Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Jessica Posner Odede

Jessica Posner Odede first came to Nairobi with dreams of volunteering with a theater program, but her experiences in the slums of Kiberia drew her to co-found Shining Hope for Communities, creating a girls’ school as a hub for social services ranging from medical aid to clean power and water initiatives.

Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society Report, 1893

Orphanages in the United States

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish philanthropists founded many orphanages in cities with significant Jewish populations, aiming to provide elementary education, vocational training, and religious instruction for dependent children they feared would be raised in non-Jewish asylums. Women were often at the forefront of these institutions as founders, managers, and staff members.

Rosanna Dyer Osterman

Rosanna Dyer Osterman’s supplies helped travelers explore the western frontier, but it was her life-saving efforts as a nurse for which she was best remembered.

Bertha Pappenheim

Bertha Pappenheim was the founder of the Jewish feminist movement in Germany. In 1904, she founded the League of Jewish Women. Pappenheim believed that male-led Jewish social service societies underestimated the value of women’s work and insisted on a woman’s movement that was equal to and entirely independent of men’s organizations.

Mollie Parnis

Mollie Parnis’s wit and fashion-savvy made her clothing designs a must during her tenure as a fashion legend. Parnis was equally famed for her New York salons that welcomed literary and political giants and for her fashion designs that adorned first ladies.

Erna Patak

Erna (Ernestine) Patak was a social worker and one of the Zionist veterans in Vienna in the early twentieth century, serving as the first president of WIZO Austria in the early 1920s. After surviving Theresienstadt, she returned to Vienna and later moved to London and finally to Tel Aviv.

Jessica Blanche Peixotto

Jessica Blanche Peixotto defied convention and her family to become a respected authority in the field of economics. Through her education, professorship, and departmental leadership at the University of California at Berkeley, she broke down barriers for women in education.

Anita M. Perlman

Anita M. Perlman was a feminist visionary, leader, and philanthropist who founded the B’nai B’rith Girls (BBG) -- the young women’s division of BBYO.

Helen Harris Perlman

With almost seventy years as a social work practitioner, supervisor, teacher, consultant, and author to her credit, Helen Harris Perlman was a legend in her field. She pioneered the “Chicago School” of social work, arguing that many people in crisis needed short-term therapy and solutions rather than long-term Freudian analysis.

Alice S. Petluck

Alice S. Petluck was one of the first women in the United States to attend law school and to practice in New York. She was a prominent social reformer in the early twentieth century who, through her example, was able to open the door for generations of future female lawyers.

Philanthropy in the United States

In the United States, Jewish women’s philanthropy generally occurred through three main types of organizations: autonomous women’s organizations, women’s organizations that included some men, and women’s auxiliaries of male-dominated groups. In recent decades, changes in Jewish philanthropy and in gender roles have influenced contemporary styles of Jewish women’s philanthropy.

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.

Rebecca Machado Phillips

Rebecca Machado Phillips tended her community by founding soup kitchens and aid societies for the poor and sick. She helped raised money for her synagogue for ritual objects and served as the first directress of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society of Philadelphia.

Rosalie Solomons Phillips

Between her family ties to the American Revolution, her political work, and her efforts as a founding member of Hadassah, Rosalie Solomons Phillips showed her deep concern for both preserving the past and creating a future for the Jewish people.

Nurse and Patients at National Jewish Hospital

Seraphine Eppstein Pisko

Like many middle-class Jewish women at the turn of the twentieth century, Seraphine Eppstein Pisko used her experience in volunteer work to move into the realm of the professional workplace. As executive secretary and vice president of the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives in Denver, Pisko was one of the first women to lead a national Jewish institution.

Nora Platiel

The Russian Revolution of 1917 made a convinced socialist of Nora Block and inspired her to study law. After leaving Nazi Germany for France and then Platiel, Platiel returned home, eventually becoming the first woman director of a German district court and being elected for three terms in the Hessian State Parliament.

Justine Wise Polier

As the first woman judge appointed in New York, Justine Wise Polier focused on helping the most vulnerable population: children. From the bench, Polier helped reform both foster care and the school system, ensuring that minority children had access to services. She also worked an informal second shift, volunteering for important causes ranging from prison reform to trying to evacuate Jewish children from Europe during the Holocaust.

Virginia Morris Pollak

During World War II, sculptor Virginia Morris Pollak used her deep understanding of clay, plaster, and metal to revolutionize reconstructive surgery for wounded servicemen. This earned her a presidential citation, and she was later appointed to JFK’s Commission for the Employment of the Handicapped. Pollak also co-founded her own sculpture studio and chaired the Norfolk Fine Arts Commission, beautifying her hometown with an outdoor sculpture museum at the Botanic Garden.

Tamar De Sola Pool

Born into a family deeply involved in Jewish activism and scholarship, Tamar De Sola Pool spent over a decade as both a Hadassah chapter president and later Hadassah’s national president. She wrote two books in collaboration with her husband, volunteered at displaced persons camps in Cyprus, and helped resettle Jewish children in Palestine with Hadassah.

Rosalind Preston

Rosalind Preston is a leading British philanthropist and advocate for various Jewish and women’s groups. She was honored with the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for her service work in such groups as WIZO, the National Council of Women, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Inter Faith Network UK, and the Jewish Volunteering Network.

Suzanne G. Priebatsch

Suzanne Priebatsch has focused her career in investment management on helping people become more “financially literate” so they can manage their wealth during their lifetimes and pass on legacies that reflect their values.

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.

Project Kesher

Project Kesher is a feminist Jewish organization empowering women in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Russian-speaking community in Israel to build a society in which inclusive Jewish life can flourish, and where women are the instruments of peaceful change.

Jennie Franklin Purvin

Jennie Franklin Purvin was one of a few Jewish women to become prominent in both civic and Jewish communal work in Progressive Era Chicago. Of her many efforts to improve the city, Purvin’s most visible and long-lasting accomplishment is the beachfronts on Lake Michigan for swimming and recreation.

Aly Raisman

Alexandra “Aly” Raisman not only won gold and bronze medals for her individual performances at the 2012 Olympics but captained the women’s gymnastic team that won the gold medal that year.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Philanthropy and Volunteerism