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The Long Path from a Soup Kitchen to a Welfare State in Israel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2013

John Gal and
Mimi Ajzenstadt
John Gal
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mimi Ajzenstadt
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2013, pp. 240 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2013

Soup kitchens are social welfare institutions that provide meals for free or for reduced prices on a regular basis. There is evidence that soup kitchens have provided meals for people at different times, in diverse civilizations, and across the globe for at least six hundred years. Though they have clearly been sidelined by services and benefits provided by modern welfare states, even at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century soup kitchens continue to function across the globe in both developed and less-developed nations.Footnote 1

There is evidence that large-scale soup kitchens, known as imarets, were established in the fourteenth century in various parts of the Ottoman Empire and they remained a central social institution in the empire until its demise in the early years of the twentieth century.Footnote 2 Similarly, soup kitchens served as a means of ensuring food security in Beijing during the Qing dynasty in China, beginning in the late seventeenth century.Footnote 3 In Europe as well, soup kitchens provided a means of dealing with poverty and with a lack of work and resources during different periods. In Bavaria, the renowned Count Rumford (Sir Benjamin Thompson) planned and established a public kitchen in 1790 and then successfully exported the idea to other European countries.Footnote 4 In England, shortages of food, during and after the Napoleonic wars of the late eighteenth century, led to the introduction of soup kitchens in different cities, while various localities in Tuscany, under the rule of the French in the second decade of the nineteenth century, established soup kitchens as an alternative to other forms of outdoor assistance to the poor.Footnote 5 A few decades later, the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century saw the adoption of the Soup Kitchen Act by the British Parliament and the subsequent introduction of soup kitchens across Ireland as a means to combat widespread hunger and to replace relief work.Footnote 6 During the latter half of that century, soup kitchens served a local response to the needs of the homeless in Philadelphia and New York and other large cities in the United States.Footnote 7 Soup kitchens also functioned as a crucial act of communal enterprise during the coal miners’ strike in Wales in the late 1920s.Footnote 8 During the early years of Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s, soup kitchens were a prime source of relief, providing food for many of the unemployed.Footnote 9

In much of this literature, soup kitchens emerge as a crucial social welfare institution that typically preceded the large-scale involvement of the state in the provision of social services, or they supplemented existing public institutions in times of acute social crisis. The characteristics of the soup kitchens that existed in the decades that preceded the emergence of the welfare state often appear to be diametrically opposed to those generally identified with those of the institutions that comprised the welfare states as they crystallized in the second half of the twentieth century. Soup kitchens were often temporary institutions established by private individuals or charities in times of economic or social crisis that sought to deal with acute needs of citizens by providing sustenance. The staff providing the service tended to be primarily composed of (often religiously motivated) nonprofessional volunteers. Access to the soup kitchens was generally unconditional and offered on a first-come–first-served basis. By contrast, welfare states comprised of state-funded and -run institutions tended to provide long-term benefits or benefits-in-kind to recipients based on clearly defined criteria. The provision of food has never been perceived as a legitimate or feasible goal of welfare states with the emphasis, particularly with regard to the poor, being on access to the labor market, to adequate services, and to cash benefits. Professionals are the core personnel in these state-run institutions.

Nevertheless, at the time of their establishment, soup kitchens were often a marked improvement over the sporadic, often particularistic welfare institutions that existed beforehand. At times when neither state nor church offered adequate assistance, they offered accessible, sometimes life-sustaining, aid to the people that most needed it during times of crisis.

The goal of this article is to draw upon findings from a historic study on a specific soup kitchen in Jerusalem during the early decades of the twentieth century in order to better understand the role of soup kitchens in the development of the modern welfare state. This soup kitchen was a central social welfare institution in Jerusalem, the country’s largest and most important city, during this historical period. Its operation spanned two decades and it served as a crucial bridge between the premodern, strongly particularistic, and faith-based structures that offered the only response to need in the city at the time and the development of public social services in that city, and in the entire country, that emerged following its closure. As such, the closing of the soup kitchen in Jerusalem was a crucial watershed in the long path to the establishment of a modern welfare state in Israel.

POVERTY AND NEED IN JERUSALEM IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

The first two decades of the twentieth century marked the final years of the Ottoman Empire and its rule in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine. By the end of the first decade of the new century, the Holy City was the country’s most populous city and home to an estimated seventy thousand inhabitants, forty-five thousand of whom were Jews and the remainder primarily Christian and Muslim Arabs. Most of the inhabitants of the city lived in the various quarters of the Old City. However, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the Jewish population of the city had grown as a result of immigration and a number of additional new neighborhoods and public institutions were established outside the walls of the Old City.Footnote 10 In the past, much of the Jewish population of Jerusalem had depended on the “Halukkah,” funds sent by Jews in the Diaspora and distributed primarily to scholars studying at the religious institutions in the city based on their origin and institutional affiliation. A decision by donors to limit this funding in 1906 led to an increasing effort on the part of members of the Jewish community to seek gainful employment.Footnote 11

Despite the economic growth that much of the expanding Jewish community in Palestine experienced during the first decade of the twentieth century (which was fueled by immigration to Palestine from Europe and the Middle East), economic activity in Jerusalem remained limited, the sources of livelihood were small, and the Halukkah funds did not offer a sufficient source of income for those without work.Footnote 12 Poverty was rife and the standard of living and health of much of the Jewish and Arab population was dismal. In addition, the Jewish community was characterized by severe internal splits between diverse ethnic, religious, and organizational groupings.

The economic situation in the city worsened in 1909 and continued to deteriorate in the years before, and particularly after, the outbreak of World War I.Footnote 13 Although a number of private welfare institutions, such as hospitals and institutions for the blind, elderly, and disabled, were established during this period, these clearly did little to assuage the needs of the population. As such, internal emigration to the more prosperous parts of the country and external emigration were common among residents of the city and this led to a sharp reduction in the population, in particular among the young and those of working age.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STRAUS SOUP KITCHENS

Apart from an Ottoman imaret, which provided meals to the poor members of the Muslim population of Jerusalem for a period of more than four hundred years until after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine,Footnote 14 there is evidence that additional soup kitchens established by the Jewish community existed in Jerusalem (often with a limited life span and sometimes only during the winter months) during the nineteenth and into the first decades of the twentieth century. For example, in 1849 a soup kitchen specifically intended for the indigent elderly was established in the city.Footnote 15 Eliahu Eliashar reports that some of the leaders of the Jewish Sephardic community distributed cooked food to the needy on Sabbath and during religious festivals from 1859 onward.Footnote 16 First established by three merchants, this soup kitchen was transferred to the ownership of the Sephardic community leadership in the 1870s and it continued to function until 1917.Footnote 17 Another such institution, the “General Soup Kitchen,” was established by the Jewish Ashkenazi community in the city in 1894. It reportedly provided three hundred meals per day and apparently continued to function until about 1915.Footnote 18 Indeed, even afterward, a soup kitchen under the same name (though privately run) continued to operate until the late 1940s.Footnote 19

