The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland

Daniel Kupfert Heller

Jewish History (2018) 31: 319–352 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-018-9301-9 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland DANIEL KUPFERT HELLER Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia E-mail: daniel.heller@monash.edu Abstract This article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland by focusing on the establishment and activity of the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szkoła Piel˛egniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie). Founded in 1923 and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the school’s staff believed that they could shape the attitudes and behaviors of Polish Jewish women and use them as a conduit to advance their vision for a Polish state committed to the protection of Jews and their equality before the law. Drawing upon the voices of JDC officials, local Jewish health activists, Polish government officials, and young Jewish women in the Second Polish Republic, the article highlights the multiple and frequently conflicting ways in which gender figured in their political imagination. It also sheds light on the efforts of American Jewish humanitarian activists and Polish Jewish women alike—much like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America—to reframe traditional gendered expectations for women in order to expand their range of professional choices and the roles they could play in public life. The final section of this article recounts the school’s decline and compares its fate to a Jewish nursing school initiative in the city of Vilna. In doing so, it assesses the limits of the Joint Distribution Committee’s interethnic bridge-building initiatives in interwar Poland. Keywords Poland · Jews · Women · Nursing · Foreign aid In the spring of 1924, a group of Jewish journalists gathered at a café in Warsaw to recount their discoveries, from the latest Polish parliamentary scandals and stories of corruption in Jewish communal organizations to cases of antisemitism in their country and beyond. One of the journalists, who had recently undergone surgery in Warsaw’s largest Jewish hospital, insisted that he had unwittingly stumbled upon a story that far exceeded those of his colleagues in its originality and importance. During his time in the hospital’s surgery ward, he reported, “I was introduced to a world so extraordinary . . . so elevated above our grey, everyday, ordinary lives.” At the helm of this new world, he continued, were Polish Jewish women who were training at the hospital’s school for nurses. The nurses’ professionalism, dedication to their patients, and compassion were transforming the ways in which he viewed hospitals, traditionally depicted by eastern European Jews as unhygienic, financially corrupt, dangerous destinations of last resort. He took special note 320 D. K. HELLER of the fact that tensions between Poland’s Jews and Christians were nowhere to be found in the ward. Instead, he marveled at the nurses, dressed in their pink uniforms and white aprons, “approaching both Jewish and Christian [patients] and treating them equally, without any distinction.” He suggested that these interpersonal interactions would have an impact far beyond the hospital’s corridors. Likening the nurses’ white caps to crowns, he claimed that these Polish Jewish women were queens, creating a new world that was “so remarkable, so great, and so mighty.”1 The American Jewish creators of the nurses’ training school undoubtedly would have been pleased by the journalist’s belief in their students’ power to transform the society in which they lived. Opened in July 1923, the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szkoła Piel˛egniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie) was the creation of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a humanitarian organization established during the First World War to provide emergency relief to Jewish communities in war-torn Europe and Palestine.2 By 1921, Joint officials working in Eastern Europe turned their attention from emergency relief to the reconstruction of Jewish communities. Paying particular attention to Poland, home to the largest population of Jews in interwar Europe, they established committees dedicated to providing funding and infrastructure for child care, cultural activity, religious education, refugee aid, building repairs, and medical aid. Declaring the opening of their nurses’ training school as “the beginning of a new era in the history of educational opportunities for Jewish young women in Poland,” the Joint’s medical aid personnel claimed that theirs was a school for “national service,” where Polish Jewish women would learn to “diagnose and heal not only physical, but wounds of a graver kind.”3 Like other social agencies of the era, who viewed their public health initiatives as 1 Reconvalescent [pseud.], “Di idishe varmhertsige shvester: Shpitol poeme in proze,” Haynt, June 6, 1924. On traditional depictions of hospitals by eastern European Jews, see Lisa Epstein, “Health and Healing,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven, CT, 2008), 694–98. 2 For scholarly overviews of the Joint’s establishment during the First World War and its activity between the two world wars, see Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1929–1939 (Philadelphia, 1974); Michael Beizer, Relief in Time of Need: Russian Jewry and the Joint, 1914–1924 (Bloomington, IN, 2015); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven, CT, 2005); Jaclyn Granick, “Waging Relief: The Politics and Logistics of American Jewish War Relief in Europe and the Near East, 1914– 1918,” First World War Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 55–68. 3 Amelia Greenwald to the Committee on Medical Affairs, November 4, 1923, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives (hereafter JDC Archives), Records of the New York Office, 1921–1932 (hereafter NY21–32), folder 364; “Communique from Jews of New Poland to America,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 321 a means to regulate and shape human behavior in the service of their ideological goals, the Joint proposed distinct roles that women could play in transforming the social, political, and cultural landscape of interwar Poland.4 Fusing medicine with politics, the Joint’s medical aid activists believed that Polish Jewish women under their guidance would serve as ambassadors of American Progressivism. While the proponents of American Progressivism were diverse in their political orientations, they shared the belief that governments had an obligation to protect their citizens from abject poverty and health hazards. They also believed that politicians should rely on the expertise of trained, nonpartisan experts—from social scientists and doctors to teachers and welfare workers—to address the social and economic problems associated with urbanization and industrialization. These professionals, they argued, would transcend political divisions to bring about meaningful social change and promote peaceful relations between different groups.5 Exporting this ethos to Poland, Joint officials believed that the hospital’s medical experts would not only play a critical role in improving the mental and physical health of Polish Jewry but would also transform the ways in which Polish government officials and citizens viewed and treated Jews. Through the case of the Warsaw School of Nursing, this article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland. By tracing the school’s establishment and activity, it explores the attempts of JDC activists to shape the attitudes and behaviors of Polish Jewish women and to use them as a conduit to advance their vision for a Polish state committed to the protection of Jews and their equality before the law. This article draws upon the voices of JDC officials, local Jewish health activists, Polish government officials, and young Jewish women in the Second Polish Republic to highlight the multiple and frequently conflicting ways in which gender figured in their political imagination. It also sheds light on the efforts of American Jewish humanitarian activists and Polish Jewish women alike— much like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America— to reframe traditional gendered expectations for women in order to expand their range of professional choices and the roles they could play in public life.6 4 For useful surveys on the relationship between public health initiatives and politics, see Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London, 1999); Frank Huisman and Harry Oosterhuis, eds., Health and Citizenship: Political Cultures of Health in Modern Europe (London, 2014). 5 On the similarities and differences among proponents of American Progressivism, see Linda Gordon, “If the Progressives Were Advising Us Today, Should We Listen?,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 2 (April 2002): 109–21. 6 Scholars often refer to these practices as “maternalism” or “maternal feminism”: promoting the notion that women’s innate differences, particularly the qualities associated with motherhood, can exert a valuable influence on public life, including politics. For a useful overview 322 D. K. HELLER The final section of this article recounts the school’s decline and compares its fate to a Jewish nursing school initiative in the city of Wilno, known in Yiddish as Vilna. In doing so, it assesses the limits of the JDC’s interethnic bridge-building initiatives in interwar Poland. Making the Case for Jewish Nurses In January 1921, the JDC’s medical aid committee, known as the MedicalSanitary Commission, sent eighteen American Jewish physicians and “sanitation personnel” to Poland. Each member of the medical unit was assigned to a different region and given seven weeks to draw up a detailed survey of local sanitary conditions. Although the medical unit operated throughout Poland, most of their personnel were dispatched to Poland’s eastern borderlands, known in Polish as the kresy, where Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and White and Red Army forces had battled for control between 1918 and 1921. Already reeling from the mass violence of the First World War, tens of thousands of Jews in the kresy were murdered in a wave of pogroms during this period.7 The medical unit’s reports on the region painted a devastating picture. Jews in the kresy, reported one official, “live today in greater fear, in worse despair and in a more uncertain and unpromising future than during the dark days of the World War.”8 Drinking wells in provincial towns were polluted with sewage from rivers. Homes, synagogues, and ritual baths (mikvas) lay in ruins. Tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, dysentery, typhus, and favus (head scalds) ran rampant. The constant flow of Jewish refugees between Poland and the Soviet Union only exacerbated the spread of epidemics.9 of the development of this approach to campaigning for women’s rights across Europe, see Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA, 2000), esp. 213–340; Karen Hunt, “Women as Citizens: Changing the Polity,” in The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700, ed. Deborah Simonton (London, 2006), 216–58. For case studies from North America, see Jan Doolittle Wilson, The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920–1930 (Urbana, IL, 2007); Brian T. Thorn, From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women’s Political Activism in Postwar Canada (Vancouver, 2016). For the case of interwar Poland, see Eva Plach, The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935 (Athens, OH, 2006), 102–32. 7 The most devastating pogroms took place in the central and southern regions of the kresy. They were largely carried out by the anti-Bolshevik volunteer army commanded by General Anton Ivanovich Denikin and Ukrainian troops headed by Simon Petliura. The exact number of victims is unknown, and estimates range from between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand. For a discussion of these numbers and the Joint’s reaction to this violence, see Beizer, Relief in Time of Need, 73–97. 8 J. J. Golub, “Survey and Annual Report on Medico-Sanitary Activities in Wolhynia, 1 March 1921–28 February 1922,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 378, 4. 9 Golub, “Survey and Annual Report,” 30–68; for reports on the regions of Brześć, Białystok, and Wilno, see also JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 359, folder G31. