Vocational education

This record group contains three-dimensional objects and printed materials that relate to the history of Hadassah. A bulk of this record group consists of promotional and commemorative objects and awards created by Hadassah for its Annual and Midwinter National Conventions, and for Young Judaea events. Examples of such items include t-shirts, hats, bags, buttons, stationery and keychains. Artifacts created by local Hadassah chapters and regions, as well as awards received by local and national Hadassah leaders from other organizations, are also included. Of a particular interest is the bronze death mask of Henrietta Szold.

This record group contains materials related to the local units of Hadassah—groups, chapters, regions, and co-ops—as well as Junior Hadassah, a youth organization that functioned as a group within the Hadassah Chapter structure. The record group documents over one hundred years of Hadassah’s growth, and illuminates a century of American Jewish communal life, particularly that of Jewish women, across the United States. The record group reflects the formation, administration and activities of the individual groups, chapters, co-ops and regions, and contains information on local events and programs organized around fundraising, Zionism, Jewish heritage, religion and holidays celebration, the study of Hebrew and Yiddish, women's issues, fashion, health, technology and many other topics.

This collection contains correspondence, financial data and reports (some published) on the work and activities of the School. Among the officers were N. Taylor Phillips, treasurer, and his wife, Rosalie Solomons Phillips, president and first vice president.

Emigration 1864-1952: This collection - encompassing about 90 years - contains papers about the situation and persecution of Jews in Eastern European countries (Russia, Poland, Roumania, Bulgaria, Lithuania). Papers describe the activities of various relief organizations. There are more than 170 papers (ca.900 pages), about half of them written in German, about 30 each in French or English, over 20 in Yiddish and some in Polish. A printed appeal of the Reichsausschuss fuer Russisch-Juedische Fluechtlingshilfe, Berlin (1929) carries among others the signatures of Leo Baeck and ALbert Einstein. (VI, 16).

This record group includes documents created and maintained by the Office of the President, the Office of the Executive Director and the Chair of the Division Coordinators/Directors Committee. Prominent is the Henrietta Szold series, containing correspondence by and to Szold as well as printed materials written by and about her. The files in this record group were created by a national president or executive director, or for their use, or maintained in their office during their years in office. Included are correspondence, minutes, memos, publications, reports and subject files on topics with which these individuals were involved.

This record group contains meeting minutes, correspondence and reports of the Hadassah Council in Israel (originally the Hadassah Emergency Services and the Hadassah Council in Palestine), the Hadassah Youth Services (originally the Palestine Council of Hadassah) and the Hadassah Youth Services (HYS) successor organizations, Hadassah Vocational Education Services (HVES) and Hadassah Israel Education Services (HIES). The records represent the activities of Hadassah's representatives in Palestine/Israel, from 1927 to the 1990s. The Hadassah Youth Services focused on providing services to underserved youth in Palestine/Israel, most notably with their school luncheon and Guggenheimer playground programs. After HYS changed its working name to HVES in 1952, it began to focus on vocational education projects in Israel. Legally, however, the name of the organization in Israel remained Hadassah Youth Services. The Hadassah Council in Israel acted as an advisor and liaison between Hadassah's American offices and Hadassah's Israel projects, including the Hadassah Medical Organization, Youth Aliyah, and Hadassah Youth Services.

This collection is comprised of proceedings, programs, papers, minutes and memorandum from annual conferences, an organizational handbook, summary charts of Jewish Vocational Service Agencies, manuals for reporting monthly statistics, memorandum, general correspondence, reports and miscellaneous promotional fliers and pamphlets. The documents in this collection describe regional conferences concerning professional and vocational practices in the Midwestern and Eastern regions of the United States. Reports concerning the activities of the President's Committee of Fair Employment and the War Manpower Commission are also included in this material. Included in this collection are the following publications: JOC Newsletter (1972-1974), JOC Program and Information Bulletin (1965-1967), Program and Information Service (1956-1964), and Vocational Abstracts (1954-1964).

The Julius and Elisabeth Hirsch Collection holds the papers of this couple, with much of the collection consisting of family correspondence. Prominent subjects include the immigration of family members and genealogy of the family. In addition to extensive correspondence and family trees the collection includes notebooks, essays and articles, newspaper clippings, photographs, early drafts of Julius Hirsch's family memoir, and research notes.

