Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993
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Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993
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Overview
The first comprehensive history of the oldest national religious Jewish women's organization in the United States
Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and its impact on both the Jewish Community in the United States and American Society in general.
Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernization and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389383 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2015 |
| Series: | Judaic Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Gone to Another Meeting
The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893â"1993
By Faith Rogow
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1993 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8938-3
CHAPTER 1
The Founding
IF HARD WORK earned Hannah Greenebaum Solomon the honor of being named NCJW's first president, she became its founder by being in the right place at the right time. In 1890, Chicago's elites were excitedly beginning to plan various facets of the forthcoming World's Fair. The Fair was designed to provide an international showcase for American industrial leadership. Organized into congresses planned and run by appropriate experts, the Fair highlighted the best of America's technological and social advances. For practical reasons, residents of Chicago did much of the preparation for the Exhibition. Tasks were assigned to committees, and committees were divided by gender. The most important of the women's committees was the Board of Lady Managers of the Exposition, formed in 1891.
The Board, headed by Bertha Honoré Palmer, was responsible for providing exhibit staff and for organizing much of the women's programming, both in and out of the proposed Woman's Building. Palmer quickly recruited friends from the elite Chicago Women's Club to aid in the planning, including Ellen M. Henrotin, whom she appointed vice-president of the Board of Lady Managers. Henrotin's duties included chairing the women's branch of the General Committee on Religious Parliament. The responsibilities of this position required her to appoint chairs for the women's committees representing each major religious denomination. Thus, Henrotin came to consider possible candidates for the Jewish Women's Committee. Unable to find Jewish female clergy or nationally known Jewish suffragists, Henrotin turned to her friends in Chicago.
Thirty-three-year-old Hannah Solomon was an obvious choice. Fifteen years earlier, Solomon and her sister, Henrietta Frank, were the first Jews invited to join the prestigious Chicago Women's Club. Solomon's father was a prominent merchant, and her family members had been active in several civic organizations since the 1850s. As a Woman's Club member Solomon had demonstrated she was "properly" cultured as well as an ardent and effective social reformer. She was a self-proclaimed suffragist but disavowed radical tactics. She was also involved in Chicago's most prominent Jewish organizations. She belonged to the radical Reform Temple Sinai, but her relatives helped found all five of Chicago's original Reform synagogues, providing her with connections to several leading rabbis as well as to a wide range of Chicago's Jewish community. In short, Solomon was the perfect chair: a consummate clubwoman and a dedicated Jew from a respected family.
Ellen Henrotin invited her friend Hannah to convene the Jewish Women's Committee "under whatever division or divisions of the Exposition she thought best." Solomon accepted with idealistic hopes that the Exposition would inspire international unity and that, for the first time in recorded history, it would give the Jewish community a showcase "on an equal footing with Christianity, not to defend itself but to tell the world what are its tenets and its deeds."
Solomon viewed the Exposition as a golden opportunity for the Jewish community to prove its worth, and she assumed her role with a grave sense of responsibility and unbounded energy. Sources indicate that she did much of the early work alone. Her first major decision was to organize the Jewish Woman's Congress under the auspices of the World Parliament of Religions rather than as part of the events being housed at the Woman's Building, where programs were dominated by a women's rights agenda. Deborah Grand Golomb has explained this decision as choosing allegiance to Jews over allegiance to women, a choice she claims manifested itself in later NCJW policy. Solomon, however, had no reason to view the two groups as mutually exclusive. Many prominent advocates of women's rights participated in the Parliament of Religions, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard. In fact, Solomon explained that she chose the Parliament because she "felt that in the Parliament of Religions, where women of all creeds were represented, the Jewish woman should have a place."
Moreover, though Solomon generally favored positions of the women's rights activists planning the Woman's Building programs, she had reason to wonder whether Jewish women, as Jews, would be welcomed there. Particularly troubling was the feminist debate over the role of western religion in the subjection of women. Like much of the Jewish press, Solomon reacted negatively to the book around which much of that debate centered, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible. Stanton's critique of Christianity included the accusation that Judaism was ultimately at fault for women's oppression. She explained: "The dogmas incorporated in the religious creeds derived from Judaism, teaching that woman was an afterthought in creation, her sex a misfortune.... These dogmas are an insidious poison." Solomon may have believed that this debate would be continued in any religious programming done through the Woman's Building, and feeling uncomfortable with those women who backed Stanton's position, she chose to avoid them or at least to deny them a public forum that could have conceivably obscured Jewish women's contributions with anti-Jewish rhetoric.