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 323 The medical unit’s members warned that the health and sanitary conditions of the region’s Jewish population had far-reaching political consequences. These conditions, they observed, not only reinforced the antisemitism of the region’s new Polish rulers but also provided them with a cover to justify their persecution of Jews. The medical unit documented numerous instances in which Polish government officials requisitioned Jewish hospitals or emptied them of their equipment.10 They also described how the government’s new public health officials used their epidemic quarantine campaigns as a means to expel Jews who had crossed into Poland from the Soviet Union.11 Many Polish officials viewed the JDC’s American Jewish relief workers in the same way as they depicted local Jews: as potential communists-in-disguise, or at the very least as a threatening group of foreigners seeking to undermine Polish power in the region.12 These officials drew upon long-standing antisemitic beliefs that eastern European Jews were dirty and disease-carrying and that their alleged physical deficiencies were an embodiment of their moral corruption. Joint officials feared that the health and sanitation conditions of the kresy’s Jews were also stoking antisemitism among the representatives of the American Relief Administration, American Red Cross (ARC), and other US-sponsored agencies upon whom the JDC relied for cooperation and support.13 In the face of these challenges, the medical unit’s members viewed their mission as twofold: to transform the hygienic and sanitation conditions of Polish Jewry, and, in doing so, to change the attitudes and behavior of Polish government officials and American relief workers towards Jews. Within three years, the JDC’s medical unit oversaw the reconstruction and creation of hundreds of health institutions, including public baths, hospitals, medical dispensaries, mobile x-ray units and infant-care stations.14 10 JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 378, 4; I. Michlin to M. Waldman, May 19, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 372; Brest Regional Medical Commissioner to Assistant Medical Director in Warsaw, January 3, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 360. 11 Golub, “Survey and Annual Report,” 11. 12 J. J. Golub to Assistant Medical Director in Warsaw, January 30, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 359. 13 These fears proved to be well founded: as historian Stephen Porter has recently shown, several American military and relief personnel operating in Poland accused JDC personnel of being Bolshevik agents. Some American officials claimed that Polish military violence against Jews was justified because Jews were indeed a hostile population. See Stephen Porter, Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed (Philadelphia, 2017), 30–31. 14 J. J. Golub, “Report on American Joint Distribution Committee Medico-Sanitary Department in Poland, February 1921–October 1923,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 381. On their anti-favus campaign, see Rakefet Zalashik, “The Anti-Favus Campaign in Poland: Jewish Social Medicine,” Polin 27 (2015): 359–84. 324 D. K. HELLER According to the medical unit’s staff, their quest to find suitable candidates among Poland’s Jewish population to run these institutions and ensure their survival proved far more difficult. Local health activists who worked in traditional relief institutions like Linas Hatsedek, Bikur Holim, and Mishmeres Holim were painted as earnest but incompetent, untrained to meet the “modern needs” of Jewish communities.15 Feldshers, local medical practitioners with less training than doctors, were similarly accused of providing “unskilled ministration” to Poland’s Jewish population.16 Several JDC officials had taken out ads in local Jewish newspapers for doctors and nurses. Most of those who replied, they complained, were charlatans desperate for employment.17 Even Jewish relief and health agencies founded in the Russian Empire, upon whom the Joint had relied to distribute its funds during the war, did not escape criticism. JDC officials accused representatives of the EKOPO (The Central Jewish Committee for the Relief of Sufferers of War) of trying to monopolize relief activity rather than cooperate with the OZE (The Society for the Preservation of the Health of Jews), an organization that possessed a vast network of medical relief institutions and personnel in the provinces of Wilno and Białystok.18 When the medical unit’s scattered personnel assembled in April 1921 to report their findings, many insisted that the only way they could ensure the success of their initiatives in the region would be to train their very own cadre of medical activists. It was within these meetings that several of the medical unit’s members raised the possibility of establishing schools for Jewish nurses.19 From the start, their discussions about nursing prompted debates about the extent to which Polish Jewish women should wield authority in the public sphere. Among the most vocal participants in these discussions was Dr. Jacob J. Golub (1892–1953). Born in the Pale of Settlement and coming of age in Boston, the twenty-three-year-old expert in joint diseases had left his post in the US Public Health Service to join the medical unit. Dispatched 15 Golub, “Report on American JDC Medico-Sanitary Department in Poland,” 22–23. 16 “Report of the Special Commission Appointed by Mr. Louis Marshall,” April 1922, YIVO Archives, RG 335.1, folder 40. 17 “Meeting Minutes of Medico-Sanitary Commission,” December 12, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 358. 18 Conference of Medical Commission with Mr. Waldman, December 10, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 358; Z. A. Bonoff to S. M. Schmidt, November 31, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder G31. On OZE’s activities in interwar Poland, see Nadav Davidovich and Rakefet Zalashik, “Air, Sun, Water: Ideology and Activities of OZE (Society for the Preservation of the Health of the Jewish Population) during the Interwar Period,” Dynamis 28 (2008): 127–49. 19 Z. Syrkin-Binsztejnowa to J. J. Golub, October 18, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 365. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 325 to the eastern borderland province of Wołyń and desperate for medical personnel to assist him, Golub decided to establish a makeshift nurses’ training school in the province’s capital, Równe.20 Opening in the spring of 1921, the six-month-long program was affiliated with Równe’s Jewish hospital.21 Explaining his decision to his colleagues, Golub insisted that his venture was born out of necessity, not out of any ideological commitments to women’s advancement in civic life. He assured them that his school did not intend to turn Polish Jewish women into medical authorities. Instead, he insisted that their “limited training” would “always be borne in mind” and that they would only be called on to conduct public health propaganda and basic medical care.22 Golub also reminded Joint officials that the training of female nurses, rather than doctors, made good financial sense: given that salaries for women across various professions in Poland were significantly lower than those of men, it stood to reason that female nurses would prove all the more cost-effective.23 Golub likely had more than just his medical unit colleagues in mind when he described the limited power of the nurses under his guidance. Despite the numerous fault lines dividing Polish Jewry—from region and class to religious practice and political affiliation—suspicions about the nature of women’s employment and their roles in the public sphere were remarkably widespread.24 Jewish women in Eastern Europe engaged in a wide variety of economic activities, from trading with peasants in shtetl marketplaces to earning wages in urban workshops. Their work, however, was generally 20 In addition to the Równe school, the JDC’s representative in the region of Brześć sponsored the training of six nurses in 1921. The JDC also offered nominal support to a nurses’ school established in Wilno by the OZE. On Brześć, see “Report of Medical Commission Conference, 5–8 December 1921,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 358. On the nursing school in Wilno, see the final section of this article. 21 For a detailed account of the school’s founding and operation, see Golub, “Survey and Annual Report,” 107–37. 22 Regional Medical Commissioner for Wołyń to Medical Commissioner for Poland, June 14, 1921, JDC Archives, NY31–32, folder G39. 23 Even so, one of the representatives on the medical committee complained that hiring trained nurses was far more expensive than hiring “girls” to do similar work. See Meeting Minutes of the Medical Commission, December 12, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 358. 24 Gershon Bacon, “Poland: Interwar,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, posted March 1, 2009, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/poland-interwar; Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle, 1995), 83–92; Paula Hyman, “East European Jewish Women in an Age of Transition, 1880–1930,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith Baskin, 2nd ed. (Detroit, 1998), 216–21; Jolanta Mickute, “Modern, Jewish and Female: The Politics of Culture, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Interwar Poland, 1918–1939” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2011); Daniel Blatman, “Women in the Jewish Labor Bund in Interwar Poland” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (New Haven, CT, 1998), 68–84; Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (Syracuse, NY, 2009), 82–97. 326 D. K. HELLER viewed as a necessary supplement to their husbands’ income rather than as a means to achieve economic and personal independence.25 Despite the fact that traditional Jewish organizations increasingly endorsed women’s participation in educational and social work and were more tolerant of secular education for women than they were for men, they tended to frown upon women assuming positions of public leadership and professional authority, fearing that doing so would breach the walls of modesty.26 Acculturated Jewish elites, far fewer in number, often viewed their daughters’ admission into professional schools as an affront to bourgeois norms of domesticity. Whether orthodox or secular, rich or poor, Bundist or Zionist, many claimed that women’s supposedly delicate nervous system, inferior intellectual capacity, and periodically erratic behavior determined by their reproductive systems rendered them biologically unfit to wield professional power. The social independence afforded to working professional women, they warned, would come at the expense of their maternal duties. Bearing these attitudes in mind, Golub emphasized that his nurses were merely extending their maternal instincts and responsibilities into the public sphere and insisted that their roles would be circumscribed and supervised by a male-dominated medical profession. As “social hygiene” ambassadors, he wrote, the nurses’ primary task was to “teach mothers and children the art of sanitation and cleanliness.”27 Although many of the Joint’s medical staff in Poland shared Golub’s enthusiasm for training nurses, not all approved of his decision to limit their education and responsibilities. Among Golub’s critics was Dr. Zofia SyrkinBinsztejnowa (1898–1942)—one of two women to participate in the medical unit’s meetings.28 Born in the town of Bielsk-Podlaski in Congress Poland, she was among a select few Jewish women in the Russian Empire to defy traditional gendered expectations and seek professional medical training. She may have studied at women’s medical colleges founded toward the end of the nineteenth century in cities such as Kiev, Kharkiv, or Odessa. More likely, she was among the thousands of Jewish women who journeyed westward from 25 Bacon, “Poland: Interwar.” As Bacon points out, little scholarship exists that singles out Jewish women’s economic activity in interwar Poland for investigation. 26 See, e.g., Asaf Kaniel, “Gender, Zionism and Orthodoxy: The Women of the Mizrahi Movement in Poland, 1916–1939,” Polin 22 (2010): 346–67; Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (London, 2018). 27 Regional Director of the Medical Commissioner for Wołyń to Medical Commissioner for Poland, June 14, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder G39. 28 Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s birthdate of 1898 appears on a page of testimony submitted to Yad Vashem’s “Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority” by a cousin named Marian Grynberg. If Grynberg remembered her age accurately, Syrkin-Binsztejnowa would have been only 22 years old when hired by the Joint to serve as a doctor in Western Galicia. See “Zofia Binstein,” Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, ID 1192195. