, October 9, 1988; Star Tribune (Minneapolis), May 19, 2002; The Christian Science Monitor, October 11, 2002; The Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 17, 2005; www.kittycarlisle.com; jwa.org/discover/weremember/carlisle.

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"23 souls, big as well as little," arrive in North America

September 4, 1654

Early in September 1654, a group of Jews, described in the public records as "23 souls, big as well as little," arrived on the docks of the new world Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.

We know about their arrival because on September 7, presumably quite soon after their arrival, the captain of their ship the St. Catherine sued them for the cost of their freight and food en route. Of the six names of this initial group mentioned in surviving court records, two were women. Historians have speculated that there may have been more women than men in this original group.

A number of Jewish traders had already found their way to the New World before September 1654, but the presence of women and children among the New Amsterdam 23 signaled that this group had come not merely to make their fortunes, but to make a home. Accordingly, later American Jews have dated the founding of the American Jewish community to the arrival of this group.

See also: "Still Lives" and the Women of the 23 Souls, Jewesses with Attitude; Jewish Women on the Map - Shearith Israel Graveyard.

Sources: Arnold Wiznitzer, "The Exodus from Brazil and Arrival in New Amsterdam of the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers, 1654," Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society, 44:1 (September, 1954): 80-97.

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Unprecedented Jewish Women's Congress meets in Chicago

September 4, 1893

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Date: unknown

On September 4, 1893, the Jewish Women's Congress opened as part of the World Parliament of Religion at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. Press accounts of the Congress reported that "women elbowed, trod on each others toes, and did everything else they could without violating the proprieties" to find a place in the overcrowded hall. Over four days, they heard twenty-five women from all over the United States, many of whom had never spoken publicly before, address questions of Jewish women's roles in religion, history, and philanthropy.

The Congress was primarily the result of work by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, who by 1893 was already a prominent Chicago activist. Born on January 18, 1858, Solomon and her older sister Henriette were the first Jews admitted to the elite Chicago Woman's Club in 1871.

Solomon's commitment to creating a Jewish women's congress was fostered when male organizers of a proposed Jewish Congress demonstrated no inclination to offer women any meaningful role on their program. She worked with other women from Chicago's ultra-Reform Congregation Sinai to bring together an unprecedented formal gathering of Jewish women from around the country.

On the last day of the Congress, the assembled delegates voted to create a permanent organization, the National Council of Jewish Women [NCJW], with Solomon as its first president. Under her leadership, the Council grew to 3300 members in fifty sections in its first three years. Noting that secular organizations could provide social services as well as sectarian ones, Solomon sought to steer the NCJW toward religious renewal as its primary goal. To that end, she fostered study circles designed to encourage women to renew their commitment to religion.

The Jewish Women's Congress and formation of NCJW represented and spurred a growing trend toward organization and activism among American Jewish women, crystallizing a new public identity that shaped their contributions to their communities and synagogues throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century. Today, the NCJW works through over 100 sections nationwide on advocacy for women and children in both the U.S. and Israel.

To learn more about Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, visit History Makers and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: The National Council of Jewish Women, and This Week In History for November 15, 1896, "National Council of Jewish Women holds first national convention"; NCJW in the Virtual Archive.

Sources: Chicago Tribune, September 5, 1893; Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993 (Tuscaloosa, 1993), pp. 9-35; jwa.org/exhibits/wov/solomon/; Jewish Women in America, An Historical Encyclopedia, p. 1283; Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (2000), pp. 185–189; www.ncjw.org.

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