While these soup kitchens were only one part of diverse private and communal welfare and aid institutions that existed in Jerusalem and served the Jewish community, they clearly could do little to overcome the destitution of a significant proportion of the population during the final years of Ottoman rule.Footnote 20 This was the setting that greeted the American-Jewish philanthropist Nathan Straus, his wife, brother, sister-in-law, and friend J. L. Magnes when they toured the city in 1912. “My heart is deeply rooted in Jerusalem, in the historic city that is so redolent in glorious memories, and my sympathy is with the people who live there helpless and suffering and praying,” Straus wrote of his impressions of the city to a leader of the Federation of American Zionists.Footnote 21 In a newspaper interview the following year, he told a reporter that the conditions in Jerusalem “appalled me. Starvation and disease held the people in their grip.”Footnote 22

At the time of his visit, Nathan Straus was a well-established businessman, prominent public figure, and philanthropist.Footnote 23 Jointly owning Macy’s department store with his brother, Isidor, Straus had long been involved in public life and the community in New York City. Born in 1848 into a landowning Jewish family in Germany that left a few years later for the United States in the wake of the reaction to the German revolutions of 1848, he grew up in Georgia but later moved to New York. Apart from his business interests, Straus had been particularly active in the Democratic Party in New York and was engaged in philanthropic activities in the city and elsewhere in the United States. One of his major concerns was public health and indeed he led the drive to ensure the pasteurization of milk, spending much of his own fortune on establishing milk depots throughout New York City in order to ensure that poor children had access to healthy milk.Footnote 24

After having first visited Palestine briefly in 1904, Straus and his wife returned in 1912 for a longer stay. This visit was the beginning of his growing and intense interest in Zionism, the movement to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, and in the welfare of the inhabitants of Palestine. Following the death of his brother and sister-in-law in the sinking of the Titanic, Straus retired from business and devoted all his time to philanthropic work, with a major emphasis on Palestine. By the time of his death in the early 1930s, he was regarded as one of the major contributors to Zionist causes in the United States and is reported to have given around $2 million to Zionist efforts in Palestine.Footnote 25

The situation of the inhabitants of Jerusalem led Straus to establish a number of welfare institutions in the city in the wake of his visit: a soup kitchen, a health department, workrooms for the unskilled, and a school for girls. Although he did not consider the soup kitchen a long-term solution and indeed clearly preferred putting a major effort into bettering their health and education and creating viable employment options, Straus felt that the soup kitchen was a vital and immediate need of much of the population. It was intended, in his words, to offer a much needed “stopgap” solution for the poor of the city.Footnote 26

Straus’s decision to establish a soup kitchen in Jerusalem was not unusual for philanthropists of his time in the United States. Despite efforts by some American reformers for over two decades to introduce principles of “scientific charity” that rationalized relief and sought to create more efficient privately funded charity organization societies, not all philanthropists or, for that matter, reformers were supportive of the principles of this movement. These principles, which assumed that individual deficiencies were a primary cause of poverty and that virtuous families were the antidote to need, advocated not only that charitable assistance be organized efficiently but that investigations of an individual’s need for relief were crucial in determining qualification for assistance. This would typically take the form of advice rather than material relief.Footnote 27 Straus, however, was apparently unmoved by the claims of the advocates of organized charity and clearly regarded the suffering of the poor as primarily a consequence of external forces beyond their control. Responding in typical form to criticism of his direct material support (cheap coal and lodgings) for the unemployed in New York in 1894, he was quoted as saying: “It is absurd to say that my methods encouraged pauperism. It is organized charity that encourages pauperism. I merely desired to give unemployed workingmen and working women something for their money, so that when the good times come again they would have no occasion to blush or accuse themselves with having been the recipients of charity in times that were distressful through no fault of theirs.”Footnote 28

Straus’s decision to establish the soup kitchen not only ran counter to notions of “scientific charity” in the United States, but it contradicted the accepted form that welfare institutions took in the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Because of the deeply fragmented and religious nature of the Jewish community, soup kitchens and other welfare institutions were typically established by, and on behalf of, specific sectors of this community. Generally funded by individual Jewish philanthropists or communities outside Palestine seeking to offer material support to religious scholars and their families, they were specifically intended for members of that sector of the community that had managed to raise funds for their establishment and through which the funds were transferred. As such, the geographic positioning and the running of these institutions strictly reflected the lines that divided the Jewish community in the city. The establishment of the Straus soup kitchen was neither motivated by a desire to specifically support religious scholars nor by a desire to strengthen any particular group within the Jewish community. Rather, it was a direct nonpartisan response to the externally generated threat of hunger and the source of ill-health among many of the residents. Straus lacked any strong religious affiliation, had longtime ties with non-Jews, and had undertaken philanthropic endeavors on behalf of Jews and non-Jews alike. These notions, common among the Jewish business elite in the United States, were unique in Jerusalem. The Straus soup kitchen reflected these sentiments and intentionally offered support to all the poor regardless of their affiliation or origin.Footnote 29

THE STRAUS SOUP KITCHENS, 1912–1933

The time that lapsed between Nathan Straus’s visit to Jerusalem, the decision to establish a soup kitchen, and the actual implementation of the idea was short, and by the end of 1912 a contractor had undertaken to provide meals to three hundred people daily, all funded by Straus.Footnote 30 Situated in the Old City, not far from the Wailing Wall (the holiest Jewish site in the city), the kitchen initially provided a bowl of soup, and later a piece of bread as well, to the neediest members of the Jewish community. Every Sabbath, thirty-nine portions of fish and meat were also provided to clients of the soup kitchen.Footnote 31 Straus initially pledged to continue funding the institution for another two years.Footnote 32

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 and Turkey’s involvement in the conflict led to a drastic change in the operation of the soup kitchen. The war precipitated an economic crisis in Palestine with the closing of foreign banks and a breakdown in ties with Europe. These developments enhanced a growing sense of isolation and led to the forced conscription of working-age men and to a sea blockade that cut supply links to Palestine and prevented the export of cotton, grain, and citrus fruit. The depletion of grain supplies and a drastic increase in prices due to war coupled with a locust plague in 1915 resulted in an outbreak of famine throughout the country. In Jerusalem, the impact of these developments was particularly severe. An observer describes the situation at the time: “Everywhere little Jewish children lay down and died in the streets; little families of two, three and four huddled together under the parental guidance of some ten-year old older brother or sister. Most of them had not any shelter for the night and they slept in some corner on the pavement.”Footnote 33 An alarming indicator of the results of these hardships was a marked depletion of the population of the city. Death from disease and starvation was increasingly commonplace. Fatalities and emigration led to a severe decline in the Jewish population of the city and by 1916 the number had dropped significantly from 45,000 in 1910 to only 26,605.Footnote 34

