In Esther's Name

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

--Jeremiah 8:22

Baltimore-born Spinster Henrietta Szold, at 49, was heartbroken because a romance with a rabbinical scholar had come to an end. As balm, her mother suggested a trip to Gilead. What Zionist Szold saw in Palestine under Turkish rule in 1909 made her personal troubles seem trivial. In Jerusalem's Old City, she saw a child's trachoma-dimmed eyes covered with flies, and when she asked the mother why the flies were not brushed away, she was told: "They will only return.''

On her way home, Henrietta Szold wondered whether the flies must always return, whether trachoma need be as prevalent as the common cold, whether men and women must forever be debilitated by malnutrition and malaria. To her, the answer lay in Jeremiah's second question. In Jerusalem there were only twelve doctors; in all Palestine only 45. On the Feast of Purim in February 1912, Henrietta Szold rallied U.S. women Zionists into an organization she called Hadassah (original Hebrew name for Queen Esther), made the betterment of Palestine's health its prime goal.

Plague after Plague. Last week 254 physicians, 514 nurses and 1,352 other staff members of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center poured out of Jerusalem to the nearby village of Ein Karim, reputed birthplace of John the Baptist, to dedicate a $31 million building. U.S. Ambassador Ogden R. Reid, who has been learning the language, gave a slow, well-enunciated greeting in Hebrew. And everyone agreed, on the centenary of Henrietta Szold's birth, that medicine has come a long way in Israel.

The first Hadassah nurses sent to Palestine had rough going under the Turks, who regarded them as missionaries. In World War I Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis urged Hadassah to send a full medical unit to the war-torn land. In the summer of 1918 the unit found Jerusalem's population down from 50,000 to 26,000; men, women and children half naked and only half alive, fought in the streets for scraps of garbage. Plague followed plague: malaria, typhus, influenza, cholera, dysentery, and the dread Black Death itself. Sent to Tiberias by British General Allenby, a Hadassah team found cholera rampant: the townspeople were using Sea of Galilee water to cook with, to swim in, and to bathe their dead.

Cooking Up Words. Because she was a pacifist, Henrietta Szold herself at first could not get into British-mandated Palestine. She at last persuaded Viscount Samuel, the newly named High Commissioner, to use his influence. Once in, she stayed there most of her remaining 25 years, and proved herself an organization dynamo. In the years from 1922 through 1931, Hadassah's volunteer medical services spent more money ($445,000 to $655,000 a year) than the mandate government's Health Department. They opened scores of hospitals, clinics and mother-and-child welfare stations.

By the time the state of Israel was born in 1948, the infant death rate, which had been 140 per 1,000 in 1918, was down to a Western-world normal of 29. Trachoma among schoolchildren was down from 34% to 4.3%, ringworm from 40% to 1%.

In 1939 Hadassah moved to a new medical center on Mount Scopus. There, for a time, Arab royalty from Jordan. Iraq and Saudi Arabia got modern medical treatment unavailable in their homelands. But the 1948-49 war left Mount Scopus a no man's land, and the medical center sits empty. The new hospital at Ein Karim, designed by Austrian-born Architect Joseph Neufeld, is needed to replace it. To save nurses' steps, the main patient building is semicircular. Two of its nine floors are underground, in case Ein Karim too becomes a battleground. For its synagogue Marc Chagall has designed $120,000 stained-glass windows, to represent each of the Twelve Tribes.

The women of Hadassah have by now raised a total of almost $200 million, two-thirds of which has gone for medical services. Israel has 4,700 physicians--the world's highest doctor-patient ratio--and a fine school for training new ones.

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