The materials in this record group document the entirety of Hadassah’s history and work in Israel and the United States in photographs—prints, slides, glass lantern plates, and digital images.

This is a partial inventory of the Records of the Jewish Colonization Association. Portion of JCA records described here pertains to JCA activities in Galicia and Russia only. Included here are reports on JCA colonies, cooperative savings and loans societies, agricultural schools, vocational and technical schools, carpentry workshops, mechanized embroidery factories and weaving factories.

The Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews of Russia, known by its Russian acronym, "ORT," was founded in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Empire, in 1880. Its aim was the promotion and development of skilled trades and agriculture among Jews, especially through support of vocational and agricultural training. At first operating only as a provisional committee, it received legal recognition in Russia in 1906, and subsequently established local divisions in various cities within Russia and, after the First World War, in Poland, Lithuania, and other countries. An ORT committee was formed in Vilna in February 1919; the ORT Society in Vilna helped found an international umbrella organization, the World ORT Union, in 1921, with headquarters in Berlin (until 1933) and, later, Paris. The collection comprises records of the ORT Society in Vilna that, despite their fragmentary nature, broadly reflect the society's activities from its beginnings until its dissolution by the authorities in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, in 1940. The collection contains administrative records, such as bylaws, minutes, reports, membership records, and financial records; outgoing and incoming correspondence, with correspondents including the ORT Central Committee in Poland, Warsaw (founded 1923); records pertaining to the administration of the society's vocational programs, including its Crafts School, which trained Jewish youth as artisans in the fields of carpentry and locksmithing, and various professional advancement courses for adults, in fields such as electrical installation and tailoring (cutting); records concerning activities related to agriculture in the period 1920 to 1923, apparently reflecting the work of an ORT regional committee based in Vilna (loan applications and questionnaires about Jewish families working on farms, in most cases pertaining to localities in the western part of present-day Belarus); and a few items documenting a credit cooperative society founded by the Vilna ORT Society. Also included is a small amount of ephemera, and two small groupings of ORT-related records with no apparent relationship to the society in Vilna: correspondence of the Arbeterheym (Workers' Home), Riga, Latvia, in 1923, including letters from the Jewish People's Relief Committee, New York, which became affiliated with the American ORT; and correspondence addressed to J. Capitanchik, London, in 1924, from the ORT Society in London, in part concerning his effort to organize an ORT committee in the city's East End.

The Jewish Vocational (Technical) School of ORT in Vilna, known as the Technicum, opened in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; today, Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1921 and remained in existence until 1940. It trained Jewish young people in the fields of mechanics and electrical engineering over a three-year course of study. The Technicum was subsidized by the ORT Central Committee (Warsaw), the Vilna Jewish Community Council, and the Vilna municipality. The school was equipped with laboratories and workshops, as well as a technical library, and published a series of its own Yiddish-language textbooks for use by students. The collection comprises administrative records, including budgets and general reports, school statistics, financial records, correspondence, and files pertaining to students and teachers, as well as materials documenting the curriculum, course scheduling, and examinations. Also included are letters and supporting documents from applicants for teaching positions; student papers; materials related to a graduates' association and a parents' committee; and copies of several of the textbooks published by the school.

Young Judaea is the oldest Zionist youth organization in the United States, established as a national organization in 1909 by the Federation of American Zionists. It was supported by Hadassah, including direct financial sponsorship from 1967-2011. The major aims of Young Judaea throughout its history have been to advance the cause of Zionism, to further the mental, moral, and physical development of Jewish youth, and to promote Jewish culture and ideals in accordance with Jewish traditions. Young Judaea has remained non-partisan and non-denominational, embracing and recruiting Jewish youth from all backgrounds.

The Youth Aliyah Records in the Hadassah Archives document Hadassah's work with multiple international organizations to rescue Jewish children from continental Europe to Palestine from 1933-1945. The collection also documents Hadassah's involvement with Youth Aliyah since 1946 in providing residential, educational, vocational, rehabilitative and therapeutic care for displaced and at-risk youth from around the world.