In response to an appeal by the American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau Sr., for immediate aid to the Jewish community in Palestine, a leading Jewish organization in the United States, the American Jewish Committee, sent an initial sum of $50,000 to Constantinople. This money was then distributed primarily to relief organizations throughout the country. However, the growing acknowledgment of the dire needs of Jews affected by the war in Europe and Palestine, and the sense that the diverse efforts by American Jewry to organize funding for aid should be coordinated, led to the establishment of a central disbursing agency, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), in late 1914. The JDC sought to provide humanitarian aid to Jews in different countries affected by the war, among them Palestine. The aid to the Jewish (and non-Jewish) community in Palestine took the form of the provision of foodstuffs, medical supplies, loans, and funds for relief institutions in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country. An initial step was the sending of nine hundred tons of foodstuffs and medicine (half of which was funded by Nathan Straus) on the collier Vulcan to Palestine in 1915. Later, aid primarily in cash was transferred to various local charity organizations in the country.Footnote 35

Soup kitchens were perceived as a crucial means in the effort to combat starvation and disease in Palestine. Indeed, given the hunger that characterized life in Jerusalem, it is not surprising that this dire humanitarian crisis led to the establishment of additional soup kitchens in the city during these years. Elmaliach reports that in September 1914 a number of institutions in the old and new parts of the city provided tea and bread daily to an ever-growing number of families.Footnote 36 Another organized effort was undertaken by the members of the American Colony, a Christian group that had settled in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1881. During 1916–17, the American Colony provided soup to the destitute Arab and Jewish inhabitants of the city with the number of portions growing from four hundred to eleven hundred and then to twenty-four hundred daily. This effort ended when the soup kitchen was ordered closed by a German major after the United States entered the war against Turkey.Footnote 37

An additional initiative was that of a young Swiss woman, Thérèse Dreyfus, who arrived in Palestine in 1914 to teach schoolchildren. Shocked by the terrible conditions in Jerusalem, she established soup kitchens in three of the city’s neighborhoods in May 1915. By September of that year, Dreyfus’s soup kitchens were reportedly supplying soup, bread, and flour to nearly two thousand poor pupils in a number of schools and fourteen hundred additional portions to poor families and individuals.Footnote 38 Dreyfus collected the initial funding for the soup kitchens; she then left for Switzerland and the United States to seek additional funds. The running of the soup kitchens was to the officials representing a Dutch philanthropic society, HaPekidim Veha Amarkalim be Amsterdam (Officials and Bookkeepers of Amsterdam). While the Turkish authorities would not let Dreyfus return to Palestine, the JDC agreed to continue funding the soup kitchens that she had established.Footnote 39 During the war years, the Dreyfus soup kitchens served between two thousand and four thousand daily portions of soup and bread to school students and poor families and distributed hundreds of weekly portions of flour to “respectable families.”Footnote 40

The Straus soup kitchen increased its capacity during the war years, the number of daily portions growing to more than six hundred in January 1915. The JDC began funding the Straus and Dreyfus kitchens, giving two thousand dollars a month to each kitchen. In addition, Straus continued to fund the soup kitchen in coordination with the JDC, to which he was a major donor. Initially the funds were transferred directly to Straus’s representative in Jerusalem, Dr. Levy, and from September 1916 by way of the American consul in the city, Dr. Otto Glazebrook.Footnote 41 With the United States’ entry into the war, the Spanish Consul, Count Ballobar, took over responsibility for the transfer of funds and indeed for the running of the Straus soup kitchen.Footnote 42 During this period, supervision of the soup kitchen and the actual use of the funds that reached Jerusalem was particularly lax and claims of misappropriation of funds and the existence of padded lists of recipients of meals emerged.Footnote 43

The British occupation in Palestine and the arrival of U.S. representatives of the JDC to Jerusalem led to renewed efforts to provide assistance to the inhabitants of the city, many of whom were left penniless and in dire need because the war. The initial efforts in Jerusalem included an attempt to rationalize the functioning of the soup kitchens by distributing the clientele of the Straus and the Dreyfus soup kitchens on a geographical basis and the de facto amalgamation of the soup kitchens into a joint relief effort directed by the JDC. In addition, an effort was made to identify which of the recipients of the food provided by the kitchens were actually in need of assistance and to weed out the less needy.Footnote 44 Although Straus continued to fund his soup kitchen, the fact that much of the funding for the soup kitchens came from the JDC facilitated this move.Footnote 45 While the administration of the Dreyfus kitchens was perceived as generally efficient, criticism of the running of the Straus kitchen during the war years and in its aftermath was common. The establishment of a soup-kitchen committee of public figures in Jerusalem was a first step in the effort to deal with this mismanagement.Footnote 46 The JDC representative in Palestine at the time, Dr. David de Sola Pool, was personally involved in the efforts to streamline the acquisition and distribution of foodstuffs.Footnote 47

During the following decade, the Straus soup kitchens (the original kitchen within the walls of the Old City and the former Dreyfus kitchen situated in the Mea Shearim neighborhood outside the walls) continued to provide food to a large number of impoverished Jews. Funding came primarily from Straus, who established a foundation to ensure the continued funding of the soup kitchens “as long as poverty should exist in Jerusalem.”Footnote 48

During this period, the population of Palestine grew significantly and the Jewish population more than doubled, mainly due to immigration. While solid data are limited, it appears clear that there was strong and sustained economic growth throughout Palestine. Despite a depression from 1925 to 1928, it has been estimated that production per capita and consumption per capita rose by over 50 percent during this decade. The establishment of the British Mandatory Government and a unitary legal and administrative system, the major input of Jewish immigrants and capital from abroad, along with growing manufacturing, housing, and modernizing agriculture sectors and ever-increasing exports all contributed to economic growth in the country and an increased standard of living. The population of Jerusalem grew from 62,100 to 93,100 in the 1920s and there was economic growth and improvement in public services in the city. The existence of the hub of the Mandatory Government in the city as well as the establishment of the Hebrew University and the Hadassah hospital created additional jobs and strengthened the economy. Nonetheless, the extent of manufacturing, trade, and building activity in the city remained much more limited than that in other parts of the country. The scale of immigration to the city was low compared to the rest of the country and the labor market remained relatively small and undiversified.Footnote 49

The Straus soup kitchens were not the only social welfare institutions during this period. The city was comprised of a mix of numerous (and often small) religious welfare institutions alongside a growing number of social welfare initiatives, typically established by Diaspora-based Jewish organizations. The most prominent of these were established by Hadassah, a major Zionist women’s organization, which was particularly active in the developing of health services in Palestine. In Jerusalem, these included infant welfare centers, a school lunch program, and a health center. Similar to the soup kitchens, these institutions sought to operate on a nonpartisan basis, serving the entire (generally Jewish) community while adopting more systematic operation principles and oriented toward rehabilitation, education, and health rather than assistance.Footnote 50

Straus remained indirectly involved in the functioning of the soup kitchens during this period. He received regular updates on developments and on the financial situation of the institutions and indeed visited Jerusalem.Footnote 51 In addition, the soup kitchens administration made an effort to maintain contact with him.Footnote 52 Nevertheless, the aging philanthropist was not involved directly in running the kitchens, but instead were managed by his representatives in Palestine, primarily by Henrietta Szold.Footnote 53 Szold, the founder and head of Hadassah, spent much of this decade in the country and was actively involved in various initiatives Straus had funded, among them the soup kitchens.Footnote 54