More important, while Solomon was certain that Judaism promoted rather than precluded rights for women, she knew that Jewish women were not yet ready to substantiate that position. Unlike their Christian sisters, some of whom were ordained clergy, most of whom were well versed in the Bible, and all of whom had been debating these religious issues for at least forty years, most Jewish women barely possessed even elementary knowledge of the fine points of Jewish learning. Jewish tradition held that formal religious education was extraneous to women's duties in the home, and American religious schools were too few in number and too poor in material resources and teachers to provide a quality education, so few Jewish women had seriously studied the texts around which the feminist debate centered. Moreover, neither American culture nor Judaism approved of a public religious leadership role for women, so few Jewish women had experience speaking in public. At the time of the Exposition there were no Jewish women's organizations anywhere in the world that publicly discussed religious issues. Solomon even commented that many of the women who spoke at the Jewish Women's Congress were speaking in public for the first time in their lives. Finally, Jewish women were relatively new to America. Most had been in the United States for a generation or less, and as immigrants fighting for acceptance, Jewish women were reluctant to enter any public debate, especially one that had so aroused emotions nationwide.
Solomon did not want to avoid the debate completely. In fact, she believed that defending Judaism was a primary responsibility of every Jew, especially those in the public eye as those who spoke at the Congress would surely be. As the first Jew in the Chicago Woman's Club, Solomon was familiar with the role of being the representative Jew in a non-Jewish context. She knew that many of her co-members based their opinion of Jews on their opinion of her. She was naturally concerned that these women know enough of Judaism to understand why it differed from Christianity without resorting to that difference as a basis for discrimination. She expressed her concern in 1892 by daring to break an unspoken Club ban on formal discussions of religion. The paper she delivered, "Our Debt to Judaism," was an attempt to demonstrate that the Christian society of the clubwomen sprang from Jewish roots. One of Solomon's major hopes for the Congress was to publicize this positive view of Judaism by providing the groundwork for Jewish women's entrance into the discussion of religion's role in women's lives. Later that hope would be expressed in her insistence that a large portion of NCJW's energy be directed toward educating Jewish women about Judaism. In Solomon's mind, the only way to ensure that this discussion could begin in a nonthreatening environment was to place it in the Jewish context of the Parliament of Religions' Jewish Congress rather than the feminist environment in the Woman's Building.
Solomon also knew that in many of the Congresses, particularly those planned by Woman's Building organizers, women and men were preparing to square off as enemies. Solomon believed that Jewish men and women could bring their reputed cooperation in the home to the public sphere as a shining example to the women's movement that cooperation was more effective in advancing women's rights than setting men up as opponents.
Solomon recruited a planning committee sympathetic with this view that "on an occasion when men and women of all creeds are realizing that the ties that bind us are stronger than the differences that separate, that when the world is giving to Israel the liberty, long withheld, of taking its place among all religions to teach the truths it holds for the benefit of man and the glory of the Creator, the place of the Jewish woman would not be vacant." The likeminded committee Solomon secured was carefully selected from a pool of Jewish women with whom Solomon had already worked, including members of the Chicago Women's Aid Society, the South Side Sewing Society, Chicago's Reform synagogues, and her own family.
According to Solomon, "At the first meeting of the Jewish Women's Committee, it was decided to work along the lines adopted by other committees. The committee also decided to collect and publish the traditional melodies of the Jews as a souvenir of the occasion." To sell the hymnbook and to advertise the Congress, the committee issued notices "to all Jewish publications, inviting the cooperation of all persons interested." The committee naturally wanted to prepare the souvenir with the expertise befitting the occasion, and knowing of no capable women, they arranged for the Reverend William Sparger and Cantor Alois Kaiser to write the text and Dr. Cyrus Adler the introduction. They found a willing publisher in Mr. T. Rubovits, and the committee's first task was quickly completed.
In addition to publicizing the Congress in Jewish publications, the committee began to correspond with the few Jewish women authors and clubwomen they knew in other cities seeking potential speakers for the occasion. They also wrote to rabbis asking for suggestions of names to include in the program. Solomon, alone, wrote ninety letters by hand.
Early in this process the committee happened upon two important discoveries. First, the correspondence indicated that "dozens of Jewesses disclaim affiliation" and "hundreds proclaim indifference and confess absolute ignorance of Jewish history and literature." Second, it was difficult to track down those women who were still committed to Judaism and might be qualified to speak or be interested in attending. These two discoveries were the seeds from which NCJW sprang.
