National Council of Jewish Women

The National Council of Jewish Women was founded in 1893 by Hannah Solomon, as part of the Parliament of Religions in the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. At the close of the exhibition, Solomon and the others involved with its committee of Jewish women resolved that they would form a permanent organization, known as the NCJW, with a dual purpose. First, this new organization would work to keep Judaism alive by informing women of their religious duties and their role in rearing Jewish children. Secondly, its members would "take part as a large group in all that concerns the welfare of mankind," working together to solve growing social problems that were impossible for the individual to combat alone. The Council quickly spread across the country, as a social and socially active women's club, so that by the time of its first triennial convention in 1896, the Council had more than four thousand members and fifty local sections.

In the past hundred years since its inception, the National Council of Jewish Women has grown to approximately one hundred thousand members and has established itself as one of the preeminent American reform organizations of the twentieth century. It has been actively involved in a wide variety of concerns including immigrant aid, opposition to the white slave trade, educational opportunities and vocational training for the blind and visually impaired, maternal and infant health care, establishment of child labor laws, religious education, opposition to anti-Semitism, international relief work, civil rights for blacks and women, and peace initiatives.

The journal in which these essays were first published, The Immigrant, was a monthly and then later a quarterly journal published by the National Council of Jewish Women, Department of Service to the Foreign Born (later known as the Department of Immigrant Aid) in New York City from 1921 to 1930. It was edited by Etta (Lasker) Rosensohn and Cecilia Razovsky.