While not a social worker by training, Szold was deeply influenced by the ideas of American Progressive Era thinking in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by leading social-work thinkers in the United States.Footnote 55 Reacting to the social gaps caused by rapid industrialization and the excesses of big business and political corruption, Progressives were committed to social justice and the positive role of government and legislation in alleviating deprivation and social ills, such as poverty, and in curbing the power of the financial elite. The Progressive agenda emphasized the centrality of efficient and well-organized social welfare services and the role of the local community in providing them. Professionals were seen as crucial in providing these services. Privately funded and run charities, such as soup kitchens, were frowned on and perceived as irrelevant and obsolete. Scientific methods were regarded as an important basis for formulating thinking about social welfare. While the environment was perceived as a major factor in poverty, individual responsibility was also regarded as crucial in improving well-being.Footnote 56 Henrietta Szold was personally acquainted with some of the leading figures associated with this broad movement, such as Louis Brandeis and Jane Addams, and she adopted their perspectives on social welfare and social work.Footnote 57

Szold’s attitudes toward the soup kitchens reflected these sentiments and indeed were similar to those that prevailed among social workers and Progressives of her era. However, she was apparently reluctant to express them publicly. Nevertheless, her critical opinions concerning the soup kitchens, though apparently never fully and directly conveyed to Straus, were already clear in her correspondence to a friend, Sophia Berger, during this decade. She perceived the institutions as “static,” unprofessional, and out of line with modern attitudes to social problems, and she expressed her dismay at seeing children queuing to seek their lunch at the soup kitchens.Footnote 58 Careful to avoid discouraging Straus or his wife from continuing to support the soup kitchens and other welfare and health initiatives in Palestine, Szold sought to introduce reforms into the running of the kitchens by placing Berger on the Soup Kitchens Committee and by supporting efforts to replace the soup kitchen staff, which she perceived as inefficient and uneconomical, offering services that did not adequately meet the requirements of the needy immigrants to the city but rather favored families affiliated with the religious institutions.Footnote 59

A survey undertaken at the behest of the Straus family in late 1926 and completed in early 1927 provided data on the running of the Straus kitchens and its clientele.Footnote 60 In the report, the soup kitchen in the Old City is described as an orderly and impressively clean kitchen, in which food was ready for distribution at 9:00 every morning. In most cases, the food was taken home. In the cases of families, this was generally the wives’ task. Only a minority of men ate their portions in the dining room. The portions consisted of a loaf of bread and a pint of soup and were distributed free of charge. Distribution of relief was apparently tightly regulated by the soup kitchen administration. The needs of applicants were assessed and eligibility was determined on a case-by-case basis. A sheet of coupons sufficient for a month’s access to the soup kitchen was then provided to the needy. Receipt of the portions was dependent upon the client producing one of the monthly coupons.

The clientele of the Old City soup kitchen was mixed. All were Jews, most of whom were from Arab countries (Sephardic). A significant proportion were elderly, half of whom depended upon begging for a source of income. The younger clients were typically families lacking sufficient income. Most of the men in these cases were water carriers, cobblers, or street venders. The social worker who undertook the survey describes their homes as generally lacking any furniture at all. Sometimes the family had a metal covered box for their possessions. The floor was covered with straw mats or rags, which also served as bedding at night. There was seldom any cooking equipment. Inhabitants spent most of the time in courtyards and only used the dwellings for sleeping.

The Mea Shearim soup kitchen served 720 families, a third of whom were of European origin (Ashkenazi) and were affiliated with “Kollelim.” These Orthodox Jewish institutions were traditionally comprised of individuals and families (often from a specific region or town in Europe) who received financial support from Diaspora Jews in order to undertake religious study.Footnote 61 As such, a relatively large number of children were among the recipients of the soup kitchen portions. The number of elderly clients was smaller than that in the Old City and the number of beggars was negligible. The one-room homes of the soup kitchen clients housed large families and were in better condition than those in the Old City. In some cases, the families actually owned these homes. An old and dilapidated building, the kitchen served a larger number of men than in the Old City kitchen. During the winter months, many of the men ate in the dining room.

One consequence of this report was that shortly after its submission, it was decided to close down the Mea Shearim kitchen and move it to the new health center, which Straus established in the vicinity and opened in April 1929. A separate section of the center that included the entire rear and right wing of the building, the soup kitchen included a dining room that could accommodate 150 people, a waiting room, sculleries, pantries, storerooms, and an office. It distributed between 2,100 and 2,200 portions daily.Footnote 62

CLOSING THE SOUP KITCHENS

By the beginning of the 1930s, after operating for nearly twenty years, the Straus soup kitchens had become a major social welfare institution in Jerusalem. With a monthly income of $2,000 from the Straus family foundation, the two soup kitchens were providing soup and bread on a regular basis to 1,405 Jewish families, a total of 5,111 adults and children.Footnote 63 In all, the soup kitchen clientele comprised one-tenth of the Jewish population of the city and fully one-quarter of the Jewish inhabitants of the Old City. It was estimated that the soup kitchens provided between a third and a half of the daily need of the recipients.Footnote 64

However, despite the move to the modern health center and the central role that it played in the lives of a significant proportion of the Jewish population of Jerusalem, steps to close it were being taken behind the scenes. The death of Nathan Straus in January 1931, and his wife less than a year before, was one factor that contributed to this process. While their daughter, Sissie (Straus) Lehman, continued to participate in the family’s various activities in Palestine, among them the soup kitchens, she and her brothers were less committed to supporting the kitchens financially and more critical of the type of assistance that the kitchens provided. In a letter to Henrietta Szold in mid-1931, Lehman commented that “free food, if given at all, except during an emergency of short duration, should, in order to do good and no harm, be given as part of a constructive relief program looking at the rehabilitation of the people served.”Footnote 65 This lack of enthusiasm was also linked to financial losses that the family and the Straus Foundation suffered because of the Great Depression.Footnote 66

In response to the Straus family’s growing disenchantment with the continued funding of the soup kitchens and their questions concerning the necessity of the institution, which were made explicit to a number of individuals involved with the Straus Foundation,Footnote 67 Henrietta Szold suggested that a detailed study of the soup kitchens be undertaken regarding its continued operation.Footnote 68 The family readily agreed to Szold’s proposal. Despite apparent fears among members of the Soup Kitchens Committee concerning the implicit goals of the investigation and its possible implications, they were unable to prevent the study given the support for it by the Straus family.Footnote 69

The investigation, coordinated by a legal representative of the Straus family in Jerusalem, Harry Viteles, and a subcommittee of the Soup Kitchens Committee, focused on three questions: (1) Does every client need free food? (2) Is the ration such as to maintain health? (3) Are the soup kitchens doing constructive social work by temporarily helping a rapidly changing group to become self-supporting, or are they encouraging people to look upon free food as a permanent right? Investigators visited 1,301 households, comprising 92 percent of the kitchens’ clients, and collected information about the clients’ background and personal and socioeconomic situation, their occupation, and the assistance they received from the soup kitchens and other community institutions. The investigation took place between December 1931 and February 1932.Footnote 70

The report concluded that while a considerable number of clients needed the food they received, no conclusive evidence emerged indicating that most of the clients could not get along without the rations or that they could not obtain them from other sources. The report found that “a certain percentage of the clientele do not need the assistance of the Soup Kitchens,”Footnote 71 and that this was due to inadequate ongoing investigations into the actual situation of the clientele. Indeed, it noted critically that many of the clients perceived that they had a right to receive assistance and that the existence of the soup kitchens was a factor in the development of a lack of responsibility on the part of heads of households toward their families.