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 327 the 1870s onward to medical schools primarily in France or Switzerland, where they did not face restrictive entry quotas. Jewish women frequently made up a substantial proportion of the student population in these institutions.29 In April 1920, Syrkin-Binsztejnowa was hired by the Joint to organize their “sanitary section” in Western Galicia. The only Joint-appointed doctor in the region, her meticulous studies on the spread of typhus and her tireless efforts to distribute medical supplies and educational leaflets to local Jews so impressed the JDC’s leadership that they named her the Director of Public Health and Propaganda for all of Poland.30 Arriving at the JDC’s headquarters in Warsaw in the fall of 1921, she presented her own proposal for establishing nurses’ training schools. SyrkinBinsztejnowa’s plan differed from Golub’s school in several crucial respects, reflecting her deep interest in expanding Polish Jewish women’s opportunities and responsibilities in the public sphere. While Golub’s Równe nursing program circumscribed the training and activity of its graduates, SyrkinBinsztejnowa offered a far more expansive vision for the roles that could be played by the Joint’s Jewish nurses. Provided with rigorous professional training, Polish Jewish women, she argued, could become the “banner carriers of health across Central and Eastern Europe.” She insisted that Polish Jewish women had the power not only to shape the sanitary practices of Polish Jewry but to also mold their moral character. With Polish Jewish women at the helm, she wrote, the Joint’s medical programs could transform Polish Jews into “the best type and specimen of people.”31 Describing Golub’s school as “primitive” and “superficial,” she told her colleagues that “if the Americans came here to help the Jews in Poland, they should leave something substantial and permanent.”32 She proposed the establishment of nurses’ training schools in Warsaw, Wilno, and Kraków.33 Emphasizing the need to provide extensive medical training to nurses, 29 See Lisa Epstein, “Caring for the Soul’s Home: The Jews of Russia and Health Care, 1860– 1914” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 53–83; Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 57–101. 30 “Report of Dr. Syrkin-Bienschtein on the Sanitary Section of the Jewish Relief Committee in Krakow,” October 5, 1920, JDC Archives, Records of the New York Office, 1919–1921, folder 92. 31 Z. Syrkin-Binsztejnowa to Director of Medico-Sanitary Department, December 29, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 372. 32 “Report of Medical Commission Conference.” See also Z. Syrkin-Binsztejnowa to J. J. Golub, October 18, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 365. 33 Medical Commission Meeting, May 17, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 361. The Kraków nurses’ school never materialized, nor did the efforts of the JDC’s medical commissioner in Lwów to establish a nursing school succeed. See Medical Commission in East Galicia to Dr. Harry Plotz, October 1, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 358. 328 D. K. HELLER Syrkin-Binsztejnowa called on the Joint to invest Polish Jewish women with professional authority. Her detailed curriculur plan demanded two years of rigorous training for both hospital service and public health campaigns that would reach Jews on the streets and in their schools and homes. While Golub focused on the cost-saving benefits of hiring nurses rather than doctors, Syrkin-Binsztejnowa envisioned nursing as a means to provide Polish Jewish women more economic independence. She told Joint officials that the medical authority they invested in the schools’ graduates would ensure that they would find steady employment in a variety of Jewish medical institutions.34 Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s plan was quickly circulated among the Joint’s executive team in New York, who forwarded the proposal to various American public health experts. Among the first to be contacted was Helen Bridge, the director of a nursing school in Warsaw sponsored by the American Red Cross.35 Her disclosure that the school’s Polish board members forbade the admission of Jewish, Russian, and German students further convinced the JDC of the need to establish a nurses’ training school of their own. Bridge also hinted that the Polish Ministry of Public Health, Social Welfare, and Labor Protection would welcome the chance to cooperate with the Joint in establishing a nurses’ training school for Jewish women.36 Her comment struck a chord with the JDC’s executive leadership. Despite their deep frustration with Polish government representatives in the eastern borderlands, they continually attempted to forge an amicable relationship with Polish officials. Doing so, they hoped, would diminish state-sanctioned antisemitism and promote the security and prosperity of Poland’s Jews. Members of the Joint’s medical unit had themselves mused that a nursing school in Poland’s capital, committed to improving the health of all of the country’s citizens, would be “an entering wedge for a small beginning of cooperation with the [Polish] Government through its Ministry of Health.”37 The Joint’s medical commission turned its focus to establishing a school in Warsaw, the nerve center of the country’s political life. Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s plan for a school in Kraków was, for the time being, scrapped. A nurses’ school established in Wilno in May 1922 by the OZE was given five thousand dollars—an amount 34 “Report of Medical Commission Conference”; Syrkin-Binsztejnowa to Director of MedicoSanitary Department, December 29, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 372; “Curriculum,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 372. 35 On the history of the American Red Cross–sponsored school in Warsaw, see Maria Barbara Jezierska, Pochylone nad człowiekem: Z dziejów Warszawskiej Szkoły Piel˛egniarstwa, 1921– 1945 (Warsaw, 1991). The ARC also opened a nursing school in Poznań in 1921. 36 Anna Bercowitz to Morris Waldman, January 17, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 37 “Conference with Mr. Waldman, March 8, 1922,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 360. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 329 that, according to one Joint official, “cleared us [the JDC] of any obligation” for its operations.38 Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s nursing school proposal also passed through the hands of nursing experts in the United States, including faculty at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College. While nearly all approved of her call to expand the responsibilities and authority provided to female nurses, they were unanimous in one critique: they complained that Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s proposal did not mention the need to employ American nurses as the school’s teachers and supervisors.39 They were convinced that Americans were at the cutting edge of medical expertise and women’s professional training and that it was their duty and destiny to export these skills abroad. They urged JDC officials to create a school that not only bore the stamp of American expertise but also embodied American Progressive values. As a frame of reference, some JDC officials turned to the work of the Zionist women’s organization Hadassah in bringing American nursing experts to Mandate Palestine, where they established a nurses’ training school in 1921.40 Circulating SyrkinBinsztejnowa’s revised plan across the United States, they began their search for an American nurse who could carry out this mission. From Gainesville to Warsaw The woman chosen for the task was Amelia Greenwald (1881–1966). Raised in Gainesville, Alabama, she had rebelled from an early age against the expectations of her father, a wealthy German-Jewish grain dealer who served for a time as the town’s mayor. Mesmerized by her father’s accounts of the nurses he met on the Civil War’s battlefields, Amelia decided from an early age that nursing was her life’s calling. Her parents vehemently objected and insisted that nursing, or any work for that matter, was unbecoming of a respectable woman of her social status. They did their best to make their daughter conform to the bourgeois norms of femininity—including throwing a lavish party for her “debut” in society. Their efforts were to no avail: at the age of 25, over her parent’s objections, an unmarried Amelia fled Gainesville and 38 Meeting Minutes, Medical Committee, November 14–29, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 362. In the same meeting, it was reported that the Warsaw Nurses’ Training School would receive $50,000 from the JDC. 39 Bernard Flexner to Josephine Goldmark, April 10, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 40 See Nira Bartal, Chemla ve-yeda: Reshit miktsoa hasi’ud be-erets yisra’el, 1918–1948 (Jerusalem, 2005); Dafna Hirsch, “Interpreters of the Occident to the Awakening Orient: The Jewish Public Health Nurse in Mandate Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (2008): 227–55. 330 D. K. HELLER enrolled in a nurses’ training school in New Orleans. After further studies in Baltimore, she eventually found her way to New York City as a student at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where some of the most exciting experiments in professional nursing were taking place.41 Greenwald’s arrival in New York brought her into contact with Lillian Wald (1867–1940), the famed suffragette and civil rights activist and nursing’s foremost pioneer and advocate. In 1893, Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. Sponsored by German-Jewish philanthropists and patterned on organizations in England, the Henry Street Settlement was part of a broader movement in which middle-class, educated women moved to impoverished urban neighborhoods in order to address a variety of social ills they associated with poverty. The nurses who lived at the Henry Street Settlement gained national attention for the health care they provided to immigrants living in the neighborhood’s tenements, the beginners’ English courses they taught, and their lectures on citizenship and domestic science. Serving simultaneously as health experts and social workers, the nurses strove to help their clients adjust to American life and to bridge the city’s divides of religion, class, and race. Wald had coined the term “public health nurse” to emphasize the extent to which nurses would join forces with public agencies to promote social welfare on a municipal, national, and even global scale. Inspired by the American Progressive movement, she believed that female public health activists would play a critical role in cultivating understanding between nations and fostering world peace. Although Wald relied upon traditional concepts of women’s roles as moral guides and caregivers, she used these ideas to expand the professional authority and political power they could wield in public affairs.42 Greenwald was enthralled by Wald’s demand that nurses be treated as medical authorities and that women be recognized as vital players in national and international politics. In 1916, she became the director of the New Jersey branch of the Public Health Association, and she served for a time as a nurse for an insurance company that partnered with Wald. In 1918, several months after the United States entered the First World War, Greenwald enlisted as a nurse within the American Expeditionary Force. Upon her return to New York in 1919 after serving in hospitals in France and Germany, she was hired by the National Council of Jewish Women to run a pilot project in upstate 41 For brief accounts of Greenwald’s biography, see Susan Mayer, “Amelia Greenwald and Regina Kaplan: Jewish Nursing Pioneers,” Southern Jewish History 1 (1998): 83–108; Susan Mayer, “Amelia Greenwald: Pioneer in International Public Health,” Nursing and Health Care 15 (1994): 74–78; Leon Sokoloff, “Amelia Greenwald (1881–1966), Pioneer American-Jewish Nurse,” Korot 10 (1993–94): 92–101. 42 Marjorie Feld, Lillian Wald: A Biography (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 53–122. