The Human Spirit/JPost..
11 October '12..
Back in Colchester, Connecticut, when I was a child, the members of Hadassah and those devotees of the synagogue sisterhood were feuding.
Usually it was my father who was involved in ideological battles. But now my mother was indignant. She was in the Hadassah camp. The synagogue parties to which she objected actually looked attractive to me, and I wondered why my sociable mother treated them with such disdain. “There aren't enough resources in our small town for everything. Those parties are for fun,” she said. “Hadassah is for Israel.”
I was in high school when my father donated the money earmarked for our family vacation to the emergency fund for the Six Day War. “Vacation can wait,” he said. “Israel needs the funds now.”
We speak a lot about inculcating values in education. I’m a grandmother today, but I remember those messages about priorities loud and clear. The question I have been asked more than any other in my life is how my parents reacted to my decision to move to Israel immediately after graduating from college.
I have a pat answer. “They said they’d miss me, of course, but they were relieved that I didn’t do something less acceptable, wind up in jail for opposing the war in Vietnam or go off to an ashram like other students of the rebellious ‘60s.” Alternatively, “After all, I had prepared them for it for years of active participation in Young Judaea.”
Looking back with a little more humility, I may have prepared them, but they certainly had prepared me.
On one hand, we were such an American household: my father ran the often vitriolic town meetings and served on the school board. He was a justice of the peace and married couples in our living room on Sundays.
My mother taught reading as part of president Lyndon Johnson’s poverty program in our public school. But there was always another theme that ran like a current through our household: Israel above all.
This week, nearly 2,000 Hadassah members and male associates will be in Israel celebrating the centenary of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Although much will be said about billions of dollars collected through bake sales and thrift shops for health and education, the contribution of Hadassah to Israel is unquantifiable. Oil-rich neighbors with their expendable billions have not been able to accomplish the medical achievements of Israel.
LOOKING BACK, it’s not obvious that the women of Hadassah would have been successful in convincing a suspicious local population that they should accept newfangled Western health care. It wasn't obvious that women would sign up for the nursing school that Hadassah opened in 1918. Nice girls didn't leave home to live in a dormitory. Those first women graduates were tough enough to overcome their parents’ objections and then to push back the epidemics that threatened to engulf pre-state Israel.
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