Hilde Hochwald

Hilde Alexander-Katz (née Hochwald) was born on 12.12.1907 in Berlin and died in 1992 in Haifa. She began her career as a kindergarten teacher of infants born outside marriage. After graduating from the Social Women's School in Berlin Schöneberg in 1929, she worked in a Jewish orphanage, in a 'Kinderlandheim' and in the Jewish Child Welfare Office and held various leading positions as a kindergarten teacher and in the Jewish Welfare School. She also worked in an institution for Jewish girls founded by Bertha Pappenheim, the leader of the Jewish women’s movement. Later, Hochwald went to work at the Kovno institution of the physician and pedagogue Siegfried Lehmann (Lithuania) in preparing children for immigration to Palestine. She herself emigrated to Palestine in 1929 and eventually settled in Haifa, where she soon became the head of a nursery run by the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO). After starting as a social worker in the Youth Aliyah at the invitation of Henrietta Szold, the American social work leader in Palestine, she later became the executive secretary in the Union of the Nurses, Social Workers, and Pharmaceutical, a rare opportunity that has opened the door to assimilate professional social work in the union. Then, she became a supervisor at the National Council in the field of outdoor care and arrangement of immigrant children. In 1934 she was appointed by the German social work pioneer Siddy Wronsky to map and investigate foster homes and institutions, while monitoring the status of these children. From 1941 until her retirement in 1967 she directed the Bureau of social work in Haifa, where she implemented the concept of team meetings and emergency social work and set up a nursery, clothing warehouses and a soup kitchen. In addition, she wrote articles in international journals and in 1957 took part in the advisory committee to the Israeli minister of welfare Moshe Shapira.

Authors: Ayana Halpern, Dayana Lau