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 331 New York to transform east European Jewish immigrants into farmers. Unsatisfied with the results, she longed for an escape. It was around this time, in the winter of 1922, that Bernard Flexner, the chairman of the JDC’s Committee on Medical Affairs, approached her with Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s nursing school proposal in hand. The impact on Greenwald of Lillian Wald’s vision of women and American Progressivism was unmistakable. Writing to the Felix Warburg, the chairman of the Joint, she enthused, “I want you to know that I am going to Europe determined to do everything in my power to lay the foundation for a work which I hope and believe will someday do for Europe, what the Henry Street Settlement has done for America!”43 In Greenwald’s view, the future nurses’ training school had the power to dissolve hatred between nations and spread peace and progress in Poland and beyond. “I honestly believe,” she wrote Flexner, “that the nurses we are about to train are going to do more to allay the prejudices and to bring about a better understanding between Jewish and non-Jewish people . . . than any other agency in the land.”44 In keeping with Wald’s call for the professionalization of women, she called on JDC officials to view her as an expert invested with sufficient authority to operate independently. She insisted to Flexner that she “should be unhandicapped by set rules and regulations, of any kind of red tape which might embarrass her in planning and executing her program.”45 Likely as a consequence of Greenwald’s demand, the nurses’ training school remained outside the jurisdiction of a new Polish Jewish health society organized by JDC officials to take over their work when their American staff left Poland in 1923. The Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population (TOZ) included among its directors none other than Zofia Syrkin-Binsztejnowa.46 While the Joint’s executive committee was searching for an American expert in the winter of 1922, Syrkin-Binsztejnowa had assembled her own group of local medical experts to establish a nurses’ training school. In her earliest proposal to the Joint, she had suggested that the nurses’ training school in Warsaw be run by the city’s largest and most prestigious Jewish hospital. Established in 1902 in Czyste, a neighborhood near the city’s western limits, the hospital housed over 1200 beds.47 Renowned for its training 43 Amelia Greenwald to Felix Warburg, January 19, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 44 Amelia Greenwald to Bernard Flexner, July 17, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 45 Amelia Greenwald to Bernard Flexner, December 17, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 46 Z. Syrkin-Binsztejnowa to J. J. Golub, October 20, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 370; J. J. Golub to Gershon Levin, October 20, 1922, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 370. 47 On the history of the Jewish hospital in Czyste, see R. Feldshu, “Batei holim yehudiim be-varshe,” in Entsiklopedyah shel galuyot, ed. Y. Grinboim (Tel Aviv, 1959), 2:579–86. 332 D. K. HELLER of doctors, the Czyste hospital had already formed a committee in November 1921 to raise funds for a nurses’ training school. By March 1922, Poland’s Ministry of Internal Affairs approved the committee’s statute, granting them permission to open a school on the second floor of the hospital’s administration building. When the committee turned to the Joint for financial aid, their request was quickly accepted. Simultaneously, Syrkin-Binsztejnowa was informed that an American nurse, with American expertise, would lead the school. The committee was told to put all their work on hold and await Greenwald’s arrival.48 Designing Polish Jewish Women: The Warsaw School of Nursing When Greenwald arrived at the Czyste hospital in April 1923, she brought detailed blueprints from the United States for establishing a nurses’ training school. Turning to Lillian Wald as an inspiration, Greenwald was convinced that her American expertise in public health provided her with the necessary tools to train and transform the school’s nursing students and to convince Polish Jews and Polish government officials to view Jewish women as critical players in the country’s civic life. “The seeds we are sowing,” she wrote JDC officials in New York, “are bound to take root—and to spread—just as it did in America.”49 Her first task was to assemble the school’s first students. From the outset, Greenwald strove to weed out any women she deemed incapable of adopting the skills and values she sought to instill. In keeping with the Henry Street Settlement’s program, she believed that middle-class women were the ideal candidates to cultivate the physical and moral health of east European Jewry. Publishing advertisements throughout Poland, Greenwald warned prospective candidates of the hefty enrollment fees they faced. The price of admission, she wrote to JDC administrators in New York, would “not only help make the school self sufficient . . . but it also helps to get a better class of girls.”50 The steep tuition fee was not the only barrier faced by prospective candidates to attend the school. They were also expected to have completed six years of gymnasium. Of the 108 students who applied to the nursing school, only 23 were admitted. The age of the students ranged between 18 and 25, but most students were 22 years old. They were culled from provinces 48 J. J. Golub to Z. Syrkin-Binsztejnowa, January 15, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 373. 49 Fourth Report of the Nurses Training School, December 26, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 50 Amelia Greenwald to the Committee on Medical Affairs, March 5, 1925, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 333 to the east of Warsaw, with the largest contingent coming from the eastern borderland provinces of Tarnopol, Wołyń, Nowogródek, and Wilno.51 The disproportionate presence of young women from the eastern borderlands was no accident. Greenwald reasoned that local women would prove the most effective in spreading the “gospel of health” to the region in Poland that most concerned the JDC. The school’s rigorous selection process did not prevent Greenwald from venting to JDC staff in New York about the “eastern” habits of her recruits. As the child of wealthy German Jewish immigrants and a former public health nurse in New York, Greenwald had ample exposure to negative portrayals of eastern European Jews. Writing to the JDC’s Committee on Medical Affairs in New York, she echoed long-standing stereotypes about the “backwardness” of Jews from eastern Europe. Most of her students, she lamented, “are ignorant of the first principles of sanitation or even of personal hygiene; they have no idea of order of any kind and have never been disciplined in their lives.”52 Although nearly all of the recruits were raised in large towns or cities, she later recalled that “nearly all had come from small, primitive villages” and, as a result, were “extremely careless and indifferent to their environment.”53 Three months into her stay in Warsaw, she concluded that the apparent lack of cleanliness among Jewish women throughout Poland was “due simply and solely to laziness . . . on the part of the women of the homes.”54 Her comments betrayed the extent to which she was deaf to the daily struggles faced by most Polish Jewish women. In a country plagued by persistent economic crisis, devoting hours upon hours of attention to household aesthetics was likely viewed by many Jews as a luxury they could not afford. Envisioning her work as a civilizing mission, Greenwald was convinced that it was her duty to transform the attitudes and behaviors of her students. To do so, she extended the school’s training program beyond the classroom and into the nurses’ living quarters. Writing to the secretary of the Joint’s Committee on Medical Affairs about seven weeks after the school had opened, Amelia reported that she had devised a curriculum in household economics to “give the girls practical experience in house-keeping.”55 51 Amelia Greenwald, “Second Report of Nurses Training School,” November 4, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364; Greenwald to Committee on Nurses’ Training School, Warsaw, June 16, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–23, folder 132; Greenwald, “Nurses Training School, Warsaw, Report: 1929,” JDC Archives, NY21–32 folder 368, 68. 52 Amelia Greenwald to the Committee on Medical Affairs, March 5, 1925. 53 Amelia Greenwald, untitled and undated document recounting the history of the Warsaw Nurses Training School, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 367. 54 Amelia Greenwald to Ruth Kohn, August 26, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 55 Greenwald to Kohn, August 26, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 334 D. K. HELLER Figure 1. Students pose for a Polish-language brochure for the Warsaw School of Nursing, 1928. Szkoła Piel˛egniarstwa przy szpitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie, 1923–1928, Prospekt (Warsaw: Nakład Bernarda Weingarta, 1928). Students were evaluated daily on the cleanliness of their rooms—any crease on their bed linens, wrinkle in their clothes, or dust on the floor could be grounds for punishment. Other rooms in the nurses’ residence were curated to serve as models in bourgeois living. Greenwald outfitted their common room with a baby grand piano, Persian carpet, lace curtains in the widows, tastefully placed plants, and polished tables to host guests for tea.56 A brochure produced by the school several years later included a picture of the nursing students in their pink uniforms gathered around the table reading literature, while one of their peers played piano, sitting with perfect posture (fig. 1). Another showed the students gathered for afternoon tea in the hospital’s garden, sitting under a canopy with a crisp white tablecloth and cutlery meticulously laid out on the table.57 Greenwald’s gleeful reports on her students’ progress in learning the choreography of bourgeois womanhood underscored her belief that these etiquette lessons would soon spread throughout Poland. “The girls,” she wrote to a JDC staff member in New York, “have taken hold wonderfully, and I am sure they will never be willing to live in untidy homes 56 Sabina Schindlerówna, Szkoła Piel˛egniarstwa przy szpitalu starozakonnych w Warszawie, 1923–1928, Prospekt (Warsaw, 1928), 16. 57 Schindlerówna, Szkoła Piel˛egniarstwa, 16, 20. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 335 again. . . . They can hardly wait to go home to show their mothers how to clean up the house.”58 She also reminded the Joint’s staff that her exercises in cleanliness brought with them moral improvement, and she proudly noted that these transformations were already changing the ways in which Jews and non-Jews alike viewed Jewish women in Poland. Writing to Bernard Flexner, she enthusiastically reported, “Almost everyone who visits the school immediately remarks, ‘they are too well mannered to be local girls,’ or, ‘what have you done to them?’ They really show a marked improvement in every way, and admit the fact themselves.”59 Among those whom Greenwald sought most to impress were Polish government officials. She sought to cultivate a relationship with Warsaw’s municipal health authorities, hoping that they would eventually approve a longterm lease for the school and commit some of their budget to funding its activities. She believed that they would only accept this request if she could prove that Jews were patriotic citizens, eager to contribute to Poland’s development. Turning her students into patriots of Poland was no easy task. Back home in the eastern borderlands, many of them had experienced first hand the antisemitism of Polish soldiers and government officials. The linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity of Poland came as something of a shock to Greenwald upon her arrival. She was surprised to discover that in addition to speaking Yiddish, most of her recruits spoke Russian, not Polish—a product, she soon learned, of the fact that they were raised in a region previously under Russian rule, where Poles were a minority. Frustrated by Jewish linguistic diversity, Greenwald evinced little sympathy for the challenges faced by her students. Writing to Bernard Flexner in July 1923, she insisted that “they should speak that language [Polish] from now on, if they are to work in this country, as they expect to do.”60 Just as the Henry Street Settlement provided English lessons to eastern European Jewish immigrants in order to ease their integration into the United States, so too would Greenwald’s school provide Polish lessons to facilitate the integration of Jewish women into the new Polish state. Greenwald made the study of Polish obligatory for her students and worked strenuously to ensure that Polish was the primary spoken language in the school’s classrooms. The fruits of her labor, she admitted, led to a somewhat comical situation: along with her teaching assistants from Britain, Greenwald taught in English “through interpreters who spoke in Polish to students who thought in Russian.”61 The experience, she confessed, was demoralizing. Despite her ef58 Amelia Greenwald to Ruth Kohn, August 26, 1923. 59 Amelia Greenwald to Bernard Flexner, July 17, 1923. 