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When Abby Ginzberg set out to better understand the “famous Szold” in her family, she had little to go on.
Guided only by a couple of facts — she and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold were distant cousins on her maternal side, and her paternal grandfather, Talmudic scholar Louis Ginzberg, was the man who broke Szold’s heart — Ginzberg was motivated to tell Szold’s story and bring it to life in her documentary, Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold.
“This film was a really important journey to kind of uncover who Henrietta was for me,” said the Peabody Award-winning director during Hadassah’s 2025 National Conference, where the film was screened publicly for the second time since it premiered at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July.
“I made a movie based essentially on my point of view and on kind of a vision that I took from her, and I ended up with just tremendous respect for everything she did,” she added.
The movie was a work in progress for years. In fact, Ginzberg began working on the film about 20 years ago but didn’t return to the project until 2022.
“I really believe I had to be over 70 years old to be able to really tell her story, and that when I was 50, when the idea first came to me, or 52 or whatever I was, Henrietta and I weren't in dialogue yet,” Ginzberg said. “I was too young to hear her. And when I hit 70, I thought, ‘I better get this film done, or I may never get it done.’”
As Ginzberg got deeper into her research, her focus took shape, according to Sue Fishkoff’s article in Hadassah Magazine, “Henrietta Szold’s Story, From the Granddaughter of Her Lost Love.” She would spotlight Szold as a feminist, activist and person who cared deeply about Jewish survival and Jewish identity but who had a nuanced approach to Zionism.
Like many of Ginzberg’s other films, Labors of Love is about female empowerment, writes Fishkoff.
The film features photos and video clips of Szold from Hadassah archives all over the world and interviews with experts and dramatizations of key moments in the life of the woman who pioneered health care for Jews and Arabs in British Mandate Palestine, saved thousands of Jewish children as director of Youth Aliyah and, in 1912, founded Hadassah, according to the article. Broadway star Tovah Feldshuh gives Szold a voice, reading passages from her diary. The film also features interviews with Hadassah Offices in Israel’s Barbara Goldstein, ambassador-at-large, and Barbara Sofer, director of public relations.
“I’m telling the story of a woman who inspires me,” Ginzberg told Fishkoff.
As for Louis, a key figure in Szold’s life, he is presented prominently in the film. “I did think it was important to say that he never really considered Henrietta a love interest, and she acknowledges that,” said Ginzberg at the conference. “I’m the person who found that writing of hers… saying, ‘He never thought of me in that way, but thank you for opening up my idea of my own womanhood.”
At the conference, Ginzberg shared some of her family background and her connection to Hadassah and Szold. Her maternal grandmother, Zip Szold, was a Hadassah national president. She and her husband, Robert, were close with Henrietta, inviting her over when she was in the US. “Henrietta was a character in my mother’s life and the life of her sisters,” who had to show up and mind their p’s and q’s and be appropriate.
“I’m grateful to have had an opportunity to bring my Henrietta to your Henrietta,” Ginzberg said to conference guests.
Read “Henrietta Szold’s Story, From the Granddaughter of Her Lost Love” in Hadassah Magazine.
