Miriam Freund-Rosenthal

Miriam Kottler Freund-Rosenthal (1906 – January 16, 1999) was an American Jewish civic leader, best known for her contributions as President of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America.

Freund-Rosenthal was born in Brooklyn on January 1, 1906, and reared in Harlem and Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The child of Harry Kottler and Rebecca Zindler, she earned her bachelor's degree in 1925 from Hunter College in 1925, and went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate in history from New York University.

In 1927 she married Milton B. Freund, with whom she had two children—Matthew and Harry—before his death in 1968. She remarried to Harry Rosenthal, an importer of men's sportswear, in 1974, and thereafter moved to his St. Paul, Minnesota home.

In 1999, Freund-Rosenthal died in Miami Beach at the age of 92.

Freund-Rosenthal taught in the New York City Public Schools for 15 years until the early 1940s. She also played a major role in raising the funds to found Brandeis University in 1948.

Hadassah

Throughout the latter half of 1930s, after her first trip to Israel, Freund-Rosenthal was asked to speak to Hadassah groups about her visit. In 1940, she was asked to join the national board of Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America. She left Hadassah in 1942 before resigning from her position as a public school teacher and returning to Hadassah in 1943, when she took over as the chair of the American Zionist Youth Commission. Between 1943 and 1956 she held a variety of Hadassah National Board positions including National Vocational Education chair, National Youth Aliyah chair, and Vice President.

In 1956, Freund-Rosenthal was elected national president of Hadassah. During her four-year tenure, Hadassah built and dedicated its new medical center at Ein Karem in Jerusalem. At the time, the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank made the Hospital's original campus on Mt. Scopus unusable and the hospital had been operating in a scattered set of temporary facilities. Freund-Rosenthal persuaded Marc Chagall to design and execute the twelve stained-glass windows symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel for the medical center's synagogue, which have come to be known as the “Chagall Windows.” After her presidency, she held other board posts including the chair of Education, Zionist Affairs, Hadassah Magazine, two Youth Survey committees, and nongovernmental representative to the United Nations.

Post-Hadassah

Freund-Rosenthal continued her scholarly pursuits outside Hadassah. She was a founding member of the World Bible Society. She delivered a paper, "Medicine and the Hebraic Tradition," at the twenty-fifth International Congress of Orientalists. After moving to Saint Paul, Minnesota with her second husband, she helped create an educational endowment fund for National Hadassah. And in her late eighties, she spearheaded the compilation and editing of A Tapestry of Hadassah Memories, a collection of interviews and memoirs of Hadassah leaders.

• Jewish Merchants in Colonial America (1939)
• Jewels for a Crown (1963). About the Chagall windows in Jerusalem.
• A Tapestry of Hadassah Memories(1995) Compiled by Freund-Rosenthal from the writing and memories of over 200 Hadassah members.
• In My Lifetime: Family, Community, Zion, by Miriam Freund-Rosenthal. A memoir and nostalgic look at recent Zionist history.

• Morris, Richard B.. 1941. Book Review. Jewish Social Studies 3 (2). Indiana University Press: 222–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4464406.
• "Hadassah Gives Library "Jewels for a Crown," On Chagall's Work". The American Israelite. January 16, 1964. Retrieved May 3, 2016. 
• Elliman, Wendy (11 August 1995). "Ladies With a Future". Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 3 May 2016. 
• Yosef, Yaakov (1 June 1990). "An Earlier". Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 3 May 2016.