60 Greenwald to Flexner, July 17, 1923. 61 Amelia Greenwald, untitled and undated document recounting the history of the Warsaw Nurses Training School, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 367. 336 D. K. HELLER forts, government officials continued to express hostility toward the school. Without pointing to a specific incident, Greenwald lamented to Joint officials in New York in December 1923, “if Poland only but knew—she’s closing her eyes to one of the greatest opportunities she ever had—that of encouraging in these girls love and work for their country.”62 In her view, the Joint would have to take up this task. Eventually, she hoped, the students’ knowledge of Polish would be sufficient to enable them to tend to Catholic Poles, who would discover that Jewish women were loyal and patriotic citizens of Poland. In Greenwald’s view, the nurses’ ability to speak Polish would not be sufficient to prove the patriotism of Polish Jewish women: their authority as American-trained medical experts would also be required in order to transform the ways in which Catholic Poles envisioned Jews. Greenwald saw medical expertise as a powerful tool to change the ways in which women were perceived in civic life by Jews and Catholic Poles alike. She believed that nursing programs such as the one run by J. J. Golub in Równe reinforced the tendency of (mostly male) doctors to view nurses as no more than menial laborers with little ability to make their own medical decisions. Only the acquisition of medical expertise based on rigorous study and practical training would empower Polish Jewish women as medical activists in their own right. Greenwald had more than women’s advancement and Polish-Jewish relations in mind: given that Jewish medical experts were sorely needed in the kresy, Jewish nurses needed to be prepared to work without the constant guidance and supervision of a doctor. Committed to exporting American expertise to Poland, Greenwald scrapped Syrkin-Binsztejnowa’s curriculum guidelines and instead imported a curriculum approved by the United States League of Nursing. It was as expansive as it was demanding. Apart from a three-week vacation, students were expected to remain on the premises of the hospital for their two years of training. Beginning their day as early as 5:30 am, they would divide their time between lectures and bedside training. Over thirty subjects were listed in the school’s curriculum. Gathering in a classroom, the students would devote 160 hours to physiology and anatomy. In a series of courses lasting between fifteen to thirty hours each, students were introduced to bacteriology, nursing for children, internal diseases, and mental illnesses. A laboratory set up in one of the schoolrooms served as a training ground for pharmacology. A demonstration room provided students the opportunity to hone their skills in the operating room and learn techniques for bandaging. A mock kitchen provided the training ground for offering nutritional advice to patients. Over 62 Amelia Greenwald to Committee on Medical Affairs, December 26, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 337 the course of their training, students would also rotate across the various wards in the hospital, spending three months each in the surgery, internal disease, and children’s wards; two months each in the operating room and maternity ward; and one month in the ophthalmology ward. Students were also required to commit two months of their time to public health work beyond the hospital’s walls. Serving Warsaw’s population as social workers and public health activists, they staffed mobile consultation units and conducted inspections of homes. Finally, with an eye to training the nurses to take on leadership roles in Jewish medical institutions, every student took a course in hospital administration.63 Although Greenwald was convinced that her ambition, confidence, and convictions represented the best that the United States could bring to Poland, local Jews who were invested in the school’s success were far more skeptical of her program’s ability to succeed. As soon as the academic year began in July 1923, tensions flared between Greenwald and the school’s local committee, which was primarily made up of Jewish doctors affiliated with the Czyste hospital. As with all their initiatives in eastern Europe, JDC officials expected local Jews to offer substantial financial contributions to their ventures and eventually to take complete fiscal responsibility for them. Greenwald was no exception. In the fall of 1923, she complained to Flexner that local money was not coming in as expected.64 As the months progressed, she increasingly accused the school’s local committee of failing to take any interest in the school’s financial state and charged them with finding “a thousand and one ways in which to dodge their responsibilities.”65 The lack of training equipment in the hospital wards was the direct result, she wrote, of the school committee’s negligence.66 Greenwald’s reports to the local committee, often written in a brash and exasperated tone, also reveal the extent to which she struggled to assert her authority and expertise. Apart from Zofia Syrkin-Binsztejnowa, all the committee’s members were male doctors. They bristled at Greenwald’s confidence and her refusal to defer to them. Demanding that the committee explain why they chose to deny several of her requests, Greenwald insisted that her professional credentials were more than sufficient proof that her views had to be taken seriously. She reminded the committee, “I have been sent to 63 Schindlerówna, Szkoła Piel˛egniarstwa, 28–46. 64 Amelia Greenwald to Bernard Flexner, November 19, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 364. 65 Amelia Greenwald, Sixth Report of the Nurses Training School, September 1, 1924, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 66 Greenwald, Fourth Report of the Nurses Training School, December 26, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 338 D. K. HELLER Poland as a specialist in organization”; her expertise, she added, meant that “you should be ready to give me the closest cooperation.”67 Greenwald also took issue with what she perceived to be the committee’s attempt to legislate the lives of her students after their graduation. Reviewing the statutes they had prepared for the nurses’ school, she objected to a clause stipulating that the committee would determine where the nurses would work. “The nurse,” Greenwald insisted, “has a perfect right to exercise her own judgment as to where she will practice—and unless your Polish young women are vastly different from others, they will be apt to choose the hospital or other positions which might appeal to the individual as being most attractive in point of view of useful service, pleasant environment and fair remuneration.”68 Greenwald also struggled to convince the hospital’s medical staff to treat the nursing students as medical professionals. Describing her students as a cut above the nurses currently working at the hospital, Greenwald rejected the hospital’s request to use her students for tasks she deemed too menial. Such a scenario, she complained, would amount to exploitation, not meaningful medical training.69 JDC officials in New York and within their European headquarters in Vienna were forced to intervene in the growing conflict between Greenwald and her Polish Jewish colleagues. Reviewing Greenwald’s angry reports to the local school committee, they second-guessed her depictions of its members. Bernhard Kahn, the chairman of the Joint’s European offices, reported to Bernard Flexner that Greenwald’s inability to speak the languages of Polish Jewry was a barrier between her and the committee and that “she is not a clever enough diplomat to be in a position to manipulate amidst the somewhat difficult conditions prevailing in Poland.” Kahn assured Flexner that the committee was “composed of very earnestly thinking, influential and honorable people,” although he quickly added, “of course these are Polish Jews who must be measured by different measures than those applicable, for instance, to American, English or German Jews.”70 Kahn decided to travel to Warsaw in the fall of 1924 to intervene personally in the school’s operation. Under his guidance, the local committee signed an agreement pledging to contribute a substantial percentage of the school’s funds. By the winter of 67 Amelia Greenwald to the Training School Committee, January 26, 1924, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 68 Amelia Greenwald to Adolf Weisblat, November 24, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 69 Greenwald to Weisblat, November 24, 1923, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 70 Bernhard Kahn to Bernard Flexner, September 25, 1924, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 339 1925, Greenwald’s despondency began to wane. Thanks to Kahn’s intervention, she quipped, “the committee and I have smoked a pipe of peace and expect to live happily ever after—at least for a while.”71 Whatever tensions simmered between them were put aside, even if temporarily, during the graduation exercises of the school’s first class in October 1925. The lavish ceremony was an occasion that provided the school’s administrators with an opportunity to present to Polish officials, foreign dignitaries, and the Jewish public their vision for Jewish women’s roles in Poland’s civic life. Tellingly, of all the speeches delivered by the school’s director, committee members, and students, only one made a passing reference to interests and concerns unique to Jews.72 Instead, the speakers, one after the other, showcased the civic duties and responsibilities that their graduates, and other Polish Jewish women, could perform for all of Poland’s citizens. Greenwald told her audience that “humanitarian and patriotic aims” had drawn the young graduates to nursing. Turning toward her students, she added that the training “developed within you a more clear perspective on the obligations of citizens and a greater understanding of national obligations.” To make her case for the broader participation of Jewish women in Poland’s public affairs, Greenwald emphasized the capability and enthusiasm of her students. “Thanks to your intelligence, initiative and entrepreneurship,” she added, “you will find a rich field for cooperating [with Poland’s non-Jewish citizens] in the rebuilding of your beautiful homeland.”73 Members of the school’s committee and hospital administration similarly emphasized their students’ commitment to Poland and desire to serve universalist rather than uniquely Jewish aims. Adolf Weisblat, the Czyste hospital’s director, began his speech by quoting from Poland’s national bard, Adam Mickiewicz, relating to the students the famed Polish author’s ideas about good governance in Poland. Linking Mickiewicz’s ideas to the nursing profession, he told the young graduates that “the highest form of love is to love all of humanity, to love individuals, families and the society around whom you live.”74 Eight months later, when Józef Piłsudski staged a successful coup d’état, the administration of the Warsaw School of Nursing renewed its pledge to 71 Amelia Greenwald to Committee on Medical Affairs, March 5, 1925. JDC Archives, NY21– 32, folder 366. 72 Luba Bielicka, “My a nasza szkoła,” in Piel˛egniarka: Pismo wydane z inicjatywy słuchaczek szkoły z okazji ukończenia kursu nauk 1-go zespoły szkoły piel˛egniarek przy szpitalu starozakonnych w warszawie w 1925 roku (Warsaw, 1926), 22–23. This booklet was published several months after the graduation ceremony and includes speeches delivered at the graduation. The booklet is located in Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw, call no. 650.251. For the speaking roster at the ceremony, see “First Class Graduating Exercises,” JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 73 Amelia Greenwald, “Do pierwszych absolwentek szkoły (przekład),” in Piel˛egniarka, 7–9. 74 Adolf Weisblat, Piel˛egniarka, 10. 