Schools

Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger -Friedenberg

Born in Italy in 1825, Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger-Friedenberg was a persistent educator and writer. She is best known for the publication of her Jerusalem journal, which shared her extraordinary experiences in a way that combined messianic hope and the enlightenment ideals of knowledge and progress.

Marie Rambert

Influenced by Isadora Duncan, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, and Vaslav Nijinsky, Marie Rambert became known as one of the “Mothers” of English ballet. Her passion for and devotion to dance allowed her to become a talented choreographer and cultivator of talent, and her contributions to the art form earned her many honors.

Puah Rakovsky

Puah Rakovsky dedicated her life to working towards the empowerment of Jews, particularly of Jewish women. She was a revolutionary woman, taking on important roles as an educator, translator, organizer of women, and an early socialist Zionist.

Daniella Rabinovich

Following decades of intensive work in management of Israeli music institutions, Daniella Rabinovich became a leading figure in the field in Tel Aviv in the 1980s and 1990s, serving as director of the Tel Aviv Conservatory.

Ellen Phillips

Ellen Phillips influenced generations of young Jewish girls and boys in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. One of the founding members of the Hebrew Sunday School Society in 1838, Phillips donated her time, family wealth, and religious convictions to several Jewish and sectarian philanthropic organizations.

Rivkah Perelis

Rivkah Perelis was a Polish-born historian whose research focused on the Holocaust and the Zionist youth movement during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Pelech Religious Experimental High School for Girls, 2004

Pelech Religious Experimental High School for Girls, Jerusalem

Pelech is a pioneering school for girls in Jerusalem. For over half a century, Pelech has sought to educate its students towards a love and understanding of Torah. It encourage its students to take part in leadership roles in the religious world and in Israeli society and promotes women’s involvement in improving social justice.

Margalit Ornstein

Choreographer and dance teacher Margalit Ornstein is perceived as the “founding mother” of Israeli dance and a pioneer of modern dance in Erez Israel. In 1922, she founded the first Israeli dance school in Tel Aviv and helped create two important dance theaters in the 1920s.

Rina Nikova

Rina Nikova, a pioneer of classical and biblical ballet in Palestine, distinguished herself mostly in character dances, which had a nationalist style influenced by ethnic folklore. Nikova established the first school for classical ballet in Tel Aviv and founded the Biblical Ballet, which was based on Yemenite folklore and focused on Biblical subjects.

Margaret Naumburg

By founding the Walden School and creating her own system of education based on principles of psychoanalysis, Margaret Naumburg laid the groundwork for the new discipline of art therapy. Naumburg also authored many works on psychology and art therapy.

Doña Gracia Nasi

Doña Gracia Nasi was the embodiment of passionate solidarity among exiles. As a young woman she inherited her husband’s fortune, and fled from Lisbon to Venice to Ferrara, where her family lived openly as Jews for the first time. In Constantinople, she assumed a role of leadership in the Sephardi world of the Ottoman Empire.

Edis De Philippe with Hanna Rovina and Michael Gottlieb, 1945

Music: Palestine and Israel

Music in Israel is a giant mosaic of cultures, styles, and musical traditions from the region and around the world. In every way and at all times, especially since the establishment of the state, women have been active in and have left their mark on the country’s musical life.

Marion Simon Misch

Marion Misch participated in a great number of volunteer activities through her lifetime, all the while running a successful business following the death of her husband. Her primary interests centered on education and Judaism, and her volunteerism reflected her concern for these issues.

Mexico: Education

The first immigrants to arrive in Mexico during the early decades of the twentieth century from Eastern Europe, Syria, and the Balkan countries were profoundly concerned with the formal education of their children. At that time, part of the controversy in the community was whether Mexico should be an “in transit” country to the United States or a place in which to settle permanently, in which education would play an important role as part of the socializing process.

Fania Metman-Cohen

Fania Metman-Cohen set up the first Hebrew kindergarten in Odessa in 1899. In 1905, she and her husband helped establish Palestine’s first Hebrew high school in Jaffa – the Herzilya Gymnasia. Metman-Cohen was also a key figure in the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel.

Minnie Dessau Louis

Minnie Dessau Louis was an essayist, journalist, and poet, but she is best known for her philanthropic work in the Jewish community, largely focusing on women and children. She devoted her life to teaching immigrant Jewish women multiple skills through the many and varied schools she ran and her involvement in the founding of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls and the National Council of Jewish Women.

Judith Berlin Lieberman

As dean of the Shulamith School for Girls, Judith Berlin Lieberman emphasized the importance of Jewish girls getting the same rigorous education in Judaic studies as boys did.

Sara Lee

Sara Lee, a Jewish educator who combines charisma with caring and vision with realism, has been a central figure in the effort to ensure Jewish continuity. In recent years the American Jewish community has recognized both the critical need for and the difficult challenge of providing all Jews with an excellent, compelling Jewish education.

Rachel Mordecai Lazarus

Proud of her Jewish heritage but conflicted about her faith, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was torn between publicly fighting antisemitism and privately questioning Judaism’s ideals. Although she studied Judaism to better educate her stepchildren, a series of traumatic events pushed her towards Christianity, and she became an Episcopalian on her deathbed.

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut made her mark on the American Jewish community in the areas of education, social welfare, and the organization of Jewish women. Grounded in her Jewish identity as the daughter and wife of rabbis, Kohut had a public career that paralleled the beginnings of Jewish women’s activism in the United States.

Esther Loeb Kohn

Esther Loeb Kohn helped bridge the gap between Chicago’s volunteer and professional social workers and spent thirty years running the Hull House settlement whenever founder Jane Addams was away on her frequent travels.

Group photo of kindergarteners, with woman teacher at left

Kindergartens in Palestine: First and Second Aliyah (1882-1914)

Hebrew-language education of the youngest Jewish residents of Palestine was considered key to the continued success of the Zionist movement. The women who taught in these kindergartens, established during the First and Second Aliyah, demonstrated their dedication to the movement and became essential to its success.

Helene Khatskels

As a member of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund, Helene Khatskels fought to realize socialist ideals about autonomy and liberation. As a Yiddish teacher and writer in Tsarist Russia and later the Soviet Union, she demonstrated a commitment to spreading and inspiring pride in Yiddish culture.

Chaile Raphael Kaulla

Chaile Raphael Kaulla was the most influential Jewish woman entrepreneur and one of the last Court Jews in eighteenth-century Germany. A devout Jew, Kaulla supported both Jewish and Christian poor people, founded a hostel for Jewish travelers, and in 1803 donated a bet midrash, library, and funding for three rabbis to her town of Hechingen. The Austrian Emperor honored Kaulla in 1807 and she and her family were allowed to live in Stuttgart with rights equal to those of Christian citizens.

Regina Kaplan

Regina “Kappy” Kaplan was nurse, teacher, hospital administrator, and health care innovator. Most notably, Kaplan helped break down gender barriers in medicine by creating the first nursing school in the South that admitted male students.

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