Nursing was a well-respected profession for Jewish women in Palestine, until doctors and nurses clashed about the proper level of education for nurses in the 1930s. Despite the challenges women faced in the medical field, they contributed greatly during times of war and violence before the founding of Israel.

Dalia Ofer is an Israeli historian whose work mainly focuses on women’s experiences in the Holocaust and collective memory of the Holocaust in Israeli society. Ofer has published a multitude of books and articles on these topics during her career, and she has held positions at many prestigious universities around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Sculptor Chana Orloff was a part of the avant-garde circle of Montparnasse, the international movement of artists in Paris. After immigrating to Paris from Palestine in 1910, Orloff became the unofficial portraitist of the Parisian elite, creating over three hundred portraits. Orloff’s sculpture figures are now in collections throughout Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Cynthia Ozick is a Jewish-American writer, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her creative, authentic, and intelligent stories, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997), have made her one of the greatest fiction writers and literary critics alive.

The Palmah was the elite fighting brigades of the underground paramilitary force Haganah, active between 1941 and Israel’s founding in 1948. Women were active in the Palmah, but were they considered equal to men?

After fleeing Nazi Germany, Lilli Palmer pursued her acting career in Paris, London, Hollywood, and New York. In the 1950s, she returned to Germany, becoming celebrated once again in her home country. Palmer was not only a prominent actor in numerous successful plays, films and television programs, but also a painter and an author of both fiction and non-fiction.

Bertha Pappenheim was the founder of the Jewish feminist movement in Germany. In 1904, she founded the League of Jewish Women. Pappenheim believed that male-led Jewish social service societies underestimated the value of women’s work and insisted on a woman’s movement that was equal to and entirely independent of men’s organizations.

Born in Germany, Ruth Peggy Sophie Parnass was sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. Parnass became a journalist, actress, court reporter, feminist activist, and writer. Parnass combines her private and public lives in her writing, whether on her childhood under Nazi rule in Hamburg and as an exile in Sweden, on women's issues, or on political matters.

Erna (Ernestine) Patak was a social worker and one of the Zionist veterans in Vienna in the early twentieth century, serving as the first president of WIZO Austria in the early 1920s. After surviving Theresienstadt, she returned to Vienna and later moved to London and finally to Tel Aviv.

Born to an impoverished Orthodox family in Bucharest, Ana Pauker joined the Romanian communist movement in 1915. She rose through the ranks, becoming one of the most powerful Communist leaders in Romania after World War II and, according to Time magazine, “the most powerful woman alive.”

Born in Russia to wealthy parents, Shoshana Persitz was a passionate Zionist and a leader in education reform. She operated a Hebrew-language publishing house in Russia before making Aliyah to Israel, where she continued in publishing and served three terms in the Knesset.

Although women photographers long struggled for recognition and appreciation in Palestine and Israel, in recent years awareness of their roles and contributions to photograph has increased. The activity of women photographers who focus on gender issues has increased dramatically, while female curators and academics are gaining new perspectives on Jewish female photographers, re-evaluating their role in the development of photography in Israel.

Clara Asscher Pinkhof dedicated her life and work to helping and advocating for Jewish children, initially as a teacher and later as an author. She is most known for her accounts of the experiences of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation.