Georgine Gerhard
Georgine Gerhard (18 August 1886 – 21 December 1971) was a Swiss school teacher and an active campaigner for women’s rights and refugee support. She was born in Basel, the third of five children, and trained as a teacher. She taught German, French, history, geography and gymnastics at Basel’s Töchterschule. A progressive hearing loss forced her to retire from the classroom in 1919, though she stayed on at the school as secretary and adviser until 1942.
Gerhard’s public life focused on campaigning and humanitarian work. While in England before 1909 she learned about the suffrage movement, and on returning home she helped found Basel’s branch of the Swiss women’s voting-rights group in 1916. She served as president from 1917 to 1922 and again from 1935 to 1941. She worked with other activists and participated in broader Swiss and international networks for women’s rights, including the Swiss League for Women’s Voting Rights and the Swiss Association of Women Teachers, where she led the secretariat from 1920 to 1933. She contributed to the Swiss Women’s Yearbook and took part in commissions on family allowances and other measures to support families. She valued Christian socialist ideas and was influenced by Quaker ideals in her approach to social justice.
In the 1930s, as the refugee crisis grew, Gerhard expanded her work to help children escape persecution. She co-founded the Swiss section of the Committee for Help for the Children of Emigrants from Germany and, in Basel, established Basler Hilfe für Emigrantenkinder (later SHEK). She led the Basel chapter and worked closely with Nettie Sutro-Katzenstein to care for thousands of Jewish children who arrived in Switzerland during the 1930s and 1940s. The program provided temporary care with Swiss host families and navigated difficult negotiations with cantonal and national authorities. After the 1938 pogrom, they helped hundreds more children reach Basel, sometimes obtaining special permits and arranging later placements.
During World War II SHEK joined forces with other Swiss relief groups and became part of the Swiss Red Cross Child Support. Gerhard remained a frontline organizer, coordinating care for refugee children and overseeing the national network that developed during the war. By the end of the war, SHEK had helped several thousand more children, many of whom found new homes abroad. Gerhard stayed in touch with many of these refugees for life. She helped establish a Swiss children’s village near Jerusalem, Kiriat Yearim, and visited Israel in 1948 and the United States in 1964.
Beyond refugee work, Gerhard served as vice-president of the Women and Democracy Working Community (1940–1954) and, in 1947, joined the United Nations Study Commission for Women’s Questions. In 1961 she received an honorary Doctorate in Medicine in recognition of her work with refugees, and Kiriat Yearim later named a house in her honor. Gerhard never married. She died in Basel in 1971, leaving a lasting legacy as a teacher, a national advocate for women’s rights, and a devoted protector of refugee children.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:19 (CET).