The report warned that the closure of the soup kitchens would nevertheless cause a number of the clients to go hungry unless another agency replaced them. It also acknowledged that there were few other social welfare institutions to deal with the needs of the clients. The newly established Social Service Department of the Jewish community in Jerusalem was identified as a possible alternative. Indeed the report went on to state clearly that “it is not the function of a Soup Kitchen to become the permanent supporter even of this part of the Jerusalem Jewish population.”Footnote 72 The report was unable to reach a conclusion regarding the question whether the rations were sufficient to maintain the health of the recipients. It did note that the soup kitchens were neither playing a rehabilitating role nor were they offering temporary relief in times of crisis. Instead, they contributed toward persistent dependency and that “especially demoralizing and unsatisfactory are the effects of this relief on the children of the families.”Footnote 73

Although the report was completed during the early months of 1932, the subcommittee procrastinated on the recommendations well into the summer of that year. After Szold sent the report’s conclusions to Lehman, the family asked her for her own recommendations.Footnote 74 In response, Szold suggested that all clients should be able to receive support from other institutions or to fend for themselves or with the help of their families should they be discharged from the soup kitchens’ list of clients. The kitchens, she advised, should focus solely on providing temporary assistance and ongoing aid to those elderly and disabled clients without any alternative sources of sustenance. In addition, she suggested that the foundation’s funds should be initially used to employ a social worker to deal with the process of devolvement of the kitchens and as a means of providing “constructive relief” for the former clientele. In the longer term, Szold advocated that the funds serve as the basis for employment agencies and training programs.Footnote 75

Szold’s position on the soup kitchens should be seen as reflecting a broader agenda that she had developed regarding the provision of social welfare in the Jewish community in Palestine. Recently appointed as the head of the new Social Work Department of the Jewish National Council, the official Jewish administration in the country, she sought to implement her Progressive thinking in the structuring of the social welfare services in the various Jewish localities. In particular, she sought to rationalize the existing services provided by mostly small religious charities, to bring them under public, rather than private, administration, to strengthen the role of the community in the provision of assistance, and to ensure that professionals ran the social welfare institutions and determined eligibility.Footnote 76 In addition, she introduced policies and established services that offered clients skills that would enable them to escape poverty and dependency rather than prolong them.

Progressive ideas were not the only factors that had an impact on Szold’s recommendations. Because they offered free meals for the students of the religious institutions, Szold regarded the soup kitchens as providing indirect support for the religious institutions in Jerusalem that opposed the Zionist effort to establish a secular Jewish state-in-the-making in Palestine.Footnote 77 By closing the soup kitchens or refusing to provide portions to able-bodied students of these institutions, she was undermining their financial foundation and weakening their influence within the Jewish community in Jerusalem.

In addition to her ideological concerns, Szold was seeking to further institutional interests. The new department she headed lacked any funding sources and was completely dependent upon municipal support for the local social service departments that she sought to establish, and upon philanthropic funds for the national office and various country-wide initiatives. Szold sought to divert funds raised by the myriad charitable social welfare institutions in Palestine to the Social Work Department and its local affiliates. In this context, she was hopeful that the Straus family’s reduction in funding would release funds that could be diverted to the activities of the Social Service Department.Footnote 78

The report’s conclusions, Szold’s recommendations, and the fact that she had conveyed the conclusions before the Soup Kitchens Committee had discussed them caused uproar among the committee members. Rumors of the imminent closure of the soup kitchens led to agitation among the clients and cases of violence against the kitchen administration.Footnote 79 Public associations in Jerusalem representing the religious community were recruited by committee members to express their opposition to the closure, and they appealed to the Jewish community leadership in Palestine to intervene.Footnote 80 Szold and the report were subject to harsh criticism.Footnote 81 In a meeting of the committee, which Szold attended, one of the members said: “The Report is an offense to the entire committee. . . . It is obvious that the intention from the first was to close the Soup Kitchens, against the principles of the Benefactor, who insisted that every hungry man, woman or child, Jew or non-Jew, should receive food.”Footnote 82 The committee appealed to the Straus family to reject Szold’s recommendations.Footnote 83 To ensure the continued existence of the soup kitchens, the committee sought to limit the negative impact of the report by recommending that the kitchens continue to function at a reduced level and to provide temporary relief to elderly and disabled clients until a system of pensions could be established or alternative institutions founded.Footnote 84

By this time, however, the Straus family was unwilling to continue funding the soup kitchens and readily adopted Szold’s recommendations. By October, they had decided to close down the institution.Footnote 85 An advertisement published in the daily Palestine Post in January 1933 formally announced that the soup kitchens would close at the end of April. The family committed to provide aid for the aged and chronically disabled clients for an additional year.Footnote 86

CONCLUSION

Initially conceived as an ad hoc solution to the poverty and hunger of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Straus soup kitchens developed rapidly into a social welfare institution that provided sustenance to a considerable proportion of the city’s inhabitants for nearly two decades. In lieu of any alternative communal- or state-run social welfare services, the soup kitchens were the most prominent social welfare institution operating in Jerusalem.

The establishment of the soup kitchen in 1912 and the operating principles upon which it was based diverged dramatically from the social welfare institutions that had previously operated within the Jewish community in Jerusalem. These premodern services were typically affiliated to the Kollelim, the religious studies institutions, and provided services solely to the students and staff (and their family members) of those institutions. Funding came from Jewish communities in the Diaspora and the goal was to provide a livelihood and support for the scholars at these institutions. In other words, these institutions were strongly particularistic and small in scale, in which access to services and support was conditional upon religious studies. Data on the levels of poverty, distress, and hunger in Jerusalem during this period indicate clearly that the effectiveness of this structure was extremely limited.

Adopting a divergent approach to assistance, which drew upon his philanthropy in the United States, Nathan Straus established a different kind of institution in Jerusalem. He regarded charitable assistance as a legitimate response to the needs caused by these external factors. He saw soup kitchens that were open to all and not restricted to any specific group as a legitimate and indeed necessary means of dealing with hunger and poverty in Jerusalem. While he regarded the provision of free food as a temporary solution and only one component in a wider network of social welfare services, his commitment to support the kitchens “as long as poverty existed in Jerusalem” is evidence of his rejection of the notion that soup kitchens were an outdated form of social assistance. Although the Straus soup kitchens were not the only social welfare institution based on these principles, they were important because they provided food aid to a significant part of the Jewish population. This assistance was crucial given the lack of any nonpartisan municipal or national system of social assistance.

