Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut
Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut (1864–1951) was an American educator, writer, and community leader who was born in Hungary. She became the first president of the World Congress of Jewish Women, chosen at its first convention in 1923. Lillian Wald called her “American Jewry’s First Lady” in 1935.
She was born Rebekah Bettelheim in Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), the daughter of Rabbi Albert Bettelheim and teacher Henrietta A. Weintraub Bettelheim. Her family moved to the United States when she was a child, living in Richmond, Virginia, and later in San Francisco, California, where Kohut finished high school. She attended the University of California but did not graduate.
As a rabbi’s wife in New York City, she took an active role in community improvement. She founded a women’s group at her husband’s Central Synagogue, called the Central Synagogue Sisterhood of Personal Service, which helped new immigrants on the Lower East Side. She also worked with the New York Women’s Health Protective Association to improve city sanitation.
As an educator, she spoke to the National Congress of Mothers in 1897 about parenting in Hebrew homes. In 1899 she started the Kohut College Preparatory School for Girls, a boarding school, and ran it until 1905 with her stepson George Alexander Kohut. They started and edited a Jewish school newspaper, Helpful Thoughts. She gave lectures on English literature for many years and, in 1933, began a two-year term as head of the Columbia Grammar School.
In widowhood she led the New York section of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), served as a trustee of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association, and was active in New York City politics. During World War I she worked with the Women’s Committee for National Defense to place women in war-related work and helped raise funds for relief. She chaired the NCJW Reconstruction Committee, helping Jewish communities in war-ravaged Europe.
In 1923 she helped organize the World Congress of Jewish Women in Vienna and became its first president. In 1927 she became the first woman judge on the Jewish Court of Arbitration in New York City. In 1932 Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her the sole female member of the Joint Legislative Committee on Unemployment, where she urged the creation of state unemployment insurance.
She wrote two memoirs, My Portion (1925) and More Yesterdays (1950), and a biography of her stepson, His Father’s House: The Story of George Alexander Kohut (1938). In the 1930s she advised the New York State Employment Service and helped raise funds and awareness for German Jewish refugees.
She is remembered for saying, “The Jewish woman must choose between a disorganized, chaotic, and insecure world and a world in which there is peace, plenty, freedom, and security.”
She married Rabbi Alexander Kohut in 1887. He had five sons and three daughters from his first marriage, most of them young. Rabbi Benjamin Szold conducted the wedding. Her husband died in 1894. In 1895 she wrote, “I was born in Europe, grew to girlhood in Virginia, was educated in California, and hope to end my days in New York.”
Rebekah Kohut died in 1951 in New York, at age 86. In 1952 her stepdaughter Julia Kahn donated two Assyrian tablets to Yale University in memory of Rebekah Kohut. The Kohut Family Papers, including ledgers from Kohut’s school for girls, are at Yale University.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:51 (CET).