Zionism

Margherita Sarfatti

Margherita Sarfatti was born in Venice on April 8, 1880, into the wealthy and cultured Jewish Grassini family. Sarfatti was educated by private tutors, among them Antonio Fradeletto (1858–1930), the founding director of the Venice Biennale. During her childhood, she began to be interested in art and poetry, influenced by Fradeletto, who introduced her to the theories of John Ruskin.

Tova Sanhadray-Goldreich

Tova Sanhadray, chairwoman of the Emunah organization and the first woman member of the Lit. "assembly." The 120-member parliament of the State of Israel.Knesset to represent the National Religious Party, is regarded as a pathbreaker, since she began her public activity in Israel at a time when the participation of religious women in public life was not yet considered acceptable.

Pnina Salzman

“The first lady of the piano in Israel” and “She is considered the first Israel-born pianist to achieve international fame”—these and similar phrases color many writings about Pnina Salzman, who received the Israel Prize in 2006 for her contribution to the country’s musical life.

Nina Ruth Davis Salaman

Nina Salaman was a well-regarded Hebraist, known especially for her translations of medieval Hebrew poetry, at a time when Jewish scholarship in Europe was a male preserve. In addition to her translations, she published historical and critical essays, book reviews, and an anthology of Jewish readings for children, as well as poetry of her own.

Bernice Rubens

One of Britain’s most successful post-World War II novelists, the author of some twenty novels, winner of the Booker Prize (1970) and the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Award (1990), Bernice Rubens was invariably described by interviewers as, to quote one from the London Evening Standard, “Exotically swarthy, gypsily beringed, small, plump … at one remove from the seemly, London-Library circuit of modern letters.”

Anna Rozental

Anna Rozental belonged to the generation of Bundists who had already been active in the founding phase of the party under the Russian Empire and who were highly respected as “veterans” in the Polish Bund of the interwar period. From her youth on, Rozental’s life was closely tied to the Jewish labor movement in Vilna, where she died in Soviet custody during World War II.

Mathilde Dorothy De Rothschild

Shortly before her eighteenth birthday, Mathilde Dorothy (Dolly) de Rothschild married James de Rothschild (1878–1957) and so moved into a whirl of political, social and Zionist life. When her husband was mobilized into the French army in 1914 Dorothy was left to act as the intermediary between him and his father and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was then living in London. Thus she became deeply immersed in all facets of Zionist politics.

Etta Lasker Rosensohn

Though Etta Lasker Rosensohn geared much of her philanthropic career toward Jewish and Zionist affairs in New York City, her involvement with Hadassah proved to be the great passion of both her personal and professional life.

Gertrude Rosenblatt

On February 24, 1912, a group of approximately thirty young women, who called themselves Bnoth Zion, or the Daughters of Zion, met together at the urging of Henrietta Szold with the intent of founding Hadassah. Gertrude Rosenblatt was one of those women, and on March 7, 1912, when the officers were elected, she became one of the first directors of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization.

Ora Mendelsohn Rosen

A brilliant research physician, Ora Mendelsohn Rosen tragically died of cancer, the disease whose processes her researches in cell biology had helped to explain. A leading investigator of how hormones control the growth of cells, Rosen held the Abby Rockefeller Mauz Chair of Experimental Therapeutics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Sophia Moses Robison

Sophia Moses Robison was the first to document the class, racial, and moral judgments that determined who would be labeled a “juvenile delinquent” and how variations in description distorted data accumulated on delinquency.

Havivah Reik

Driving along one of Israel’s inner roads in the upper Shomron plain, one passes two settlements with similar names—Givat Havivah and Lahavot Havivah. Both are named after Havivah Reik, one of the seven members of the “Parachutists’ Mission” who lost their lives during World War II while attempting to aid European Jewry under the Nazis.

Religious Zionist Movements in Palestine

Within the Yishuv society of pre-state Israel, there developed a unique sector with a complex ideology: a religious Zionist society that included two main movements—Mizrachi (1902) and Ha-Po’el ha-Mizrachi (1922).

Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger -Friedenberg

Figuring among a precious few accounts left by a Jewish woman of a stay in the Old Yishuv in nineteenth-century Jerusalem, Flora Randegger's journal is also a record of a woman’s attempt to establish an educational project for Jews and especially for Jewish women in Palestine.

Bracha Ramot

Bracha Ramot, a specialist in internal medicine and hematology made major contributions to the development of hematology in Israel and to research on the genetic differences of Jewish ethnic communities in Israel.

Puah Rakovsky

Referring to herself in her memoirs as a “revolutionary Jewish woman,” Puah Rakovsky included her personal struggle for autonomy together with her Zionist and feminst activism in her self-definition. She dedicated her long life to struggling for the empowerment of Jews, and particularly of Jewish women.

Rahel Bluwstein

Rahel Bluwstein is rightfully considered the “founding mother” of modern Hebrew poetry by women. Rahel’s affiliation with the avant-garde group of Second Aliyah pioneers, her dedication to Zionist ideals and her agonizing death, made her a symbol in the eyes of the Israeli public—and her mythic status persists to this day.

Frances Raday

The career of Frances Raday as a leading human rights and feminist academic and also as an influential human rights advocate and litigator has evolved on no less than three different continents: starting in England, passing through Africa and finally settling in Israel.

Nehamah Pukhachewsky

Nehamah Pukhachewsky's protofeminist Hebrew writing provide a rationale for her lifelong activism on behalf of Jewish women.

Esther Raab

The entrance of women into the field of modern Hebrew poetry was a phenomenon of the early 1920s, a revolution in which Raab played a major role.

Prose Writing in the Yishuv: 1882-1948

An examination of the historiographies of Hebrew literature during the pre-State (Yishuv) period in Palestine (1882–1948) yields little discussion, mapping or classification of the gamut of women writers who authored works of prose during this period.

Jane Prince

Jane Prince dedicated her life to furthering the economic, social, and educational opportunities of young people in Palestine and Israel through her involvement in the Women’s League for Palestine and its successor, the Women’s League for Israel, and with the American Friends of Hebrew University.

Rosalind Preston

In 1988 Preston became the President of the National Council of Women and in 1991 she was elected Vice-President of the Board of Deputies. Her broad interests are reflected in her other voluntary sector involvements, including her position since 2000 as co-chair of the Inter Faith Network UK, an organization set up in 1987 to enable all major faith communities to come together to discuss issues of common concern, and her position since 1999 as Chair of Nightingale House, a residential care home for elderly Jewish men and women.

Rikudah Potash

Crowned “the Poetess of Jerusalem” by Sholem Asch (1880–1957), Rikudah Potash wrote in Yiddish about the landscape of her beloved city and its diverse ethnic communities.

Zosha Posnanska

Sofia (Zosha) Posnanska, one of the unsung Jewish heroes of World War II, lived only thirty-six years, three of them during the war in Europe.

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