“If my hands could have achieved it, I would have strewn roses all over the streets of Jerusalem for you.” This sentence was written by a man not to his wife or lover, but to the doctor who saved his six-month-old daughter’s life.
Dr. Helena Kagan, the guardian angel of Jerusalem’s children, was a pioneer in every sense of the word. Almost everything she did was groundbreaking.
She was the first woman to receive a job offer from the medical research institute at the University of Bern. She was also the first woman to obtain a license to practice medicine in the Land of Israel, and the first pediatrician in the country. She established the first daycare center in the Holy Land, the first well-baby clinic, and the first pediatric department in an Israeli hospital.
Despite all these impressive professional achievements, people who met her in person primarily remembered her for her incredible kindness, humility, and caring nature. This serious woman, whose gentle manner concealed a sharp professional mind and a strong sense of determination, saw herself as nothing more than a public servant. She never expected any rewards.
In the case of the six-month-old infant whose father wrote the opening sentence of this article, Dr. Kagan made her way to the family’s home – they couldn’t afford any other doctor – and spent forty consecutive days there monitoring their daughter’s recovery and providing necessary treatment. When the grateful parents sent her a bouquet of flowers, Helena responded with astonishment, remarking, “Buy why?”
Helena Kagan was born in 1889 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was then part of the Russian Empire. When her father’s employers discovered that he was a Jew, they demanded that he convert to Christianity or leave the factory he managed. He left, and the family lived in poverty for years, until he was eventually able to establish an independent business on his own.
Helena’s talents were apparent even early on, but her parents couldn’t afford the costs of her education, so she was forced to stay home. During her childhood she took care to educate herself, without the aid of a teacher, and when she reached high school-age she was eventually accepted to the most prestigious school in Uzbekistan.
When her family’s financial situation improved, Helena’s parents sent her and her brother Noah to study in Western Europe. It was only when they arrived in Lausanne, Switzerland that Helena discovered she was too young to be admitted to the music studies program she had dreamed of. Not one to sit idly by, she instead enrolled as an external student (again, due to her young age) in pre-med studies. And that was that. Almost immediately, she fell in love with the profession and discovered she excelled at it.
In 1910, when she was only 21 years old, she completed her medical studies, specializing in pediatrics. That’s when she received a job offer from the faculty of medicine’s own research institute – an offer that had never been extended to any woman before, not to mention a Jewish woman.
She returned home to visit her parents, having not seen them for several years, to tell them about the coveted position she had secured. Unfortunately, she found her father on his deathbed, where he made one final request: Before starting such a job, she should travel to the Land of Israel, just for a visit. It wasn’t long before her father passed away. Helena and her mother decided not only to visit the country but to make it their permanent home. Their ship arrived in the port of Jaffa just a few short months before the start of World War I.
When they eventually arrived in Jerusalem, Helena was in for a shock. First, she was astounded by the terrible sanitary and health conditions in the city.
A passage from her book, The Beginning of My Journey in Jerusalem, reads:
“The medical situation in Jerusalem in 1914 was shockingly primitive, reminiscent of an era centuries before. Ignorance and superstition ran rampant in the city, in addition to severe poverty. The sanitary conditions were dismal, with municipal services such as garbage collection available only on main roads and in a few residential neighborhoods. Public restrooms did not exist at all.”
She then soon discovered that she couldn’t practice medicine at all, at least not officially. The Ottoman government wasn’t exactly a model of progressive thought or practice, and while women could be admitted to medical studies in Europe, the Ottomans found the idea of a female doctor unthinkable.
As you can already imagine, a minor detail like lacking an official license was not going to stop Dr. Helena Kagan from doing what she believed was right.
She opened a clinic in the small house she had bought and waited for patients to arrive. But they didn’t show up. The traditionally-minded residents of Jerusalem – Jews and Arabs alike – didn’t understand why this young woman thought she could heal them. “Doctors” who had never been trained in Western medicine mocked the laboratory she set up next to the clinic: What kind of doctor was she if she needed to take her patients’ blood to diagnose diseases?
As it turned out, one particular Haredi family played a critical role in helping Kagan overcome this general lack of faith in her abilities. That family’s children later joined the ranks of one of the most extreme Ultra-Orthodox factions in Jerusalem – the Neturei Karta sect.
The Blau family’s six-year-old son Amram was very sick. None of the doctors they consulted or remedies they tried helped. In desperation, the parents turned to their last resort – the strange young woman from Europe. Kagan quickly diagnosed Amram’s illness – lobar pneumonia – and with her dedicated treatment, he recovered and grew up to become one of the leaders of the Neturei Karta movement. From that moment on, Kagan became the revered doctor of the children of Jerusalem’s Haredi community. When she later became ill herself, hundreds of families prayed for her recovery.
