Politics and Government

Pearl Willen was a twentieth-century social and human welfare activist and communal leader with a love for Jewish heritage. She had a lifelong record of service for such causes as civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of workers.

By the mid-1870s, approximately a quarter of the Jewish population of Palestine, excluding Jerusalem, was North African, and the overwhelming majority of adult Jews were women. This discrepancy was due to a large number of widows, who experienced economic and physical hardship in their new home but also a new sense of freedom.

“White slavery traffic” was an expansion of the prostitution that spread throughout the world in the first years of the twentieth century, following the massive emigration to the New World and resulting from the growing poverty and misery of European women in the age of industrialization. Jewish women were particularly vulnerable in a hostile environment, and Jewish women's organizations played an active role in the international struggle against this plague.

After years of service in the Haganah and the Auxiliary Territorial Service, Shoshana Werner was appointed as the second commanding officer of the Women’s Corps of the Israel Defense Forces in 1949.

A Zionist and a physician, Vera Weizmann was a founding member of the WIZO. She accompanied and assisted her husband Chaim, the president of the Zionist Federation of Britain and first president of Israel, as he negotiated the founding of a Jewish state.

Trude Weiss-Rosmarin made great advances for women’s involvement in Jewish life through the schools she created and her editorship of the Jewish Spectator. A dynamic speaker backed by broad-ranging Jewish scholarship and a prodigious memory, she was a popular lecturer at synagogues and Jewish centers across the United States and a foremost critic of American Jewish life and institutions.

Operating under at least five different names in the course of her career, Ruth Werner (a pen name) was a singularly accomplished spy, whose espionage activities spanned some fifteen years, from 1931 to 1946. Twice awarded the order of the Red Banner, the highest Soviet military decoration, Werner also held the rank of colonel in the Red Army.

Considered an architect of European unity, Louise Weiss is best known for her campaigns on behalf of the peaceful resolution of international conflicts during the interwar years and the Cold War. She also worked on behalf of Jewish refugee rights in the late 1930s and was a leading feminist activist who focused on obtaining the right for French women to vote.

A dedicated activist for women’s rights and racial equality, Gertrude Weil showed that local, small-scale political action could have far-reaching effects. Her decision to associate herself with a relatively radical social and political agenda was unusual for a southern woman and even more uncommon for a southern Jew. Weil, however, strayed from this norm, because she believed that women had a responsibility to participate in the political process.

Helen Weil was a devoted gerontologist in and around Cleveland, Ohio. A German-Jewish refugee herself, in addition to teaching at Western Reserve University, Weil developed thorough social services and programs for elderly Jewish residents at Montefiore Home before going on to found and direct the Schnurmann House.

Helene Weigel was an actress and director known for her maternal roles in Bertolt Brecht’s plays and her incredible kindness and generosity. Weigel married Brecht in 1922 and they fled Germany during the war, returning to East Germany after the war. Weigel was known for her strength, energy, diplomacy, and good humor as she managed an acting career and dealt with many challenges in her lifetime. 

A professor at the University of Toronto, Weinrib is one of Canada’s foremost authorities on constitutional law.

Chemist Elga Wasserman – a recipient of a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard in 1949 and a J.D. from Yale in 1976 – is best known for overseeing the entrance of the first coeducational class at Yale College in 1969.

Anna Strunsky Walling was a Russian-born author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She produced several novels and memoirs and was involved in a number of political organizations, including the Socialist Labor Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she and her husband helped found.

Holocaust survivor Simone Veil was a pioneer in the French government and the European Union. As Minister of Health, she presented and successfully argued the law decriminalizing abortion in France. She was the first woman to preside over the European Parliament and the fifth woman to be interred in the Panthéon.