340 D. K. HELLER train Polish Jewish women to take part in Poland’s civic life. Piłsudski and his supporters described the coup as an attempt to restore civic virtue and patriotism to a country whose political, religious, and economic factionalism had brought it to the brink of destruction. The new regime called for a sanacja (purification) of Poland’s political life and a “moral cleansing” of its citizens. The country’s inhabitants were encouraged to envision themselves as citizen-soldiers, working together to bring peace and prosperity to Poland.75 Piłsudski’s calls for the country’s citizens to transcend their differences endeared him to many Polish Jews, as did his promise to restrain his antisemitic rivals on the Polish ethnonationalist Right.76 Joining dozens of other civic organizations in Poland, the Warsaw School of Nursing eagerly adopted the Sanacja movement’s calls for the moral renewal and healing of Poland’s citizens. Writing promotional material for the Joint’s American Jewish patrons, Greenwald presented the school as if it were at the front lines of Piłsudski’s quest to transform Poland. Describing the street battles that accompanied the coup d’état, she recalled the wounded soldiers who poured into the Czyste hospital. One of the soldiers, along with a wounded Polish university student, allegedly accosted the nurses, saying that they would “rather die than be treated in a Jewish hospital.” When the teary-eyed nurses ran to Greenwald, she recalled, “I explained to them that this was their opportunity to show these unfortunate creatures how kind they could be when circumstances were reversed and they, who usually had the advantage, were in the nurses’ power. That it was likewise their opportunity to show these men the difference between what the Jewish people are, and what in their ignorance, they believed them to be.” Two days later, she reported, the university student returned to thank the nurses and apologize to them: “He said he had come to the realization of the error of his prejudices, and that he had learned from valuable lessons at the Jewish hospital, lessons he should have learned at home and school.” The soldier soon followed: returning to the hospital to thank the nurses, he allegedly told Greenwald: “Your nurses cured more than my wounds—they cured me of the hatred I have been taught from my cradle to 75 For overviews of the Sanacja’s policies and practices, see Antony Polonsky, Politics in Inde- pendent Poland (Oxford, 1972), 147–390; Joseph Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat (New York, 1966), 157–372. On the Sanacja’s campaign to transform Poland’s citizens, see Plach, Clash of Moral Nations; Heidi Hein, Der Piłsudski-Kult und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat, 1926–1939 (Marburg, 2002). 76 See, e.g., Jacek Walicki, Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce w latach 1926–1930 (Łódź, 2005), 133–48; Szymon Rudnicki, Żydzi w parlamencie II Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 2004), 223– 41; Natalia Aleksiun, “Regards from My Shtetl: Polish Jews Write to Piłsudski, 1933–1935,” Polish Review 56 (2011): 57–71. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 341 entertain, and to practice against them. May God forgive me for the injustice I have committed against them, as they seem to have done.”77 Although Greenwald’s account bears more than a trace of literary flourish, it underscores the depth of her conviction that the nurses’ patience, skill, and empathy had the power to win over the hearts and minds of Polish antisemites. It also reflected her commitment to Lillian Wald’s belief that public health nurses could facilitate interpersonal interactions across religious, class, and national lines, and in doing so could dissolve preexisting hostility between various groups. She insisted to American Jewish patrons of the JDC that the Polish government recognized her school’s profound impact on Poland’s public affairs, and she even claimed that she was the first woman in Poland to be awarded the Cross of Merit (Krzyż Zasługi). In her account of the ceremony, President Ignacy Mościcki described her school as “one of the greatest contributions to the reconstruction of Poland.”78 Curiously, Greenwald was short on other details, offering no information about when the event took place. Indeed, a search of Cross of Merit winners between 1923 and 1926 did not turn up Greenwald’s name. The specifics were left to the reader’s imagination.79 Despite Greenwald’s desire to remain in Warsaw and expand her network of nurses across Poland, the Joint held fast to its commitment to placing the nurses’ training school in local hands. Greenwald left Poland in December 1926. Replacing her as director of the school was a former student, Sabina Schindlerówna. In many respects, Schindlerówna, at the time twenty-seven years old, embodied the “success story” Greenwald peddled to the JDC’s American Jewish donors. Born in the town of Zaleszczyki in eastern Galicia, she had graduated from a Polish-language gymnasium and spent two years as a student at Warsaw University. At the age of twenty-three, she enrolled in the nurses’ training school and quickly outshone her peers.80 Greenwald was so impressed with Schindlerówna’s leadership and organizational skills that she convinced the Joint to sponsor her training as an administrator at a famed hospital in Berlin, and later at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College. In 1925, Schindlerówna was appointed assistant director of the nurses’ training school, and she spent a year working alongside Greenwald. In letters 77 Greenwald, “Nurses Training School, Warsaw, Report: 1929,” 24–27. 78 Greenwald, “Nurses Training School, Warsaw, Report: 1929,” 33. 79 Greenwald was likely embellishing details of an audience she had with Ignacy Mościcki at the Presidential Palace prior to her departure in December 1926. Journalists with Haynt reported snippets of their conversation and noted that he gave her a gift—an autographed photograph. See “Di oyfname fun mis grinvald baym melukhe-prezident,” Haynt, December 17, 1926. For a reference to her receipt of the Golden Cross of Merit, see “American Expert to Study Hadassah Service,” Palestine Post, December 8, 1932. 80 “Z żałobnej karty B.p. Sabina Schindlerówna,” Piel˛egniarka Polska 2 (1938): 52. 342 D. K. HELLER addressed to Joint officials in New York, she spoke fluent Joint-ese: signing off on a letter to Bernard Flexner, she offered her “best wishes for the further success in your work for the benefit of humanity.”81 To what extent did the nurses’ training school’s Polish Jewish staff continue Greenwald’s campaign to use public health initiatives as a means to further Jewish women’s participation in Poland’s civic life and transform PolishJewish relations? At the time of Greenwald’s departure, Poland was home to a small but growing number of Jewish organizations founded to fight for women’s interests and help them realize their full potential.82 They were the Jewish counterparts of a broader constellation of organizations founded by Catholic Polish women who were similarly taking up the cause of women’s advancement in public life.83 As many of the Jewish organizations were headquartered in Warsaw, the Czyste hospital’s nursing students had access to associational life that echoed the values promoted within their school’s corridors. Among the school’s students to venture into the territory of Jewish women’s political activism was Sara Goł˛ebianka. A member of the first class of nursing students, her talent as a writer caught the eye of Greenwald, who published two of her articles and a poem in a commemorative booklet for the school’s graduates.84 In 1928, Goł˛ebianka decided to put her literary skills to use and place the activity of the Czyste nursing school firmly within broader discussions in Polish Jewish society about the place of women in the public sphere. Her writing found a home in Ewa, a weekly newspaper described by its editor as a forum for “the modern Jewish woman fighting for full emancipation and active, direct participation in the building of Jewish national life.”85 Although the newspaper was affiliated with the local branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, Zionism was but one of a range of topics covered in the newspaper, from sexuality, hygiene, and birth control to Jewish women’s campaigns to gain the vote in kehillah elections and serve in all levels of Poland’s government.86 Nestled between these articles were Goł˛ebianka’s portraits of the Czyste hospital, part of a larger series in which Ewa valorized professional Jewish women working for the public good. Her work was chosen to appear in the newspaper’s inaugural issue, 81 Sabina Schindler to Bernard Flexner, April 20, 1927, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 366. 82 On the rise of these organizations, see Mickute, “Modern, Jewish and Female.” 83 Plach, Clash of Moral Nations, 102–32. 84 Sara Goł˛ebianka, “Kwiaty,” in Piel˛egniarka, 17; Goł˛ebianka, “Nasza praca wychowawcza na terenie szpitalnym” in Piel˛egniarka, 19-21. 85 “Od Redakcji,” Ewa: Pismo tygodniowe, February 19, 1928, quoted in Mickute, “Modern, Jewish and Female,” 114. 86 On the history and publications of Ewa, see Mickute, “Modern, Jewish and Female.” THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 343 which showcased the various opportunities available to the “new” Polish Jewish woman.87 The bourgeois, “noblesse oblige” attitude that Greenwald articulated to her students was alive and well in Goł˛ebianka’s articles. She related to her readers—themselves mostly middle-class Jewish women—how Jewish nurses were participating in a moral revolution, engaging in a civilizing project for the hospital’s patients, “people from the lowest rungs of society, people with very tenuous morals.” Under the guidance of women, she explained, a hospital could transform into a laboratory for social engineering. Much as a housewife could influence the behavior of her guests, so too, Goł˛ebianka reasoned, could nurses change the behavior of their patients. Besides tending to the physical health of the sick, nurses were charged with “standing . . . against a whole range of small and large violations of ethics and culture.”88 By serving as role models to their patients, nurses could cultivate in their patients mercy, compassion, and the desire to help their fellow citizens. Paying tribute to her American training, Goł˛ebianka described Lillian Wald as a pioneer in cultivating women’s potential as moral reformers through their work in public health.89 Other journalists writing in Ewa similarly emphasized the moral and cultural transformations promoted by the nurses’ training school, taking special note of its “unmatched cleanliness,” its vases filled with flowers, and its walls decorated with “tasteful art.”90 Goł˛ebianka’s articles also sought to highlight the skill with which the Czyste hospital’s nurses excelled in their profession. In vignettes recounting a day in the life of a nurse, she offered intimate portraits of her patients, from a terminally ill child, begging to return home to his mother, to the wife of an elderly man, holding his hand, desperately searching for any sign of improvement.91 Her accounts showcased the combination of tact, courage, and compassion that nurses brought to their work—qualities that, as another Ewa correspondent noted, proved that nursing was a profession that “nature herself appointed women to undertake.”92 Although Goł˛ebianka’s articles in Ewa reproduced Greenwald’s civilizing discourse and celebration of women’s professional capabilities, she did not echo Greenwald’s musings on the civic duty of Jewish women toward the Polish state. When it came to interacting with Polish government officials, 87 S. A. Goł˛ebianka, “Z pami˛etnika piel˛egniarki,” Ewa, February 19, 1928. 88 Goł˛ebianka, “Z pami˛etnika piel˛egniarki.” 89 S. A. Goł˛ebianka, “Wielka piel˛egniarka,” Ewa, November 30, 1930. 90 Adam Asnes, “Szkoła piel˛egniarstwa w warszawie,” Ewa, June 29, 1930. 91 S. A. Goł˛ebianka, “Z pami˛etnika piel˛egniarki,” Ewa, March 18, 1928; “Najmłodszemu ze- społowi piel˛egniarstwa,” Ewa, January 6, 1929; “Chelica,” Ewa, August 17, 1930. 92 Mgr. R. Muszkatblutówna, “Szkoła piel˛egniarstwa,” Ewa, May 6, 1928. 344 D. K. HELLER however, the Czyste school’s staff remained committed to showcasing their patriotism for Poland. There were significant financial incentives to do so. In the years since Greenwald’s departure, the JDC reported that Warsaw’s municipal government was increasingly subsidizing the school, providing as much as 50 percent of its working budget in 1927.93 The government also hired and paid graduates from the school to serve as public health nurses, making these women among the very few Jews in the country to be employed as civil servants on government salaries.94 Searching for ways in which to fortify the school’s relationship with the Polish government, the school’s staff skillfully reached out to government figures active in Polish women’s organizations affiliated with the Sanacja, appealing to their common desire to expand women’s participation in civic life. On the fifth anniversary of the school’s opening, its faculty hosted Michalina Mościcka, the Polish president’s wife, for a tour of their nursing school and assured her that its graduates would “go to the small Jewish shtetls and spread hygienic practices among the poor masses.”95 The school’s staff also sought to cultivate a relationship with their Catholic Polish peers in the nursing profession. Although they were refused admission into the American Red Cross nurses’ training schools, Jewish women were permitted membership in Poland’s national nursing association (Stowarzyszenie Piel˛egniarek Zawodowych). The Czyste school’s nurses sought to use the association as a platform to build bridges with Catholic Polish women. Goł˛ebianka and Schindlerówna both served on the editorial board of the association’s journal, Piel˛egniarka Polska (Poland’s nurse), and graduates from the school published several articles in the journal on public health initiatives in Poland and abroad.96 Noting from afar their participation in the association’s life, Greenwald beamed, “Never before was there the cordial spirit, the friendly intercourse or the helpful interchange of ideas that exist today, between these mixed groups.”97 Sabina Schinderówna was less effusive. Writing to Greenwald, she described the students and graduates of the Warsaw ARC school as “friend-enemies . . . who lose no opportunities to take advantage of the weaknesses in order to interfere with our 93 Amelia Greenwald to Mary Beard, February 5, 1929, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 367. 