The early years of the 1930s saw the emergence of an institutional interest that conflicted with that of the soup kitchens. The establishment of a Social Work Department by the formal public leadership of the Jewish community and its efforts to extend its jurisdiction to Jerusalem brought this administration into conflict with the private religious and social welfare institutions operating in the city. No less important, it was recognized that donations from the Jewish community in the United States and elsewhere were virtually the only potential source of income for this department and its local offices in the various cities and towns in Palestine. This was perhaps even more the case for the impoverished city of Jerusalem.

Henrietta Szold, the head of the Social Work Department, regarded the funds directed to the Straus soup kitchens as a potential source of funding for the public social welfare services that she sought to introduce into Jerusalem. Moreover, she perceived the closure of the soup kitchens as a necessary step in her efforts to undermine the power of the religious community in Jerusalem and to reassert the dominance of the secular, Zionist community leadership in the social welfare field. It also fitted well into the overall efforts of the dominant Zionist leadership within the Jewish community in Palestine to weaken the power bases of the orthodox Jewish groups, particularly those in Jerusalem, and to establish a secular Jewish state-in-the-making. Indeed in the following years, the Social Work Department not only established social welfare departments throughout the country, which provided professionally-run alternatives to the existing religious welfare institutions, but it also sought to regulate the funding and activities of these institutions and to divert Diaspora funding to the activities of the Social Work Department.Footnote 87

Justification for closing the soup kitchens was also clearly embedded in a starkly different cognitive paradigm and normative framework than those Straus adhered to. This Progressive approach, expressed forcefully by Szold and endorsed by Straus’s daughter and heir, Sissie Lehman, viewed the soup kitchens as a relic of an approach to welfare that did not deal effectively with needs or use resources efficiently. While soup kitchens were a legitimate temporary response to acute hunger, they did not offer long-term solutions to people’s needs but instead served to reinforce existing problems and perpetuate poverty. This stark dichotomy emerged in one of Szold’s letters during this period in which she described the soup kitchen discourse as “medieval” in contrast to the “modern” approach that she and other Progressives advocated.Footnote 88

The closure of the Straus soup kitchens in 1933 brought to an end an era in which this type of institution played the major role in the provision of responses to needs in Jerusalem. During the two decades of their existence, the soup kitchens had offered a nonpartisan, large-scale response to acute need in a city that lacked any professional social welfare institutions. The kitchens served as a bridge between the inefficient, particularistic, religious, and small-scale institutions that preceded them and the professional, municipal (or state) institutions that emerged from the 1930s onward. These institutions, such as the Social Work Department, provided the foundations for the Israeli welfare state and the department and its local bureaus formed the nucleus of the Ministry of Welfare, which was established following statehood in 1948.Footnote 89 The welfare state services were based on the assumption that professional social workers employed by local social welfare services should provide material assistance and psychosocial treatment to the needy and that charities should play a peripheral role in the provision of assistance.

Consequently, during the decades that followed the closure of the Straus soup kitchen, there is no evidence that any major public soup kitchen operated in Jerusalem. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the Kollelim provided meals to its members and their families, but not to the general public. This changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when, in the wake of a severe economic downturn, cuts in income maintenance provision for the poor and growing evidence of food insecurity, a number of small public soup kitchens opened in Jerusalem alongside a more significant number of food banks. Nevertheless, these did not offer a significant alternative to the state and municipal social welfare institutions but rather operated on the margins of the welfare state and offered limited support to the needy in the city.Footnote 90

Footnotes

1. The literature on soup kitchens includes: Auyero, Javier, “The Logic of Clientelism in Argentina: An Ethnographic Account,” Latin American Research Review 35 (2000): 55–81; Biggerstaff, Marilyn A., Morris, Patricia MacGrath, and Nichols-Caebolt, Ann, “Living on the Edge: Examination of People Attending Food Pantries and Soup Kitchens,” Social Work 47 (2002): 267–77; Doron, Abraham and Gal, John, Soup Kitchens in Jerusalem at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Jerusalem, 2006); Glasser, Irene, More Than Bread (Tuscaloosa, 1988); Johnsen, Sare, Cloke, Paul, and May, Jon, Soup Run and Soup Kitchen Survey (University of Bristol, 2002); Mosley, Jane and Tiehen, Laura, “The Food Safety Net After Welfare Reform: Use of Private and Public Food Assistance in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area,” Social Service Review 78 (2004): 267–83; Mulquin, Maire Eve, Siaens, Corinne, and Wodon, Quentin T., “Hungry for Food or Hungry for Love? Learning from a Belgian Soup Kitchen,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 59 (2000): 253–65; Poppendieck, Janet, Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (New York, 1999); and Reschovsky, James D., “The Emergency Food Relief System: An Empirical Study,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 25 (1991): 258–77.

2. On the Ottoman imarets, see Singer, Amy, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence (Albany, N.Y., 2002); “Serving Up Charity: The Ottoman Public Kitchen,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2005): 481–500; and “Soup and Sadaqa: Charity in Islamic Societies,” Historical Research 79(2005): 306–24.See also Peri, Oded, “Waqf and Ottoman Welfare Policy,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 35 (1992): 167–86.

3. Li, Lillian M. and Dray-Novey, Alison, “Guarding Beijing’s Food Security in the Qing Dynasty: State, Market, and Police,” Journal of Asian Studies 58 (1999): 992–1032.

4. Redlich, Fritz, “Science and Charity: Count Rumford and His Followers,” International Review of Social History 16 (1971): 184–216.

5. Stevenson, John, “Social Control and the Prevention of Riots in England, 1789–1829,” in Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Donazgrodzki, A. P. (London, 1977), 27–50;Woolf, Stuart Joseph, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1986).

6. Ó Gráda, Cormac, Black ’47 and Beyond (Princeton, 1999); Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger, Ireland, 1945–1949 (London, 1962).

7. Kusner, Kenneth L., Down & Out, on the Road (Oxford, 2002).

8. Bruley, Sue, “The Politics of Food: Gender, Family, Community, and Collective Feeding in South Wales in the General Strike and Miners’ Lockout of 1926,” Twentieth-Century British History 18 (2007): 54–77.

9. Ellis, Edward Robb, A Nation in Torment (New York, 1995); Poppendieck, Janet, Breadline Knee-Deep in Wheat (New Brunswick, 1988); Watkins, T. H., The Great Depression: America in the 1930s (Boston, 1993).

10. On Jerusalem during this period, see Bachi, Roberto, The Population of Israel (Jerusalem, 1976); and Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua, Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem, 1984).

11. Monnickendam, Menachem, “From Charity to Right: Work and Ideology During the Prestate Period,” Society and Welfare 25 (2005): 461–84 (Hebrew).

12. Friedman, Menachem, Society in a Crisis of Legitimization: The Ashkenazi Old Yishuv, 1900–1917 (Jerusalem, 2001).

13. Eliav, Mordechai, Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv in the Nineteenth Century, 1777–1917 (Jerusalem, 1978).

14. On the imaret, see Myres, David “Al-İmara Al-Àmira: The Charitable Foundation and Khassaki Sultan,” in Ottoman Jerusalem, ed. Auld, S. and Hillesbrand, R. (London, 2000), 539–82.On another soup kitchen, see, for example, the report by Theodore F. Meysels in the Palestine Post (11 May 1941) entitled “Roxane’s Soup Kitchen.”

