Andrea Gyarmati is a Hungarian Olympic medalist in swimming. In her short but impressive professional swimming career, she won 28 Hungarian national championships, set two world records, and won two Olympic medals before retiring from swimming to become a pediatrician.

Nursing was not recognized as a profession in Israel until 1918, when the American Zionist Medical Unit, which later became the Hadassah Medical Organization, opened a nursing school. The first graduates were the leaders and pioneers of the nursing profession in Israel.

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America (HWZOA) has a lengthy history of activity in the Yishuv and Israel, going back to 1913, about a year after it was founded in New York, and continuing to this day. This activity, outstanding in its scope, continuity, stability, and diversity, encompasses efforts in the sphere of health and medical services and in the welfare of children and youth.

American women have been the “perennial health care reformers.” Women’s health activism has often coincided with other social reform movements. Since the late 1960s, Jewish women have helped create and sustain the women’s health movement through decades of substantial social, political, medical, and technological change.

A brilliant pediatrician used to working in difficult circumstances, Anna Braude Heller struggled to keep children’s hospitals open through both World War I and World War II, even as the Nazis occupied Poland and placed Jews in ghettos. Although she evaded deportation in 1943, she was killed shortly afterwards when German soldiers raided the Warsaw Ghetto.

Physiologist, physician, and teacher Rahel Hirsch worked for nearly two decades at the Medical Clinic of the Berlin Charité, eventually as the head of a polyclinic and a professor. Yet Hirsch was never paid at the Charité; she left in 1919 and opened a private practice. Hirsch emigrated to England in 1938, working as a laboratory assistant and librarian, but she struggled with mental illness and died in a psychiatric hospital in 1953.

A pioneer in many realms—birth control, women’s suffrage, peace activism, and envisioning a wider future for women—Aletta Henriette Jacobs began her career as the Netherland’s first women physician in 1879. She went on to participate in many women’s rights conferences and was a staunch anti-war activist, traveling to the Hague and the United States to advocate her position.

Francis Wisebart Jacobs helped transform the fledgling state of Colorado through her organization of charities and hospitals.

Helena Kagan, a pioneer of pediatric medicine in pre-State Palestine, is known to this day as the children’s doctor of Jerusalem, the city where she settled following her aliyah in 1914. Kagan tended to generations of children—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—saving many of them from sickness and death.

Anna Kaplan was an American Jewish nurse who contributed significantly to developing the concept of nursing as a profession in Erez Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a leader in founding the nursing school, which later became the Henrietta Szold-Hadassah School of Nursing at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Lena Nemerovsky Kenin made major contributions to both gynecology and psychology with her successful medical practice and her groundbreaking work on postpartum depression.

Marcia Koven was the founding curator of the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum, one of a number of museums dedicated to Jewish history in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. Her work inspired other Jewish museum projects in Atlantic Canada, and she held a number of other leadership roles related to Jewish life and history.

Pati Kremer was one of the pioneers of the Jewish workers’ movement in Eastern Europe. Already an active member in the 1890s of the so-called Vilna Group, the precursor to the Bund, she remained closely associated with the Jewish workers’ party until her death in the Vilna Ghetto.

Born in Russia but educated in Switzerland, Anna Kuliscioff became one of the key figures in Italy’s early socialist movement and was a feminist advocate who concentrated on poor women’s issues. In her later life, she helped publish a socialist periodical and hosted a prominent salon, often with her partner Filippo Turati.

Bertha Landsman dedicated her life to nursing, becoming one of the generation of giants who laid the foundation of the nursing profession in Palestine. She worked with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women, persuading them to abandon folk superstition in favor of “correct knowledge and information,” and also taught nursing to local women students.