Organizations and Institutions

Selina Greenbaum

Selina Greenbaum was a philanthropist who created recreational resorts for overworked factory girls. In 1890, Greenbaum became the founding president of the Jewish Working Girl’s Vacation Society, which gave working young women a chance to find relief away from their demanding factory jobs.

Blu Greenberg

Blu Greenberg is known as the mother of Orthodox feminism and is author of On Women and Judaism: A view from Tradition. She coined the phrase “Where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way,” demanding that rabbis find systemic solutions to help women who feel trapped by aspects of halakhah. Greenberg is a fierce advocate for agunot, women trapped in unwanted marriages.

Amelia Greenwald

American nurse Amelia Greenwald focused her career in public health nursing on training other nurses and creating infrastructure in war-ravaged Europe.

Bessie Goldstein Gotsfeld

Bessie Goldstein Gotsfeld helped organize American Mizrachi Women, pushed for its independence from men’s groups, and made aiding children in Israel a major goal of the organization.

Jeane Herskovits Gottesman

Jeane Herskovits Gottesman was a philanthropist noted for her spiritual devotion to her work. She raised money for Jewish education, helping to support Yeshiva University, and was also a dedicated board member of Hadassah. Through Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah program, she helped rescue Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Emma Leon Gottheil

As a translator, Emma Leon Gottheil helped spread the ideals of Zionism across America, but as founder of the Women’s League for Palestine, she turned those ideals into reality.

British Delegation to World WIZO Founding Conference, Carlsbad, 1921

Romana Goodman

Romana Goodman (1885-1955) was a staunch feminist and passionate Zionist who helped establish the influential Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in 1918. During her career, she was also a founding member of the Jewish Women’s League for Cultural Work in Palestine, helped lead several Zionist conferences, and assisted in the creation of the first B’nai B’rith women’s lodge in England in 1919.

Nadine Gordimer

In 1991, writer, journalist, and activist Nadine Gordimer became the first South African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gordimer’s work presents a sweeping canvas of a South African society, where all have been affected by the institutionalized racial discrimination and oppression of apartheid.

Rebecca Fischel Goldstein

The quintessential rebbetzin [rabbi’s wife], Rebecca Fischel Goldstein was a prime mover in her husband’s drive to build the Institutional Synagogue and make it a center of Jewish life in Harlem. As a consummate volunteer leader, she strove to make women a dominant force in organized Jewish life.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was a potent voice of anarchism in North America and Europe in the early twentieth century, and her controversial beliefs made her many powerful enemies. Yet even after enduring many contentious interactions with law enforcement, Goldman continued to speak, write, and teach on freedom and individual rights, inspiring her followers to question authority at every turn.

Josephine Clara Goldmark

Josephine Goldmark laid the groundwork for transforming American labor laws by amassing data that forced lawmakers to confront the painful realities of factory work. At the National Consumers’ League, she compiled data on working conditions, wrote articles, led campaigns for legislative reform, and recruited her brother-in-law, Louis D. Brandeis, to argue for those reforms in court.

Henriette Goldschmidt

At a time when women were banned from universities, Henriette Benas Goldschmidt championed women’s education as a crucial building block of a healthy society. She co-founded the General Association of German Women in 1865 and served on the association’s board until 1906, advocating women’s education for the betterment of society. In 1911 she created her crowning achievement, the Leipzig College for Women, Germany’s first women’s college.

Edna Goldsmith

Edna Goldsmith was a driving force in the establishment of the Ohio Federation of Temple Sisterhoods. A founder of the federation, she served as its first president from 1918 to 1923 and then as honorary president until her death. Throughout her life, Goldsmith was active in welfare organizations, concentrating particularly in the educational field.

Katie Gluckmann

Katie Gluckmann was a prominent leader in South Africa’s Zionist movement of the early to mid-twentieth century. She was elected to the executive board of the Zionist Conference every year from 1928 to 1949, and she helped create the South African Zionist Council when male Zionists fought the creation of a South African branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization in the 1930s.

Doris Bauman Gold

Doris Bauman Gold was motivated by her long participation in Jewish organizational life to found Biblio Press, dedicated to educating Jewish women about their own history and accomplishments. Through Biblio Press, Gold published more than 27 general audience books that address and illuminate the culture, history, experiences, and spiritual yearnings of Jewish women.

Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber

Throughout a career limited by her gender, her religion, and her marital status, physicist Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber helped ensure other women scientists would not face the same hurdles.

Elizabeth Glaser

Elizabeth Glaser’s fight to save her HIV-positive children led to her creation of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to save children worldwide from the devastation of AIDS.

Blanche Gilman

A native New Yorker, Blanche Pearl Gilman contributed her energy and resources to a variety of religious, health, social, and activist organizations. Gilman devoted her career to bringing diverse groups together, from her interfaith work to her leadership in the Pro-Falasha (Ethiopian Jewry) Committee.

Rosa Ginossar

Rosa Ginossar’s determined lobbying of the British Authority in Palestine won women the right to practice law in Israel.

Bird Stein Gans

Bird Stein Gans was among the first generation of women involved in what was then the new field of parent education. She served as president of the Society for the Study of Child Nature for many years, significantly expanding its membership and impact.

Ruth Bernard Fromenson

Ruth Bernard Fromenson was an early twentieth-century Zionist and Jewish communal worker who volunteered extensively within Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal brought her passion for art and history to her leadership of Hadassah. Among other leadership positions, she served as the national president from 1956 to 1960.

Ida Weis Friend

Ida Weis Friend worked to improve the lives of those in her Southern Jewish community on many levels. Her leadership in Jewish organizations, such as Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, and her political activism, such as her time as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and Commission on Interracial Cooperation, earned her many honors and accolades.

Stella Heinsheimer Freiberg

Stella Heinsheimer Freiberg helped found the Reform Movement’s National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods and pushed for the major American Reform organizations to join the World Union for Progressive Judaism. As NFTS president in the 1920s, she advocated for women’s greater participation in the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

Lillian Freiman

Lillian Freiman was unquestionably the most prominent Jewish woman in Canada in the interwar period. Freiman was exemplary for her degree of independent social activism and devotion to an array of Jewish and non-Jewish social causes.

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