Rebecca Aronson Brickner (1894-1988) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parents,Max and Dora Aronson, followed Orthodox Jewish practices and had strong ties to the Zionist movement. Rebecca Aronson received a rigorous Jewish education with Dr. Samson Benderley. In 1910 Benderley was invited to establish the Bureau of Jewish Education in New York City, and Aronson accompanied him as his Hebrew secretary. During her years in New York, Aronson continued her studies at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. She was the first woman to complete a new program in Jewish education at the Seminary, and thus became the first woman with a professional degree in Jewish education in America.
Aronson married Barnett R. Brickner in 1919 and moved with him to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Barnett studied for the Reform rabbinate at Hebrew Union College. His first pulpit was in Toronto, Ontario. While living there, Rebecca Brickner established Hadassah in Canada; in 1912 she had been a founding member of Hadassah in the United States with Henrietta Szold. She also organized the first Sisterhood of a Reform congregation in Canada.
The Brickners came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925, where Rabbi Brickner was to lead Anshe Chesed - Fairmount Temple until his death in 1958. Rebecca Brickner promoted Jewish education and women's Jewish organizations. By her impetus, in 1963 the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies became an agency independent of the Bureau of Jewish Education of Cleveland, and she established the college's Women's Association. She continued to teach and study through the 1980s. In 1971, the College of Jewish Studies awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Hebrew Letters; in 1973 she earned a Masters of Hebrew Letters from that institution.
The Rebecca Aronson Brickner Papers, 1915-1980 (1970-1980) consist of writings, lecture notes, certificates, and a scrapbook.
The collection is of value to researchers studying women's roles in service organizations in general, and in Jewish education and Zionism in particular. Of note is Brickner's work with the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies and her account of the founding of Hadassah in 1912.
The collection is arranged alphabetically by document type, and then chronologically.
Photographs have been removed to the photograph and print collection.
Processed by Harold Friedman and Jane A. Avner in 1999
None.
[Container ___, Folder ___ ] MS 4776 Rebecca Aronson Brickner Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland College of Jewish Studies, 1996
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.