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Immigration

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Emunah

Emunah was founded in 1935 under the leadership of Tova Sanhedrai-Goldreich. With its headquarters in Jerusalem, the organization aims to strengthen various sectors of the Israeli community. World Emunah aims to strengthen global commitment to Israel in communities abroad.

Katharine Engel

Katherine Engel helped the massive wave of European Jewish émigrés after World War II resettle and adjust to life in the United States. A renowned emigré expert and Jewish communal leader, Engel was also an outspoken critic of McCarthyism and a tireless advocate of immigration reform.

Education of Jewish Girls in the United States

American Jewish girls have had access to a broad range of educational opportunities. Pioneering innovations such as the Hebrew Sunday school opened doors to religious education, while in public schools, training schools, and the hallways of higher education, American Jewish girls pursued secular studies as well. Today, the landscape for American Jewish education has expanded beyond the classroom to include a range of experiential educational opportunities.

Eastern European Immigrants in the United States

Forty-four percent of the approximately two million Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1886 and 1914 were women. Although these women were more politically active and autonomous than other immigrant women, dire economic circumstances constricted their lives. The hopes these immigrant women harbored for themselves were often transferred to the younger generation.

Naomi Deutsch

A leader in the field of public health nursing, Naomi Deutsch spearheaded health and sanitation campaigns in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. In running settlement houses, teaching, and eventually developing and implementing policy at the federal level, Deutsch dedicated her career to serving others through public health.

Demography: Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and other Successor States

The statistics on Jewish marriage, divorce, fertility, emigration, and aging within the Soviet Union reveal new pockets of history and can shed light on the effects of historical events on Jewish lives.

Devorah Dayan

Devorah Dayan was a symbol of the new Hebrew woman in pre-state Israel: she was maternal, rooted in the land, and fulfilled the values of a pioneer society. Her long writing career mostly comprised of autobiographical essays in publications for the women workers’ movement.

Modern Dance Performance in the United States

Jewish immigrants to the New World brought with them their ritual and celebratory Jewish dances, but these traditional forms of Jewish dance waned in the United States. Working-class and poor Jewish immigrants parents sought out culture and education in the arts for their children, often as a vehicle for assimilation. Jewish women were particularly attracted to the field of modern dance.

Cuba

With the exception of a few crypto-Jews, the Jewish presence in Cuba began after the Republic of Cuba was established in 1902. The community grew with the arrival of Turkish and Eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century, then shrank again after Fidel Castro’s rise to power, though a small number still remain.

Cookbooks in the United States

American Jewish cookbooks capture the range of Jewish religious and cultural expression in the United States. Women took advantage of the versatility and variety of cookbooks to add their voices to the growing and developing Jewish culture in the United States.

Jewish Migrations to the United States in the Late Twentieth Century

The three primary groups of Jewish immigrants to the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century were from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and Iran. In each group, women played key roles in helping their communities adapt to life in the United States.

Colonial Entrepreneurs: A Quartet of Jewish Women

Esther Pinheiro, Esther Brown, Rachel Luis, and Simja De Torres were widows, each held property, and each was at one time or another a merchant. Although they have been overlooked by history, written records that document their activities demonstrate the lives of well-off colonial Jewish women.

Rose Gollup Cohen

In her short life, Rose Gollup Cohen was a unionized factory worker and a domestic servant, was helped through an illness by Lillian Wald, became educated, and wrote short stories. Her moving 1918 autobiography Out of the Shadow offers a vivid account of her life as an immigrant Jewish woman in the sweatshops of New York.

Club Movement in the United States

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Jewish women shifted from benevolent work to social and personal reform, often through aiding immigrants and young, vulnerable women. They facilitated educational opportunities to learn about Jewish history and ethics, which in turn helped inform their aid work. These efforts created a space specifically for women in American Jewish society.

Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls

The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls was established in May 1897 to provide housing, occupational training, and community to mostly poor and immigrant young women in New York City.

Judy Feld Carr

Canadian-born Judy Feld Carr rescued 3,228 Jews out of Syria. For almost 30 years (1973-2001), Judy either ransomed Syrian Jews (with donations made to the Dr Ronald Feld Fund for Jews in Arab Lands) or made extensive use of her underground network inside Syria to bring Syrian Jews across heavily guarded borders into either Lebanon or Turkey

Elinor Caplan

Elinor Caplan is a Canadian Liberal Party politician who spent a quarter-century in elected office. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as cabinet minister at the provincial and federal levels. Caplan served as a Member of Toronto’s Provincial Parliament for twelve years and in 1997 she was elected to federal parliament.

Canada: From Outlaw to Supreme Court Justice, 1738-2005

The positive aspect of the Canadian mosaic has been a strong Jewish community (and other communities) which nurtured traditional ethnic and religious values and benefited from the talent and energy of women and men restrained from participation in the broader society. The negative aspect has included considerable antisemitism and, especially for women, the sometimes stifling narrowness and conservatism of the community which inhibited creative and exceptional people from charting their own individual paths.

Britain: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Since being allowed to resettle in 1656, Jews in Great Britain have established deep community ties throughout their diverse community. Class differences between early Sephardic settlers and the later wave of Ashkenazi immigrants gave rise to numerous Jewish charitable organizations, in which women played a key role.

Brazil, Contemporary

Brazil is home to the second largest Jewish community in South America. Jewish women played important roles in the absorption of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and also made important contributions to Brazilian intellectual and artistic life.

Clementine Bern-Zernik

A lawyer by training, Vienna-born Clementine Bern-Zernik produced broadcasts for the US Office of War Information in London during the war, served as the director of a Displaced Persons Camp in post-war Germany, and spent the last 50 years of her life as a UN liaison to the New York Public Library. Throughout her life she maintained a strong Austrian identity and was a founding member of the Austrian-American Federation.

Cora Berliner

Cora Berliner was an economist and social scientist who held leadership positions in several major Jewish organizations in Germany between 1910 and 1942. These organizations included the Association of Jewish Youth Organizations in Germany, the Reich Representation of German Jews, and the League of Jewish Women.

Margarete Berent

Margarete Berent was the first female lawyer to practice in Prussia and the second female lawyer ever licensed in Germany. In 1925 she opened her own law firm in Berlin and, after fleeing Nazi Germany, opened her own firm in the United States. Not only was she the first female lawyer and the head of her own law firm, but she was also an ardent feminist and active in promoting opportunities for women.

Bene Israel

The Bene Israel is one of three Jewish communities in India. Bene Israel women were the producers and preservers of Bene Israel culture in India, and many were very influential leaders in their communities, academia, and religious life.

Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca

Born in Latvia before immigrating to Baltimore as a child, Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca was one of America’s most remarkable women’s labor leaders. An outstanding union organizer and a captivating speaker, Bellanca understood the problems of the working class—people of all genders, ages, and backgrounds—and sought to improve conditions for workers.

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