In addition to working in the private clinic, she took a job at the municipal hospital. Initially, she was hired as a staff nurse, and afterwards began training nurse apprentices. In the absence of running water, a laboratory, or even a separate bath for patients, she taught the young women, both Jewish and Arab, how to care for patients at the most basic level – for example by disinfecting syringes or washing their own hands. She did all of this without speaking Hebrew or Arabic, relying heavily on hand gestures and pantomime.
When World War I broke out, conditions in the hospital deteriorated. A large proportion of the doctors were recruited into the Ottoman army, epidemics broke out, and the hospital director himself died of typhus. Kagan, who by now had proven her professional abilities beyond expectations, took over the management of the hospital until a replacement could arrive from Turkey. When a medical delegation came to review the hospital’s operations, its members could not ignore the woman who was running the institution so efficiently and with such authority – Dr. Helena Kagan finally received the coveted license to practice medicine.
She was the first woman to receive such a license from the Ottoman authorities in the Holy Land.
When the replacement from Turkey eventually arrived, Dr. Kaga lost her position as the director of the municipal hospital. However, by then she was already a well-known figure in Jerusalem, and her medical practice became more organized and public. She joined various Zionist women’s organizations, and in 1917, she took over the well-equipped clinic of Dr. Albert Ticho (who had been recruited into the Ottoman army), transforming it into the first Jewish hospital in the Land of Israel. In 1936, she established the pediatric department at Bikur Cholim Hospital, which was later named in her honor.
In addition to her professional work, which didn’t take up all her time, she looked after the city’s children in other ways as well. She believed that “there is no treatment for a child without treating the family,” and thus she established a daycare center for children whose fathers had been called up into the army and whose mothers needed to work. She also set up an orphanage in the Sha’arei Chesed neighborhood and later worked at an Arab children’s home in the Old City.
But Dr. Kagan’s crowning achievement was the establishment the city’s Tipat Halav (“drop of milk”) well-baby clinics. This institution, well-known in Israel today, started out of the tiny courtyard of her Jerusalem home. She discovered that a major problem affecting the health of Jerusalem’s infants was malnutrition, so she purchased a cow to provide milk for the babies under her care.
She later partnered up with Henrietta Szold and the Histadrut Nashim Ivriot (Hebrew Women’s Organization) to establish the first “Mother and Child Station” in the Old City. She and her team needed to attract women for whom the whole concept of this kind of aid seemed unnecessary and foreign (“Why would I need someone to teach me how to take care of my baby? Why should a baby who seems healthy need to visit a clinic?”). They decided to use one of the most sought-after products of the time – milk – to entice these impoverished mothers. The bottles, containing pasteurized milk (a rare commodity in the country at the time), were distributed in two ways. One was at the station itself, where mothers were encouraged to stay a little longer, weigh their babies, receive information on disease prevention, and discuss their challenges. The other was through a citywide distribution effort on the back of a donkey carrying a sign that read Tipat Halav – a drop of milk – which is the name of this network of well-baby clinics to this day.
Dr. Helena Kagan cared for all the children of Jerusalem – Arabs and Jews, religious and secular, wealthy and poor. In the Helena Kagan Collection at the National Library of Israel and in other collections belonging to public figures of that era, you can find correspondence reflecting her efforts to help children in any way possible – from purchasing a violin for a young, orphaned musician to organizing donations to purchase a sewing machine for a poor mother so she could support her children.
She pounded the pavement, going from house to house all over the city, braving Jerusalem’s unforgiving weather, during times of war and peace, growing older but never losing her vigor and passion for providing the city’s children with the opportunity to grow up healthy and well.
She received recognition for her efforts. In the 1930s, she was given a place of honor on the board of directors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1958, she was awarded the title “Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem,” becoming the first woman to receive it. In 1975, she was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize.
In recent years, her story was made accessible to children by Israeli author Dorit Gani in her book Helena Kagan, which is part of the Hebrew series “The Israelis – A Historical Women’s Series” by Zeltner Publishing.
Though her achievements and efforts in the field of medicine were impressive by any standard, Helena Kagan was more than a doctor.
In 1936, she met the talented violinist Emil Hauser, with whom she could finally share her first passion from her days in Tashkent, long before she entered the world of medicine – music. They fell in love, got married, and built a home together, working tirelessly to bring gifted Jewish musicians from Europe to the Land of Israel, and continuing to support them even after their immigration.
Helena Kagan’s story is not only the story of a woman shattering glass ceilings and enjoying a great deal of success in her chosen profession, but also the story of a person who turned everything she was involved with, including her mere “hobbies”, into a dedicated mission. That was her way of improving the world around her and improving the lives of the people who lived in it.
She and Emil had no biological children, but thanks to her decades of work, countless children owed their lives, development, and health to Dr. Helena Kagan.
