Hadassah’s 2019 Chanukah Miracles: Hadassah Nurse Extraordinaire

For nurse Judith Steiner-Freud, 2019 marks her 100th Chanukah!

Here are 10 things to know about Judith:

• At 100 years old, Judith still volunteers at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Henrietta Szold School of Nursing.
• Judith came to Jerusalem from Czechoslovakia on a rare student visa, granted by the British authorities.
• A star nursing graduate, Judith was immediately promoted to teacher.
• During the attack on the Hadassah convoy on April 13, 1948, Judith continued teaching because she knew the war was coming, and Israel would need nurses.
• Judith traveled to Malawi to train nurses.
• Judith knew Henrietta Szold.
• After becoming the director of the Henrietta Szold School of Nursing, Judith succeeded in making nursing an academic profession in Israel.
• Judith always has coffee and cake, European style, at four o’clock in the afternoon.
• It is true that her late husband was a cousin of Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst, but Judith waves away disappointments by saying, “it’s not the end of the world.”
• Judith blesses all of us to reach age 100 with “a good mind and good legs.”

Today, 2,017 nurses work at the Hadassah Medical Center. Tens of thousands have graduated from the Henrietta School of Nursing, the first-ever college for women in pre-state Israel.