GOLDSCHMIDT, HENRIETTE (née Benas):

By: Isidore Singer, Rosalie Perles

Wife of Rabbi A. M. Goldschmidt (m. 1855); born at Krotoschin, Prussia, Nov. 23, 1825; and now (1903) resident at Leipsic. She was one of the pioneers of the movement for the emancipation of women in Germany. In 1866 she entered the Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein; in 1867 she was elected to the board of directors, becoming later its vice-president. She founded in Leipsic a Verein für Familien- und Volkserziehung, in connection with which were established two public kindergartens and an institution for the training of kindergarten teachers which has already rendered about 1,000 young women capable of earning their livelihood. As a result of one of her lectures the municipal industrial school for girls was founded at Leipsic. Besides numerous articles on the Fröbel system of education she wrote "Ideen über Weibliche Erziehung im Zusammenhange mit dem System Friedrich Fröbel's." Though in her seventy-eighth year, she still conducts the various institutions which she helped to found; and at the Leipsic Teachers' Association she was invited to speak on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Fröbel. This is the only instance in which a German teachers' association has asked a woman not a teacher by profession to speak on a pedagogic subject.

S. R. P.