Rebekah Kohut

Born Rebeka Bettelheim in Kassa in the Hungarian region of the Habsburg Empire (today Košice, Slovakia), Rebekah Kohut moved in 1867 to Richmond, Virginia, and eventually to San Francisco. She studied at the University of California and married Alexander Kohut , the rabbi and linguistics scholar. They moved to New York, where Rebekah became stepmother to his eight children. While assisting her husband with his correspondence and translating his sermons from German, Kohut also worked with immigrants and battled for better public sanitation. Following her husband’s death, she gave lectures in English literature and established the Kohut College Preparatory School for Girls. After selling the school in 1905, during World War I she founded a women’s employment bureau, and afterward she was instrumental in helping European Jewish communities ravaged by the war. Kohut served as president of the National Council of Jewish Women and the World Congress of Jewish Women. The Jewish Institute of Religion awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1934. She was also a patron of academia, establishing scholarships and fellowships at Yale.