Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim

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KOHUT, Rebekah Bettelheim

Born 9 September 1864, Kaschau, Hungary; died 11 August 1951, New York, New York

Daughter of Siegfried and Henrietta Weintraub Bettelheim; married Alexander Kohut, 1887

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut was the second daughter of a rabbi and physician father, and her mother was the first female Jewish schoolteacher in Hungary. In 1874, the family emigrated to America, finally settling in San Francisco, where Kohut attended the University of California. After the death, in 1895, of her husband, a renowned Hebrew scholar and rabbi, she founded a school for girls that she headed for five years. Her major interest revolved around the newly developing Jewish women's organizations; she served as first president of the National Council of Jewish Women and of the World Congress of Jewish Women. Concern for the problems of working women led her to investigate the opportunities available to them, and to create and to serve on numerous local and national employment commissions. During World War I, she was active in mobilizing women's participation, and after the war she surveyed the refugee problems for the overseas relief organizations.

Kohut's first book, My Portion (1925), written when a long illness limited her community activities, is a description of her early years in Hungary, her first experiences in America in war-devastated Richmond, and her coming to maturity in the exciting atmosphere of post-Gold Rush San Francisco. Despite considerable restraint in discussing personal affairs, she nonetheless chronicles her spiritual crisis as an adolescent, the trials of being a rabbi's wife and stepmother to eight children, and her sorrowful adjustment to widowhood. The bulk of the story, however, is bound up with her activities in Jewish organizations and the difficulties of transforming women's groups from sewing circles and ladies' auxiliaries into significant philanthropic organizations.

As I Know Them: Some Jews and a Few Gentiles (1929) provides an informal history of Jews in the U.S. Kohut's main concern in this work, which is essentially anecdotal, is to explain the aims and attitudes of American Jews, the differences between the early Spanish, mid-19th-century German, and late-19th-century East European immigrants, and their common anxiety over the rising anti-Semitism. She is particularly concerned with detailing the tensions within the Jewish community between the Reform and Orthodox sectors, and the conflicting needs of Jews to retain traditional values while adapting to American customs. She reveals an acute awareness of women's peculiar position both in America and within Judaism, and though she eschews radical changes, she strongly supports suffrage and career training for women.

In His Father's House (1938) is Kohut's moving tribute to her stepson George Alexander Kohut, who died after becoming a leader in American education, a prolific writer, and a philanthropist. A warm relationship between stepmother and stepson underlies the story.

Kohut's last book, More Yesterdays (1949), written when she was an invalid, was intended as a supplement to her earlier autobiography but covers much of the same material. Kohut describes the pleasures of cosmopolitan life, the horrors of the severe economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, the rising fascism and its companion, anti-Semitism, and her conversion to Zionism by Theodore Herzl.

Despite her four essentially autobiographical books, the dynamic quality of Kohut's life remains untold. The formal, somewhat pedantic tone of her writing is partially responsible for this, but more significant is her attitude towards herself emphasizing her role as a member of a group rather than as an achieving individual. Her extraordinary accomplishments in social work, in education, and in the development of public unemployment agencies are presented primarily as external events rather than the struggles of a particular person. Her contributions to women's rights lie more in her assumption of responsibilities than in advocacy, yet she never lost the focus of an earlier tradition. For her the family was "a sacred and hallowed responsibility," and throughout her life she followed the injunction that "while woman's interests ought to begin at home and ought to end there, they need not necessarily confine themselves to it alone."