15. Eliav, Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv in the Nineteenth Century.

16. Eliashar, Eliahu, Living with the Jews (Jerusalem, 1980) (Hebrew).

17. Sharabi, Rachel, The Sephardic Community in Jerusalem at the End of the Ottoman Period, 1893–1914 (Tel Aviv, 1989) (Hebrew).

18. On the General Soup Kitchen, see Shiryon, Y., Memories (Jerusalem, 1943) (Hebrew), and Lorenz, A. M., The Israel Calendar for the Year (1914) (Hebrew).

19. This soup kitchen, generally termed the “Eliach Soup Kitchen,” was established in 1919 by Rabbi Solomon Eliach. For details, see a report by the Information Bureau of Charitable Organizations in Palestine, the Department for Social Service, May 1938, Central Zionist Archive (CZA) J1 12461. See also a request from the soup kitchen to the Social Service Department for financial assistance, 11 April 1948, CZA J1 12461.

20. Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua, A City Through the Prism of a Period (Jerusalem, 1977) (Hebrew).

21. Letter to Louis Lipsky, chair of the Executive Committee, Federation of American Zionists, 20 June 1912, Nathan Straus Papers, New York Public Library (NYPL), box 4.

22. Quoted in “Straus: Palestine’s New Judah,” Boston Evening Transcript, 6 December 1913, 34.

23. de Sola Pool, David, “Nathan Straus,” American Jewish Year Book 33 (1931): 135–54.

24. Straus, Lina, Disease in Milk: The Remedy Pasteurization (New York, 1937).

25. Urofsky, Melvin I. and Levy, David M., Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, vol. 3 (Albany, N.Y., 1973).

26. See Straus, Nathan, “Our Work in Palestine,” The New Palestine 14 (1928): 105–8, and “Nathan Straus Plans Big Work for Holy Land, New York Times, 21 December 1913.

27. On the notion of “scientific charity,” see Axinn, June and Levin, Herman, Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need (New York, 1975); Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York, 1986); and Trattner, Walter I., From Poor Law to Welfare State (New York, 1984).

28. “Nathan Straus’s Philanthropy has Enabled Unemployed to Obtain Relief without Becoming Objects of Charity,” New York Times, 12 April 1894.

29. de Sola Pool, David, “Without Regard to Race or Creed,” The New Palestine 14 (1928): 131 and 150.

30. Ibid.

31. Summarized Report of Nathan Straus Soup Kitchen, Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives AC2132, file 322.

32. Letter to Samuel Horowitch, 13 December 1914, Nathan Straus Papers, NYPL, box 4.

33. Quoted in Handlin, Oscar, A Continuing Task (New York, 1964), 23–24. See also Jacobson, Abigail, “A City Living Through Crisis: Jerusalem During World War I,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 (2009): 73–92.

34. See Shiryon, Memories, and U.O. Schmeltz, Modern Jerusalem’s Demographic Evolution (Jerusalem, 1987).

35. Lucas, Albert, “American Jewish Relief in the World War,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 79 (1918): 221–28. See also Handlin, A Continuing Task.

36. Elmaliach, Abraham, Eretz Yisrael and Syria During the World War (Jerusalem, 1928).

37. On the American Colony, see Dudman, Helga and Kark, Ruth, The American Colony (Jerusalem, 1998); and Vester, Bertha Spafford, Our Jerusalem (Beirut, 1950).

38. Report by Rabbi Solomon, administrator of the soup kitchens, to the JDC offices in New York, 5 November 1919, JDC Archive, 19/21, file 184. See also Elimaliach, , Eretz Yisrael and Syria During the World War, 1:188–89. See also Shilo, Margalit, “The First World War: An Arena for the Empowerment of Women in the Jewish Community in Palestine,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008): 1–15.

39. Memorandum by Advocate Horace B. Samuel, 16 March 1924, JDC Archives AC2132, file 321.

40. Report by Rabbi Solomon.

41. Report by the JDC commissioner for the Near East, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, sent to Albert Lucas, secretary of the JDC, 15 July 1919, JDC Archive, 19/21, file 167 (10F2).

42. Memorandum by Advocate Horace B. Samuel, 16.3.1924, JDC Archive AC2132, file 321. See also letter from the U.S. Consul Glazebrook to Straus, 26 February 1920, JDC Archive, 19/21, file 167 (10F2).

43. Report by Teitelbaum.

44. Report by the JDC Commissioner for the Near East, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, sent to Albert Lucas, secretary of the JDC, 15 July 1919, JDC Archive, 19/21, file 167 (10F2).

45. See letter from de Sola Pool to Straus, 21 June 1921, JDC Archive, AC2132 322.

46. See the minutes of the committee, Jerusalem Municipal Archive (JMA), L3–177.

47. See letter from de Sola Pool to the JDC in Paris, 25 January 1921, JDC Archive, 19/21, file 167 (20F2).

48. Letter from David de Sola Pool to Lehman dated 27 April 1931, CZA A125 48.

49. For more on the economic and demographic situation in Palestine in this period, see Halevi, Nadav and Klinov-Malul, Ruth, The Economic Development of Israel (New York, 1968); Metzer, Yaacov, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (London, 1998); and Schmeltz, U. O., “The Decline in the Population of Palestine During World War I,” in Siege and Distress, ed. Eliav, M. (Jerusalem, 1991), 17–47.

50. On the various social welfare initiatives in Jerusalem during this period and, in particular, those of Hadassah, see Simmons, Erica B., Hadassah and the Zionist Project (Lanham, Md., 2006).

51. See, for example, the correspondence between Henrietta Szold and Straus regarding changes in the soup kitchen staff, 14 May 1926, CZA A125 45; and the monthly financial reports sent to Straus, 6 March 1929, CZA A125 47.

52. As noted by Henrietta Szold in a letter sent to her friend, Sophia Berger, in July 1924, regarding her membership on the Soup Kitchens Committee and her ideas for changes in the running of the kitchens: “Unless you are cautious, the mold members will league themselves against you, and will denounce you to Mr. Straus. You will recall that most pleasant relations were established between him and the committee. They feel entrenched in his good opinion and, indeed, he is satisfied with the way the work is being done” (Hadassah Archive, RG13 23 10).

53. The Straus family and Szold were longtime friends. Initial evidence of this can be found in a letter sent to Szold on 7 June 1912, Nathan Straus Papers, NYPL, box 3. Indeed, in early 1913, he funded the sending of a Hadassah-sponsored nurse to Palestine. See Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project, 16. In later years, Straus was not only one of the major funders of the Hadassah organization but evidently financially supported Szold’s public activities, as evidenced in a letter from Szold to Mrs. Straus in 1924: “I really don’t know in which words to tell you how deeply I am touched by your willingness to enable me to go on with public work without having to put a single anxious thought on means of livelihood” (6 October 1924, Hadassah Archive, RG13 30 20). As noted, during the 1920s and until the closure of the soup kitchens, she represented Straus in running the institutions. See letter from Straus to Sophia Berger (a member of the Soup Kitchens Committee), 23 February 1926, CZA A125 45.