The committee was deeply committed to the survival of Judaism in the United States and adhered to the traditional notion that religious practice in the home was the key to such survival. Custom also held that women were responsible for such religious observance. If Jewish women were too ignorant or too apathetic to keep a Jewish home, then the committee could only conclude that the next generation would be lost and Judaism in the United States would succumb to assimilation. These women had grown up in an age that embraced the Enlightenment (and popular women's club) idea that education would be the great equalizer and that public education would produce a country of responsible citizens who would solve the nation's problems with their new-found knowledge. The committee members had found that many of the women they contacted were almost Jewishly illiterate, so they idealistically concluded that they could save Judaism simply by informing Jewish women of their religious duties. This notion would become a cornerstone of NCJW policy.
The decision to work toward this goal by creating a formal organization had its source in more practical considerations. Solomon explained, "The difficulty we experienced in reaching Jewish women for organized effort made it apparent that a national organization was necessary to obviate such difficulties in the future." The committee recognized that, as a much publicized national gathering, the Jewish Women's Congress was an ideal place to reach potential members, and the founding of a national Jewish women's organization became "an integral part of the plan of the Congress ... at one of [the committee's] earliest meetings." Never in history had Jewish women convened a national organization devoted to promoting Jewish religious activity, so the committee tentatively sought approval for this idea from the general Woman's Board of the Parliament of Religions. Solomon reported: "Organizing womankind was a popular theme among those who were working in the Woman's Congresses of the World's Fair, and the projected organization of the Jewish women ... created much interest among the women attending the World's Congress of Representative Women." The committee received particular encouragement from their friend and chair of the Woman's Board, Ellen M. Henrotin, who, no doubt, recognized that such a historic event would enhance the prestige of the Parliament.
Bolstered by support from such high places, Solomon's committee launched fullscale efforts to organize the Congress. Previous attempts to identify individual Jewish women interested in the Congress had revealed a great deal of apathy. In the new effort, "Circular letters were sent to larger cities, asking Jewish women to hold mass meetings to elect delegates. This measure was more successful than had been anticipated, twenty-nine cities being represented by ninety-three delegates." The committee's search for participants spanned the Jewish communities of England and the United States, entailing the exchange of "no less than two thousand letters." All correspondence mentioned that "An attempt would be made to effect permanent organization." In the appeal for delegates published throughout the Jewish community, the committee described their vision for "a National and International organization of Jewish women, which shall hold annual meetings and thus bring together thinking Jewish women, who have the advancement of Judaism and Jewish interests at heart and shall give them the opportunity of learning to know each other and each other's work." The names of women who responded to the publicity became NCJW's first mailing list.
In addition to seeking delegates, the committee began its search for women qualified to present papers at the general parliament as representatives of all Jewish women, and at the Jewish Women's Congress itself. The committee obtained names and topics from a variety of sources and ultimately "found that every section of the country could be represented." To choose between all the possibilities was "no easy task," but eventually "Two representatives were chosen to present papers in the general parliament." The first was Henrietta Szold, daughter of the widely respected Rabbi Benjamin Szold, his protégé, and a guiding force of the Jewish Publication Society. Szold had worked with many of the top Jewish scholars in the United States and had proved herself quite capable of holding her own with them. Twenty years later she would found what would become the world's largest Jewish women's organization, Hadassah. Szold would address the topic "What Judaism Has Done For Women." The second representative was nationally known author, Josephine Lazarus, sister of poet Emma. Lazarus presented a paper entitled "The Outlook of Judaism."
As news of the proposed Congress spread, the committee became aware that not everyone would be as supportive of these efforts as advocates such as Ellen M. Henrotin. In October 1892 Chicago's leading Jewish publication, the Reform Advocate, questioned the necessity of a separate Jewish women's event at the World's Fair, stating bluntly, "As far as we can understand, Jewish women, as women, are not different from other women. There is nothing specifically Jewish in their progres [sic]." This view must have been particularly disconcerting to Solomon because it came from a rabbi she considered a personal supporter, the controversial publisher of the Reform Advocate and spiritual leader of Sinai Congregation, Emil G. Hirsch.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gone to Another Meeting by Faith Rogow. Copyright © 1993 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsForeword
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1. The Founding
CHAPTER 2. Council Religion
CHAPTER 3. Jewish Leaders Respond
CHAPTER 4. The Sunday Sabbath Controversy and the End of Council Religion
CHAPTER 5. Immigrant Aid Work
CHAPTER 6. The Rest of the Story
APPENDIX A: The Women
APPENDIX B: Biographical Sketches
APPENDIX C: National Membership Figures
APPENDIX D: Positions on Selected Legislation
APPENDIX E: Council Presidents
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index