94 See, e.g., “Ruch Służbony,” Dziennik zarzadu ˛ m. st. Warszawy 81 (1930): 1. 95 “Froy melukhe-prezidentin moshchitska’s bezukh in der yudisher kranken-shvester shule,” Haynt, March 21, 1929. 96 See, e.g., Sara Goł˛ebianka, “Dokształcenie absolwentek szkół piel˛egniarstwa w zakresie zdrowia publicznego,” Piel˛egniarka Polska 5 (May 1929): 28–31; “Szkolenie słuchaczek w szpitalu,” Piel˛egniarka Polska 11–12 (November–December 1930): 25–33; Luba Bielicka, “Z wrażeń zagranicznych,” Piel˛egniarka Polska 2 (February 1931): 30–34; M. Rechtmanówna, “Ze szpitala dzieci˛ecego w Berlinie,” Piel˛egniarka Polska 6 (June 1931): 95–100. 97 Greenwald, “Nurses Training School, Warsaw, Report: 1929,” 39. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 345 affairs.”98 Schindlerówna, too, identified “antisemitic feelings” among the ARC school’s staff, and she accused them of trying to sabotage the attendance of the Czyste school’s nurses at the International Conference of Nurses in 1928. Yet whatever tensions there may have been, the participation of both groups in the nursing association’s life seems to point to some degree of exchange and interaction, however limited. Jewish Nursing in Crisis: The Decline of the Warsaw School of Nursing Throughout the 1930s, Poland’s increasingly bleak political and economic conditions made Greenwald’s vision for the social, cultural, and political roles of Jewish nurses all the more difficult to realize. The onset of the Great Depression forced the Joint’s executive in New York to drastically reduce its subsidies for Jewish organizations abroad, including those dedicated to providing medical aid.99 By 1933, with the rise of the Third Reich, they increasingly directed money to help ameliorate the plight of German-Jewish refugees.100 Although the Joint continued to provide some funding to the Warsaw School of Nursing, they stopped short of trying to develop a national network of schools, as both Syrkin-Binsztejnowa and Greenwald had initially proposed. The school also suffered significant subsidy losses from the Polish government.101 The decision of Poland’s Ministry of Health and Warsaw’s municipal government to dramatically reduce their support for the school from 1931 onward was not only a response to the mounting economic crisis in the country: it was also a product of the rising tide of an increasingly vocal and violent antisemitism, spearheaded initially by the Polish Right, but ultimately spreading across numerous sectors of Catholic Polish society. Eager to dispel the Polish Right’s accusations that the Sanacja was pandering to Jews, or even worse, was under their control, government officials cut back on whatever meager funding they had provided to Jewish public institutions and pushed for antisemitic policies that would limit the economic activity of Jews and encourage their emigration.102 98 Sabina Schindlerówna to Amelia Greenwald, August 1928, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder 368. 99 Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, 41–42; Rakefet Zalashik, “Jewish American Philanthropy and the Crisis of 1929: The Case of OZE-TOZ and the JDC,” in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, ed. Hasia Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New York, 2013), 93–106. 100 Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, 138–79. 101 Sabina Schindlerówna, “Sprawozdanie z działalności Szkoły Piel˛egniarstwa Starozakonnych w Warszawie,” Piel˛egniarka Polska (December 1935), 250. 102 For useful overviews of the rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in 1930s Poland, as well as Jewish responses to these trends, see Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening 346 D. K. HELLER The public health sector was one of many government targets. Beginning in 1933, Warsaw’s police arrested several Jewish doctors and nurses at the Czyste hospital. Claiming that they were communist agitators, government officials demanded that they be dismissed and, in some cases, replaced by Catholic Poles. Turning on its head Greenwald’s image of the Polish Jewish nurse as a partner to the Polish government, a police informant within the hospital insisted to his superiors in the autumn of 1933 that a “communist conspiracy” had taken hold of the Warsaw School of Nursing. The informant argued that the school’s students were particularly susceptible to communist influence because many of them came from the eastern borderlands and spoke Russian among themselves.103 The school’s emphasis on training Jewish women from Poland’s eastern borderlands—once deemed by Greenwald and other staff of the school to be a service to the Polish state—now became a political liability. It is likely that antisemitic hostility also found its way into the Polish Nursing Association. By 1936, Sabina Schindlerówna was no longer on the editorial board of Piel˛egniarka Polska.104 From that point forward, no nurses affiliated with the Czyste hospital contributed articles to the journal. Greenwald’s efforts to popularize professional nursing among the Polish Jewish public and promote more opportunities for Jewish women’s leadership in public life also bore little fruit. Despite the fanfare for the school provided in the JDC’s promotional literature in the mid- to late 1920s, as well as the profiles of the Czyste school in Ewa’s pages, the Polish Jewish press paid relatively little attention to nursing. In the rare moments when Jewish nurses appeared in the pages of Warsaw’s daily newspapers, it was to highlight the economic plight of Jews. Nursing was portrayed as an economically unviable and dangerous job for young Jewish women. In one of several articles describing the untimely deaths of Jewish nurses, a newspaper recalled how a young woman who had come from a troubled family and graduated from the Warsaw School of Nursing committed suicide after tirelessly searching Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln, NE, 2006), 69–130; Emanuel Melzer, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935–1939 (Cincinnati, 1997). 103 Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie (hereafter APW), collection 72, Komisariat Rzadu ˛ m.st. Warszawie, series 2.1, Oddział polityczno-narodowościowy, file 69, 3. For more informant reports on the alleged communist activity among the Czyste hospital’s nurses, see ibid., 1, 6; ibid., file 19, 9. 104 The last time Sabina Schindlerówna’s name appeared on the editorial roster of the journal was in December 1935, when she presented a report on the Warsaw Nurses’ Training School’s activity. See Schindlerówna, “Sprawozdanie z działalności Szkoły Piel˛egniarstwa Starozakonnych w Warszawie,” Piel˛egniarka Polska 12 (December 1935): 250–59. The journal published a brief obituary for Schindlerówna in 1938, when she passed away at the age of 36. See “Z żałobnej karty B.p. Sabina Schindlerówna.” THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 347 for employment as a nurse.105 A journalist for Haynt, Poland’s most widely circulated Yiddish-language newspaper, focused on the dangers that awaited Jewish women who managed to find employment as nurses. He described the fate of Sonia Zaltz: after a desperate search for permanent employment, she was called into the Czyste hospital to help control a typhus and tuberculosis epidemic. She contracted tuberculosis from the patients and died.106 Jewish newspapers laid partial blame on the directors of Jewish hospitals, who were allegedly exploiting the nurses.107 The image of the helpless Polish Jewish nurse fit comfortably within an array of images presented to Polish Jewish readers of the dangers faced by women in the workplace. These images were invoked in the continued debates about women’s ability to participate in public affairs and to wield professional authority. Despite Greenwald’s wish that Jewish public health nurses would prove women’s value in the public sphere once and for all, these debates were remarkably resilient, and they persisted through the final years of the Polish republic with little sign of change or resolution. Greenwald’s hope that the Czyste school’s students would return to Poland’s eastern borderlands and transform its inhabitants also did not materialize as she had expected. In a report submitted to the Joint’s New York headquarters in April 1939, the Czyste nursing school reported the employment status of its 274 graduates. Only 4 percent had chosen to work in provincial hospitals. Nearly one-third of the students remained at the Czyste hospital as permanent and part-time staff, and 27 percent of the graduates were listed as “private nurses”—likely a euphemism, in many cases, for unemployment or piecemeal work as caregivers. In a further rebuke to Greenwald’s vision for Polish Jewish nurses serving the Polish “homeland,” fortyfive of the school’s graduates emigrated to Palestine.108 They were among hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews in the 1930s seeking to leave Poland. Indeed, as one twenty-four-year-old woman noted in her autobiography submitted to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1938, women with nursing degrees were rumored to have a better chance of obtaining immigration certificates to Mandate Palestine.109 When students, however few, did return to eastern Poland to work as nurses or nursing instructors, they did not necessarily seek to promote the social and political vision for Polish Jewish women articulated by the founders 105 “Tragisher zelbstmord fun a yunger yudisher flegerin,” Unzer ekspres, March 10, 1931. 106 “Dos leben un der toyt fun a idisher shvester,” Haynt, December 12, 1932. 107 “Der vey-geshray fun idishn shpitol,” Haynt, May 15, 1929; “Vegen di naye ordnungen in idishn shpitol,” Hayntige Nayes, December 18, 1933. 108 Nina Lubowska, “Report of the Activity of the School of Nursing in Warsaw from April 1, 1938 to March 1, 1939,” JDC Archives, Records of the New York Office, 1933–1944, folder 841. 109 M. [pseud.], YIVO Archives, RG4, autobiography 3520, 20. 348 D. K. HELLER of the Warsaw School of Nursing. Two of the school’s graduates, Estera Szabad and Lisa Aron, returned in the early 1930s to their birthplace, Vilna. They chose to serve as nursing instructors at a school whose vision for Polish Jewish women and public health activism refuted the universalist message initially preached within the corridors of the Czyste hospital. A brief examination of the origins and development of the TOZ School of Nursing in Vilna provides a helpful point of comparison to the Joint’s nursing initiative in Warsaw. Founded in 1922, and revived in 1932 after eight years of inactivity, the school was part of a flourishing network of institutions in the city devoted to building a modern, secular culture in Yiddish.110 The marriage between public health and Yiddish activism in Vilna was due, in no small measure, to the work of Dr. Tsemach Szabad (1864–1935). One of the most important leaders of Vilna’s Jewish community and a tireless proponent of secular Yiddish culture, Szabad had previously served as the chairman of the medical relief organizations EKOPO and OZE. When the Jewish health society TOZ took over OZE institutions in Poland in 1927, Szabad became TOZ’s director in Vilna. In addition to overseeing a network of hospitals, orphanages, and clinics for Jewish mothers and infants, Szabad played a critical role in the city’s Yiddish cultural institutions, including the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the teachers’ training school of the Central Yiddish School Organization (TSYSHO), the Central Education Committee (TsBK), and the Vilna Jewish Education Society (Vilbig).111 Szabad had proposed the establishment of a Jewish nurses’ school to the JDC as early as 1921.112 When he campaigned for the school’s revival in 1931, he relied instead on the Yiddish education network Vilbig, which he had helped to found. Szabad’s colleagues at the nursing school shared the conviction that Yiddish was a language that preserved the “national spirit” of Jews, the basis of Jewish collective identity and a vehicle for promoting a modern, secular Jewish worldview.113 Their commitment to these ideas shaped their vision of the roles that Jewish women could play as public health professionals. In their early promotional literature, they argued that Jewish nurses were needed 110 On Yiddishist activists in interwar Vilna, see Cecile Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Mod- ern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (New York, 2014); David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh, 2005), 126–38. 