54. A number of biographies and scholarly articles have been devoted to Szold and her social welfare activities in Palestine. They include: Brown, Michael G., “Henrietta Szold,” in The Israeli-American Connection, ed. Brown, M. (Detroit, 1996), 133–60; Dash, Joan, Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold (New York, 1979); Fineman, Irving, Woman of Valor (New York, 1961); Schindler, Reuben, “Reform and Welfare Policy: The Contribution of Henrietta Szold,” Journal of Jewish Communal Service 58 (1982): 143–49; Lowenthal, Marvin, Henrietta Szold: Life and Letters (New York, 1942); Zeitlin, Rose, Henrietta Szold: Record of a Life (New York, 1952).

55. Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project.

56. On the Progressive movement, see Axinn and Levin, Social Welfare; Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums (Pittsburgh, 1962); Stuart, Paul H., “Linking Clients and Policy,” Social Work 44 (1999): 335–47, and Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State

57. Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project.

58. See letters from Szold to Berger, 22 July 1924 and 21 May 1927, HA RG13 23 10.

59. See letter from Szold to Berger, 21 December 1925; and letter from Szold to Mr. and Mrs. Straus, 14 May 1926, CZA A125 45.

60. Report of Nathan Straus Soup Kitchens Investigation, January 1927, CZA, J1 7996.

61. Kark, Ruth and Glass, Joseph B., “The Jews in Eretz-Israel/Palestine: From Traditional Peripherality to Modern Centrality,” Israel Affairs 5(1999): 73–107.

62. The Nathan and Lina Straus Health Center Annual Report, HA RG2 47 1.

63. An Inquiry into the Activities of the Nathan Straus Soup Kitchens, Jerusalem, CZA, A125 55.

64. A Report on the Dietary of the Straus Soup kitchen located at the Straus Health Centre, January 1931, CZA A125 55. See also Bachi, Roberto, The Population of Israel (Jerusalem, 1976).

65. Letter to Szold, dated 28 August 1931, CZA A125 48. In a similar vein, she wrote to Szold: “I have been in social work myself long enough to know that free meals are about the most demoralizing thing for everybody concerned,” in a letter dated 2 December 1931, CZA A125 48.

66. See letter from Straus’s son, Nathan Straus Jr., to Judge Julian Mack, 9 April 1931, in which he cites the negative impact of the Depression on the income of the foundation as a reason for suspending the foundation’s ongoing financial support for Szold, CZA, A405, 108 B. The financial situation of the foundation worsened later that year, as can be seen in a letter from Lehman to Straus dated 16 December 1931, in which she noted that the income from rentals upon which the foundation was based had ceased due to the default of the tenant, CZA A125 48. See also Brown, Michael G., The Israeli-American Connection (Detroit, 1996).

67. See, for example, a letter from Szold to Lehman, dated 24 April 1931, and a letter from David de Sola Pool to Lehman dated 27 April 1931, CZA A125 48.

68. See the letter to this effect from Szold to Lehman, dated 31 July 1931, CZA A125 48.

69. See letter from the Soup Kitchens Committee chair, Braude, to Lehman, 14 August 1931, CZA A125 48.

70. An Inquiry into the Activities of the Nathan Straus Soup Kitchens.

71. Ibid., 14.

72. Ibid., 17. The reference here is to those clients of the soup kitchen—“the aged, the maimed, and the chronically ill, who are not equipped to earn their livelihood”—who would require substantial support in the future.

73. Ibid., 19.

74. See letter from Sissie Lehman to Henrietta Szold, dated 9.3.1932, CZA A125 48.

75. Recommendations of Henrietta Szold, July 1932, CZA A125 50.

76. See letter Alice Seligsberg, 10.9.1931, quoted in Lowenthal, 228. See also Schindler, Reuben, “Reform and Welfare Policy: The Contribution of Henrietta Szold,” Journal of Jewish Communal Studies 58 (1982): 143–49.

77. This criticism of the indirect support that the soup kitchens provided for the “Kollelim” can be found in a long letter written by Szold to Lehman, dated 27 April 1931, CZA A125 49.

78. See Dash, Joan, Summoned to Jerusalem (New York, 1979).As Szold noted in her submission to the subcommittee, in which she recounted her discussions with Lehman regarding the future of the soup kitchens and her suggestion to undertake a study of the clients: “Towards this decision I was influenced . . . by the hope that a genuine investigation, calculated to reveal the social service needs of Jerusalem, would show the value of continuing to apply the funds hitherto expended on the Soup Kitchens to other, more constructive purposes in Jerusalem, 7.8.1932, CZA A125 49.

79. See letter from Szold to Harry Viteles, dated 4 August 1932, CZA A125 50.

80. See letter from the Sephardic Community Committee, dated August 1932, CZA A125 53. See also letter from Szold to Harry Viteles, dated 25 August 1932, CZA A125 50.

81. See “Notes on Discussion between Miss. Szold and Mr. Braude on Report on Inquiry into the Activities of the Straus Soup Kitchens,” 5 August 1932, CZA A125 49.

82. Notes on meeting of the Straus Soup Kitchens Committee held on 14 August 1932, CZA A125 50.

83. See letter from the committee chair, I. Braude, to Sissie Lehman, dated 8 September 1932, CZA A125 50.

84. Letter from Braude to Szold, dated 28 October 1932, CZA A125 49.

85. See letter from Viteles to Szold, dated 9 October 1932, in which he related to her the gist of a conversation with the Straus family, CZA A125 50.

86. Palestine Post, 11 January 1933.

87. One of the initial tasks of the Social Work Department was to undertake, with the collaboration of a U.S. Jewish organization, a survey of the religious social welfare institutions operating in Palestine and receiving funding from the Diaspora. A copy of the report can be found in CZA J1 3065.

88. As expressed in a letter to Viteles, dated 25 August 1932, CZA A125 50.

89. Loewenberg, Frank A., “Preparing for the Welfare State: A Reexamination of the Decision to Establish the Social Service Department of the Va’ad Le’Ummi,” Journal of Social Work and Policy in Israel 7–8 (1993): 21–30.

90. On the reemergence of food insecurity, soup kitchens, and food banks in Israel during this period, see Doron and Gal, Soup Kitchens in Jerusalem at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century; Kaufman, Roni, “A University-Community Partnership to Change Public Policy,” Journal of Community Practice 12 (2008): 163–80; Levinson, Esther, The Mapping of Nonprofit Organizations in the Field of Food Security in Israel 2004: Scope and Patterns of Activity (Beer Sheva, 2005); and Nirel, Nurit, Rosen, Bruce, Erez, Shira, Ben-Harush, Ayala, Berg-Warman, Ayelet, Brodsky, Jenny, Nitzan-Kaluski, Dorit, Haviv-Messika, Amalia, and Goldsmith, Rebecca, Food Security in Israel in 2003 and Its Implications for Patterns of Nutrition (Jerusalem, 2005).