Tamar De Sola Pool
Tamar De Sola Pool’s family came from Israel to America when she was a teenager but retained its Zionist spirit, speaking Hebrew at home. After graduating from Hunter College in 1913, Pool taught comparative literature at Hunter from 1914 to 1917. She served as president of the New York chapter of Hadassah from 1929 to 1935 and national president from 1939 to 1943. Beginning in 1934, she worked with Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah program to rescue Jewish children from Europe and resettle them in Palestine. She also collaborated with her husband on two books, Is There an Answer? about Jewish faith after the Holocaust, and An Old Faith in the New World, about their congregation’s 300-year history.
Tamar de Sola Pool dreamt of a socially and economically just world where people consistently acted toward one another with good will, fairness, and faith. She believed that a solution to the world’s problems would lead to the eradication of Jewish persecution and a global understanding that the Jewish people needed an independent state. She entreated the nations of the world to cooperate with one another, to live together peacefully before God, and to create a new world order. In pursuit of the Zionist ideal, she also encouraged a reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.
Early Life
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Work with Hadassah
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Career Beyond Hadassah
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Selected Works
“Children to Palestine,” The Women’s Press (1948): 5+; “Exiles on Cyprus,” Highroad (1948): 24–28.
The Haggadah of Passover, with David de Sola Pool (1955).
Is There an Answer? with David de Sola Pool (1966).
An Old Faith in the New World, with David de Sola Pool (1955).
AJYB 83:360–361.
EJ s.v. “Hirschenson.
Pool”.
Hadassah Archives, NYC.
Horowitz, Gloria Goldreich. The Hadassah Idea: History and Development (1986).
Hudson Observer, November 15, 1916.
The Jewish Week–American Examiner, June 7, 1981: 2.
Kinosha News, January 25, 1946.
JTA-DNB, June 3, 1981.
Mizruchi, Ephraim H. “Filling the Moral Vacuum,” Hadassah Magazine 48 (1966): 20.
NYTimes, September 15, 1933, and Obituary. June 3, 1981.
Spanish and Portuguese Center. Archives. Congregation Shearith Israel, NYC.
Szold, Henrietta. Correspondence, Hadassah Archives, NYC.
UJE.
WWIAJ (1938).
Who’s Who in the World. 5th ed..
WWIA 7.
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