With every need she saw, she formed a society to meet it.

Rebecca Gratz could not see the widows and orphans of the Revolutionary war without doing something to ease their suffering — with every need she saw, she formed a society to meet it.

She was a Jewish woman from Philadelphia who founded many organizations to help women and children. 

The first one was the Female Assoc. for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances, which she founded with her mother and sister. 

Then, still seeing need all around her, she founded the Fuel Society, The Sewing Society, The Philadelphia Orphan Asylum – and when she learned the orphans were all taught Christianity, she opened the first Jewish Orphanage in America, with Hebrew language and Hebrew Sunday School for kids gathered from all over the USA and Canada.

She also found time to raise her 6 nieces and nephews after her sister died.  It’s rumored that the character Rebecca, a Jewish woman whose love of Christian Ivanhoe is doomed in Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe is based on Rebecca Gratz.

Biographical notes:

📍3/4/1781 Pennsylvania

“The crowning happiness of my days has been my association with my beloved companions [the teachers and managers of the Hebrew Sunday School] in the duties we have shared together.”

🕊 Rebecca Gratz died on August 27, 1869.

Although she outlived all but her youngest sibling, Benjamin, most of her friends, and many of her nieces and nephews, she remained actively involved on the boards of the Philadelphia Orphan Society, Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, Hebrew Sunday School and Jewish Foster Home well into her eighties.

Gratz's enduring legacy can be measured by the success and longevity of the many institutions she founded. 

Through them, she helped provide material sustenance to thousands of women and children.

She trained generations of Jewish women to be active participants in their religion and to operate the benevolent foundations and schools she founded, so they would continue long after Rebecca’s own death.

The Philadelphia Orphan Society and Female Association provided material sustenance to thousands of women and children.

The Jewish Foster Home thrived until it eventually merged with other institutions to create the Philadelphia Association for Jewish Children.

The Female Hebrew Benevolent Society and Hebrew Sunday School continued their work for almost 150 years. In 1986, the flourishing School merged with the Talmud Torah Schools of Philadelphia and continues to provide coeducational Jewish learning for thousands of young students.

In their words:

As historian Dianne Ashton writes,

“By training younger Jewish women in administering the agencies she founded, Gratz ensured that the FHBS, HSS and JFH would continue to flourish long after her death. In their work, these organizations continued to provide Jewish women and children a way to be both fully Jewish and fully American.”

Her Quotes:

I love children—and children’s talk—their own words expressing their own thoughts goes quicker to my heart than anything wiser that is said for them.

 How hard… it is to have the tastes, the habits, the longings and recollections, if not of affluence, at least of comfort, and yet to be poor.

🍵 Tea inspired by this remarkable woman:

Chamomile blend Herbal Tea