Settlement houses and the emergence of social work in Mandatory Palestine

Abstract

The two settlement houses established in Mandatory Palestine were part of efforts by Jewish social workers to both address poverty among immigrant populations and to strengthen their integration into the Zionist project, which sought to establish a Jewish state in that country. The first settlement house was established in Jerusalem by a Zionist women’s organization in 1925. Drawing upon settlement house models in the UK and those developed in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, the settlement house sought to combine community level and casework interventions, led by a social worker, in working with poor immigrant Jewish families primarily from Yemen. A decade later a second settlement house was established by social workers employed by Jewish social services. Here again a range of community and family-focused interventions were combined with efforts to integrate poor immigrant Jewish families into the wider Jewish community and to strengthen their affiliation with the Zionist values that dominated this community.