Gertrude Glogower
As children were evacuated from Germany on Kindertransports in the 1930s, Gertrude Glogower worked to help them build new lives in America. Glogower involved herself in numerous local and national organizations over her lifetime, eventually serving as president of the Detroit section of the National Council of Jewish Women, president of the Detroit JCC in the early 1940s, and national chair of Service to Women and Girls of the USO. She also chaired the board of Detroit’s YWHA, overseeing both regular activities in the city for more than 700 girls and women as well as trips to a camp in the country. But it was in the late 1930s, as chair of both the Committee on German-Jewish Children’s Aid and the Children’s Department of Resettlement Service, that she became involved with helping refugee children. She went on to become a board member and vice president of the National Jewish Welfare Board, for which she became the first woman ever honored with the Frank L. Weil Award in 1952.