111 Hirsz Abramowicz, “Dr. Cemach Szabad,” in Profiles of a Lost World, ed. Dina Abramowicz and Jeffrey Shandler, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin (Detroit, 1999), 297–300; Tsemach Szabad, Oytobiografye (Vilna, 1935). See also Folksgezunt 2 (February 20, 1935); published shortly after Szabad’s death, this entire volume of Folksgezunt was dedicated to recalling his life. 112 Z. A. Bonoff to S. M. Schmidt, October 23, 1921, JDC Archives, NY21–32, folder G31. 113 On Yiddishism and institutions supporting modern Yiddish culture in interwar Poland, see Keith Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland (Toronto, 2011); Fishman, Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, 83–97. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 349 because Jewish doctors, trained in Russian or German, were by and large assimilated and “entirely cut off from the folk-masses in their worldview [and] their way of living and thinking.” The result, they claimed, was that “cadres of female folk healers and little old women [znakhorkes un bobkes]” were more widely accepted among the Jewish masses than diploma-holding physicians.114 They conceived of Jewish women as both a problem and a solution: they were the bastions of superstition and backwardness among the Jewish masses, but they were simultaneously the key to transforming their attitudes and behaviors. The school’s activists explained that nurses trained at their school would understand the psychology of the Jewish masses and, most importantly, speak their language.115 The school’s supporters frequently celebrated their students’ command of Yiddish and their instructors’ innovative creation of Yiddish medical terminology.116 In stark contrast to the Czyste nursing school in Warsaw, the Vilna school’s staff made no claims to train public health nurses in order to serve Jews and non-Jews alike and build bridges between them. Unlike Greenwald, who wrote of Jewish women’s innate compassion as a tool to foster understanding with non-Jews, Dr. Brokhe Shainker, an ophthalmologist and one of two female faculty members at the school, invoked Jewish women’s emotional intelligence to dissuade Jews from seeking medical assistance from non-Jews. Writing in Sotsiale meditsin, TOZ’s journal for public health professionals, she insisted that no Christian nurse could give “the Jewish nation’s child” the love and empathy that a Jewish nurse could provide, or “bring into the most impoverished corners a heartfelt warmth.”117 The school’s advocates portrayed the existence of their school as an act of defiance against the Polish government, which continued to deny Jewish women entry into government-sponsored Polish nursing schools.118 They also condemned the government’s decision in 1934 to mandate that all nurses working in government-sponsored institutions had to pass a Polish-language qualifying exam.119 Celebrating their nursing students for their “instinct of 114 H. Kovarski, “Di yidishe shvester shul in vilne,” Folksgezunt 1 (January 1923): 59–62. 115 See, e.g., Kovarski, “Di yidishe shvester shul in vilne”; Tsemach Shabad, “Di naye shvestershul bay ‘toz’ in vilne,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 1–2 (1931): 152–53; Dr. H. Kovarski, “Vegn ekzamens far shvester,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1937): 35. 116 See, e.g., A. Lektor, “Di badaytung fun higiene seminar in shvesterhul,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1933): 74–76. 117 B. Shainker, “Di yidishe shverstershul ‘toz’ in vilne,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 5–6 (May– June 1933): 65–70. 118 Shabad, “Di naye shvestershul bay ‘toz’ in vilne”; I. Biber, “Di shvestershul bay ‘toz’ in vilne: 1-ter aroysloz 1932–4,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1934): 15–19. 119 Biber, “Di shvestershul bay ‘toz’ in vilne.” 350 D. K. HELLER communal solidarity,” the school’s staff insisted that their recruits would remain committed to training in Yiddish and would valiantly serve Vilna’s Jewish school network and the public health institutions run by TOZ, including hospitals, orphanages, milk stations, health clinics, and summer camps.120 While the TOZ School of Nursing in Vilna’s commitment to Jewish national distinctiveness was more in line with the Polish Jewish political currents of the day than was Greenwald’s vision for Jewish women, the school’s ideological underpinnings proved similarly difficult to sustain in 1930s Poland. Despite the insistence of TOZ leaders in Vilna that Yiddish was the undisputed basis of Jewish collective identity, they had to reckon with the changing linguistic choices of their students, who were part of a generational cohort that attended public schools sponsored by the Polish government. Although Yiddish remained the predominant language of Jews in Poland’s East, Jewish youth were increasingly choosing Polish as one of their spoken and written languages.121 The school’s faculty also recognized that students with little knowledge of Polish would struggle to find work in Jewish hospitals, where doctors often employed Polish medical terminology. As a result, students with little knowledge of either language were expected to attend the school’s language classes in either Polish or Yiddish.122 The school also had to face the demands of the market. Barred from statesponsored nursing schools and eager to pass the Polish-language qualifying exams introduced by the government in 1934, Jewish women in Vilna and its vicinity preferred to attend private nursing schools whose language of instruction was Polish. By the winter of 1937, two years after Tsemach Szabad’s passing, the directors of the TOZ School of Nursing in Vilna began to change their tactics. Writing to officials within Poland’s Ministry of Social Welfare (Ministerstwo Opieki Społecznej), TOZ’s national leadership informed them that they had completely redesigned the school’s curriculum to comply with the new government guidelines for nursing.123 They also reached out to officials at the provincial level (urzad ˛ wojewódzki) to gain their favor. By April, the director of the province’s Department of Health voiced his support of the school, telling officials in the Ministry of Social Welfare that TOZ was filling a critical gap by training qualified nurses within 120 R. Shadowski, “Di shul higienistin,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1933): 72–73; I. Biber, “Der tsveyter aroysloz fun der ‘toz’ shvestershul in vilne,” Sotsiale meditsin, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1935): 88–91. 121 For an introduction to these trends, see Gershon Bacon, “National Revival, Ongoing Acculturation: Jewish Education in Interwar Poland,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 1 (2002): 71–92. 122 Biber, “Di shvestershul bay ‘toz’ in vilne.” 123 TOZ do Ministerstwa Opieki Społecznej, February 15, 1937, Archiwum Akt Nowych (hereafter AAN), collection 2/15/0, Ministerstwo Opieki Społecznej w Warszawie, file 577, 2. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF PUBLIC HEALTH 351 the province.124 One year later, in the summer of 1938, TOZ once again appealed to the ministry—this time to ask for the right to advertise that their school had the same rights as government-run nursing institutions.125 There was, of course, a price to be paid for such approval: in revised statutes for the school submitted at the end of the year, the school’s officials stated that a member of the provincial government would have permanent representation on the school’s board of directors.126 Perhaps the most significant concession in the statute was the school’s language of instruction. From 1938 onward, TOZ officials promised that classes would be conducted in Polish.127 Much like the Warsaw School of Nursing, the school in Vilna was ultimately forced to abandon several of the ideals that had inspired its establishment. Conclusion The Warsaw School of Nursing was an ambitious project to transform Polish Jewish women into public leaders whose medical expertise would help transform interwar Poland’s political, cultural, and social landscape. The school’s American Jewish architects viewed Jewish women as conduits through which they could successfully export the values of American Progressivism to Poland. If the school’s Polish Jewish supporters viewed this project with skepticism in the 1920s, by the 1930s the school’s initial pledges to heal Polish-Jewish relations seemed naive and quixotic at best. While Jewish medical activists in Vilna and elsewhere in Poland’s eastern borderlands took up the cause of nursing, as Greenwald had hoped, the political ethos and agenda that propelled their work often rejected the American Progressive beliefs that lay at the heart of the interethnic bridge-building initiatives promoted by the JDC. Greenwald’s triumphant proclamations were no match for the resilience and growth of Polish antisemitism. Nor could her vision for women’s professional independence, success, and authority overturn long-standing suspicions, shared by many Jews and non-Jews alike, regarding women’s participation in the public sphere. The Warsaw School of Nursing likely would have eluded historians altogether were it not for the role played by its staff and students during the Second World War. Forcibly relocated to the Warsaw Ghetto in the fall of 1941, they worked tirelessly to provide whatever medical relief they could 124 Urzad ˛ Wojewódzki Wileński do Ministerstwa Opieki Społecznej, April 22, 1937, AAN, collection 2/15/0, file 577, 9. 125 TOZ do Ministerstwa Opieki Społecznej, August 12, 1938, AAN, collection 2/15/0, file 577, 13. 126 “Regulamin Rady Szkolnej,” AAN, collection 2/15/0, file 577, 26. 127 “Statut,” AAN, collection 2/15/0, file 577, 24. 352 D. K. HELLER to the ghetto’s population, even after the school’s dissolution in August 1942 during the first deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka.128 It is within the historiography of the Holocaust, where scholars consider the acts of individuals, however small, worthy of attention, that Polish Jewish nurses achieve visibility. Within historical scholarship on interwar Polish Jewry—so heavily weighted toward investigating how politics shaped their lives and fates—the scholarly paper trail documenting women’s lives remains thin. The author of the paean to Jewish nurses with which we opened this article would have been troubled by these habits of historical scholarship. Recalling his conversation with fellow journalists at a café in Warsaw, he wondered aloud whether their focus on the sweeping political events of the day was at the expense of individual Jewish lives worth remembering. Addressing his Polish Jewish readers toward the end of his article, he wrote, “I ask myself: What is eternal? And what is fleeting? Is it the most recent parliamentary scandal, described in all the newspaper columns? Or is it the quiet, self-sacrificing activity of the nurse, whose work no one will mention? . . . What remains, and what fades away?”129 128 Miriam Offer, “Ethical Dilemmas in the Work of Doctors and Nurses in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Polin 25 (2013): 467–92; “Courage under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust, ed. Michael Goldin (New York, 2014), 82–85. For first-person accounts of the fate of the Warsaw Nurses’ Training School, see Sara Gurfinkel-Glocer, “Goralo shel beit haholim czyste,” in Grinboim, Entsiklopedyah shel galuyot, 585–604. See esp. the archival collection of Luba Blum-Bielicka, who was the director of the nurses’ training school on the eve of the Second World War. A Bundist in the 1930s, Blum-Bielicka survived the war and would serve as a leader of nursing instruction in Communist Poland until her death in 1973. Blum-Bielicka collection, Centralne Archiwum Piel˛egniarstwa Polskiego, Warsaw. 129 Reconvalescent [pseud.], “Di idishe varmhertsige shvester.”

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland

The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS