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THE GUIDE 2019/2020
Group Helps
Jewish Women
for 200 Years
jesse bernstein | je staff
E ileen Sklaroff forgives you if you haven’t heard of
the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society (FHBS),
an organization celebrating its 200th anniversary.
“We are a very well-kept secret,” said Sklaroff, the
organization’s president.
The tiny social services organization was founded
in 1819 with the help of legendary Philadelphian
Rebecca Gratz. At the time, Sklaroff said,
Philadelphia Jewish women who found themselves
unexpectedly without a husband (whether by ill-
ness, death or greener pastures) were in the doubly
unenviable position of being both without much of a
safety net or a Jewish organization that could cater to
their needs. There were Christian missionaries who
assisted such women in procuring food, shelter and
clothing, but there was also “a good dose of indoctri-
nation,” according to Sklaroff.
Thus the FHBS was born, a product of work
done by a group of women from Congregation
Mikveh Israel, with Gratz leading the charge; she’d
hold the secretary position for close to 40 years. The
women of the FHBS, according to the constitution
penned in 1837, were “desirous of rendering them-
selves useful to their indigent Sisters of the House
of Israel, associated themselves together for the
purposes of charity.”
FHBS was small then, and remains small now
— run completely by a 13-member volunteer board.
They focus on four core areas: emergency aid, some-
times in the form of monthly stipends; personal
emergency response systems for frail, elderly women
who need assistance; a pharmacy stipend program
and summer camp scholarships for children.
These programs, Sklaroff noted, are a reflection
of the needs of the day; the current iteration of FHBS
does significantly different work than the FHBS of 35
years ago when Sklaroff joined the group, let alone
200 years ago. Board members were doing monthly
home visits when she began.
Sklaroff was a reluctant sign-up at first. Her
mother died when she was young, and she was
quite close to her grandmother. One day, her grand-
mother’s closest friend, Bertha Braude — their hus-
bands were first cousins — asked her to join the
board of the FHBS. Sklaroff, grateful to Braude for
years of friendship to her grandmother, agreed.
She had reservations. For one, she was committed
at the time to working in charitable organizations
that had some sort of relevance to her life as a mother
with two young children.
“I didn’t really want to do anything that didn’t
impact them directly,” she said.
To further the feeling of not belonging, she was
far and away the youngest woman at the first meet-
ing she attended, held in Braude’s John F. Kennedy
Boulevard apartment. Braude, then president, con-
ducted the meeting in a suit, hat and gloves.
“I was horrified,” she remembered.
But she felt she had to continue for her grand-
mother and pressed on. Within two years, Braude
called Sklaroff to tell her that she was being unilaterally
declared treasurer. Since then, Sklaroff has worked to
make FHBS sustainable, helpful and meaningful to its
constituents, some of whom are Holocaust survivors.
Most of the women helped by FHBS are not made
self-sufficient by the help they receive, nor is that
really the point, Sklaroff said, although she certainly
doesn’t complain when it turns out that way. Some
women depend on the group for many years; others
get a one-time stipend and are never heard from
again. The object is to simply be a place for women
who need help, Sklaroff said.
“Our donors like us,” she said, “because we’re
quiet, we’re quick and they know their money is
going directly to a Jewish woman in need.”
Pam Stein, a tax partner at an accounting firm, is
the current FHBS treasurer. She finds herself fascinated
by the history of the group, and how changing societal
mores and women’s legal standing have allowed the Pam
Steins of the world to flourish in a way they couldn’t
before. Aside from her work as an accountant, Stein
worked for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia
at the local and national level for many years.
“I feel an obligation to perpetuate it,” she said of
the FHBS.
As one might expect of a low-key organization,
the main part of its anniversary celebration will
consist of a small, private affair: A ceremony and
stone-placing will be conducted at the Mikveh Israel
Cemetery, where seven original board members are
buried. What is certainly against the group’s M.O. is an anni-
versary banner ad on the PECO Building. Anonymity
aside, Sklaroff said, 200 years is a big deal.
The future of the group, Sklaroff said, will be up
to the women who run it, just as it was put to her on
the day she took a leadership position. “I would want
it to look like what the women who are leading it
want it to be,” she said.
Stein hopes that whatever form it takes, its con-
tinued existence is assured. For the 400th anniversa-
ry, she said, it’ll be good to know that “there’s still a
group of Jewish women in the Philadelphia area that
are helping other Jewish women.” l
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THE GUIDE 2019/2020
43