Tamar de Sola Pool (née Hirshenson), was Born in Istanbul to a family from Jerusalem. Her parents are Rabbi Chaim Hirschenson and Eva (Cohen) Hirschenson. The family moved to New Jersey in 1904, but retained its Zionist spirit, speaking Hebrew at home. There Rabbi Hirschenson became a congregational rabbi.
After graduating from Hunter College in 1913, Pool taught comparative literature at Hunter from 1914 to 1917. She served as president of the New York chapter of Hadassah from 1929 to 1935 and national president from 1939 to 1943. Beginning in 1934, she worked with Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah program to rescue Jewish children from Europe and resettle them in Palestine.
In 1917, Hirshenson married David de Sola Pool, the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York. She collaborated with her husband on two books, Is There an Answer? about Jewish faith after the Holocaust, and An Old Faith in the New World, about their congregation’s 300-year history.
Full biography:
Marjorie Lehman, 'Tamar De Sola Pool' at Jewish Women's Archive. jwa.org.
Tidhar, D. (1957). Entsiklopedyah le-halutse ha-yishuv u-vonav (Vol. 8, p. 3071- 3072) (In Hebrew)
