Architectural Records in the Hadassah Archives

This record group documents the history of the building projects sponsored by Hadassah in Israel. In 1925, the Hebrew University opened on Mount Scopus and partnered with the Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) to build a hospital. Designed by architect Erich Mendelssohn, the Hadassah University Hospital, Mount Scopus opened in 1939.

On April 13, 1948 a HMO medical convoy, consisting of doctors, nurses, hospital workers, Hebrew University personnel, and members of the Haganah (Jewish military organization formed in British Mandate Palestine), was attacked by Arabs while en route to the medical facilities on Mount Scopus. Seventy-nine people were killed during the day-long attack. Among those killed were HMO Director Dr. Haim Yassky, Dr. Leonid Doljansky, a noted cytologist, and Dr. Moshe Ben-David, who was to head the new medical school. After the ambush, the Mount Scopus medical complex was abandoned to United Nations forces. The complex included the Rothschild Hadassah University Hospital, the Henrietta Szold Hadassah School of Nursing (formerly the Nurses' Training School), and the unopened Nathan Ratnoff School of Medicine. After suffering the loss of its director, dozens of medical workers, as well as its hospital on Mount Scopus, Hadassah needed to galvanize itself and it quickly set up medical operations in makeshift quarters. Medical services were transferred to five temporary locations.

During that time, Hadassah began building a medical center at Ein Kerem. The Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center at Ein Kerem opened in 1961. It was designed to be a cutting-edge hospital with a full array of clinical and research laboratories and outpatient departments; facilities for schools of medicine, dentistry, nursing, and pharmacy; and many patient amenities—plus room for expansion. Unable to find a single location to rebuild the medical center and the university campus, Hadassah and the Hebrew University had to part ways. Far removed from the city, Ein Kerem became the hub of an entirely new residential area, Kiryat Hadassah, with new roads to link it to Jerusalem.

The Hadassah buildings on Mount Scopus lay unused for 19 years until after the Six Day War in 1967. In 1976, the Hadassah University Hospital (rebuilt and expanded) reopened on Mount Scopus. The most recent building project documented in the record group is the Sarah Wetsman Davidson Hospital Tower, which was completed in 2012 at the Ein Kerem hospital site.

Besides the hospital buildings at Mount Scopus and Ein Kerem, Hadassah also built youth villages, day centers, and educational facilities that were established for Youth Aliyah wards. By 1997, there were seventy youth villages and boarding schools, forty kibbutzim, and fifteen day centers connected to Youth Aliyah.

Hadassah also built schools through the Hadassah Israel Education Services (HIES) project. In August of 1940, Hadassah voted to memorialize Alice Seligsberg by establishing a school for girls in Jerusalem. The four-year school opened in 1942 in Hadassah's Rothschild Compound as the "Alice L. Seligsberg Trade School for Girls." Under the direction of Helen Kittner, the Seligsberg School taught sewing, handcrafts, cooking, secretarial skills and bookkeeping in addition to a general high school curriculum to young women from Jerusalem. The student body later became co-educational. In the 1950s, the school expanded its offerings to include four-year programs for dental assistants (1955) and laboratory assistants (1956). The school also offered evening classes, which later formed the genesis of the community college. Until the opening of the college, the Seligsberg School was Hadassah's primary educational project in Israel both in terms of budgetary commitment and enrollment. The Hadassah Community College opened next door to the Seligsberg High School in Jerusalem on November 8, 1970 as a two-year college, with Helen Kittner as its first director. It initially offered courses in medical records librarianship, computer technology, scientific photography, and electronics. The college experienced a number of name changes in English (the Hebrew name remained Michlelet Hadassah). Originally named "Hadassah Community College" when it opened in 1970, it was successively re-named "Hadassah College of Technology" and "Hadassah Institute of Technology" before becoming "Hadassah College Jerusalem" in 2003. As of this writing (2016), it is called the Hadassah Academic College.