Ida Silverman

In 1925 Silverman made her first trip to Palestine and was able to use her experiences to gain speaking engagements in a variety of venues.[14] Throughout the remainder of the 1920s, Silverman served as vice president of the Zionist Organization of America and vice chair of the hospital building fund for the Hebrew University. In addition to her national organizational work, Silverman was vice president of the New England Zionist Region, the New England Conference of Hadassah, and an honorary president of the Hadassah Organization in Providence.[15] She is the only woman to have served as vice president of the Zionist Organization of America and the American Jewish Congress.[2]

Ida Silverman National Jewish Fund

Silverman was an outspoken proponent for Israeli statehood, traveling throughout the Americas and Europe advocating for a Jewish homeland.[16] She depicted the Jews who had resettled in Palestine as simple farmers, seeking an agrarian life to alleviate the hunger they had experienced elsewhere. Silverman stressed that the settlers' intent was not to industrialize and vie with the international powerhouse nations, but simply to provide for their basic needs.[14] Throughout 1927 and 1928, her itinerary included a speaking engagement in Savannah, Georgia with Sir Wyndham Deedes, prior chief secretary of Palestine;[17] a tour of hospitals, clinics and public health programs in the Holy Land to determine how Hadassah could improve the health of the entire region, "without regard to race or creed";[15] and attendance at the World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.[17] Silverman resigned from Hadassah in 1928 in a policy dispute[8] over the high salaries being paid to administrators rather than using the funds for charitable works.[18]

Silverman in 1938

Despite the Great Depression, Silverman's travels expanded in the 1930s, when she began spending 6 months each year outside the U.S.[19] As early as 1932, land purchase programs to buy and settle refugees on permanent homes in Palestine were being pursued by Jewish organizations. Silverman not only supported the plans and raised funds for them, but she planted the first tree in the colony at Wady Havarith.[20] With Hitler's rise to power, Silverman's pleas for a safe haven for Jews became more urgent[21] and her first-hand reports from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Poland[22] contained explicit accounts of conditions.[23] In 1938, Silverman was working with the Youth Aliyah Movement in conjunction with Hadassah in the U.S. to relocate 10,000 refugee children to Palestine. As a fund-raiser, Silverman's goal was to raise a quarter of a million dollars for resettlement and youth training in agricultural and vocational pursuits.[24] In 1939, she ended her Polish tour studying the conditions and desperation,[23] shortly before the Polish invasion,[22][25] but the effort was successful in relocating some 7,000 young people from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania to Palestine before the end of 1940.[23]

Because riots had broken out in the late 1930s over British proposals to partition Palestine,[23] and U.S. diplomats including Sumner Welles proposed American alternatives,[26][27] Silverman embarked on several tours of South America and the Caribbean in the early 1940s to determine if, as an alternative to Palestinian resettlement, European Jews could be established in the Dominican Republic, Peru, or Uruguay.[28] She reported on her findings at the Inter-American Conference in Baltimore, describing the alternatives as unfavorable and the attempt in the Dominican Republic, as a "failure".[26] She also wrote articles under the byline Mrs. Archibald Silverman, urging the emigration of Jews to Palestine rather than to other places – such as a Jewish colony in Sosúa, Dominican Republic, promoted by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the early 1940s; a plan to settle Jews in the Kimberley region of Australia; and another proposal for a Jewish colony in Paramaribo, Suriname. Her articles were filled with vitriol against what she perceived as the "schemes" of Jewish organizers opposed to Zionism; in a 1948 article titled "The Surinam Nightmare", she "described 'diabolical plans' to abandon Jewish 'guinea pigs' to 'terrifying tropical diseases'". Eventually the alternative emigration plans were scrapped in the wake of the 1948 declaration of independence by the State of Israel.[29]

Ida Silverman presenting a scroll to Israeli Defense Minister Joseph Jacobsen

After the Inter-American Conference in Baltimore, Silverman continued her travels in South America and then obtained special permission to travel through England, Scotland, and Ireland to raise money. [30] Her collections were a resounding success, which she attributed to the acute understanding of homelessness experienced by British citizens who had been displaced during bombing raids.[25] Anticipating the war's end, Silverman increased efforts to buy land in Palestine,[31] believing that if Jewish organizations owned land, when the Peace Conference occurred, bargaining would be in their favor.[32]

As the war was ending in 1945, Silverman was on the road, traveling through all the countries of Central America, in South America, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa on fund-raising missions.[33] Then in 1946, she was in Europe visiting refugee camps in Sweden and Occupied Germany, before returning to Palestine.[34] By the end of the war, she had traveled 600,000 air-miles[1][35] having visited every state in the United States, each province of Canada,[22] Mexico,[36] all of the countries in Central and South America,[22] the West Indies, almost all of Western Europe,[36] parts of Eastern Europe,[22] Australia, New Zealand, Iran, Palestine, Morocco,[36] and South Africa.[33]

Ida Silverman in 1960

After the State of Israel was established, Silverman recognized the diverse needs to build the nation and she and Archibald channeled funds into planting orchards, building the Sharon Hotel, and supplementing the Synagogue Centre Building Fund.[35] The Sharon Hotel, built in Herzliya,[30] on the Sharon Plain, was part of an effort to build infrastructure[37] and develop tourism sites to stimulate further growth.[35] Silverman founded and served the board of the company which created the hotel.[30] In the Jezreel Valley, she chaired a water development company and established a mixed-fruit orchard of around 70 acres of trees.[30] She also was involved in several projects in Rhode Island. In 1955 she founded and served as president of the Friends of Butler Hospital in an attempt to reopen the health center, which had been shut down.[38] They were successful in proving its benefit to the community and the hospital reopened.[36] In 1957, Silverman served as chair of the fundraising for the Rhode Island Association of Mental Health.[38] By the early-1960s, 33 synagogues throughout Israel had been built through the synagogue fund.[36] During the two years she lived in Israel, she helped erect around 80 additional synagogues[39] and by the time of Silverman's death, the number was over 100 synagogues in Israel and elsewhere.[40]

In 1971, at the age of 89, Silverman immigrated to Israel.[41] She died on 1 November 1973 in Herzliya, Israel and was buried in the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery near Jerusalem.[38]

• American Mothers Committee (1976). Mothers of achievement in American history, 1776–1976: Bi-centennial project, 1974–1976. C. E. Tuttle Co. ISBN 9780804812016.
• Browning, Christopher R.; Hollander, Richard S.; Tec, Nechama (2007). Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-46723-0.
• Foster, Geraldine S.; Horvitz, Eleanor F.; Cohen, Jusith Weiss (1998). Jews of Rhode Island 1658–1958. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7385-9015-8.
• Goodwin, George M.; Smith, Ellen (2004). The Jews of Rhode Island. Lebanon, New Hampshire: UPNE. ISBN 978-1-58465-424-7.
• Morris, Helen (November 1980). "Ida Silverman: Nobody's Puppet" (PDF). Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes. Vol. 8. Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association. pp. 109–129. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
• "Ida Marcia Silverman" (PDF). Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes. November 1973. Retrieved 27 December 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Rovner, Adam (2014). In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. NYU Press. ISBN 978-1-4798-1748-1.