29 Facts About Sophia Getzowa

Sophia Getzowa grew up in a Jewish shtetl in Belarus and during her medical studies at the University of Bern, she became engaged to Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel.

Sophia Getzowa carried out widely cited research on the thyroid, identifying solid cell nests in 1907.

Sophia Getzowa worked through the 1920s in various locations in Switzerland and briefly in Paris.

Sophia Getzowa collaborated with a wide range of European scientists over the remainder of her career, before her retirement in 1940.

Sophia Getzowa was born on 23 January 1872 in Belarus, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire.

Sophia Getzowa's mother died when she was eight and a cousin, Marie Scheindels-Kagan, who ran a school in Svencionys took her in and taught her Russian orthography.

Sophia Getzowa returned to Gomel in 1882 and entered the newly founded Progymnasium, where she studied for three years.

Sophia Getzowa was active in the Zionist movement and in 1898 was a delegate to the Second Zionist Congress, held in Basel.

Sophia Getzowa traveled to Pinsk on both occasions, with her sister Rebekka, who was studying medicine in Bern.

Sophia Getzowa became an important member of the Zionist community, attending the 5th Zionist Congress as a delegate of the Democratic Fraction, a radical group formed by her friend Leo Motzkin and Weizmann in 1901.

Sophia Getzowa's behavior was seen as dishonorable, and created fractures with Motzkin and others in the Democratic Fraction.

Sophia Getzowa's observation was that cell rests and cysts of the postbranchial body in atrophic goiters of the thyroid were not formed from thyroid tissue and did not react with the thyroid.

In 1905, Sophia Getzowa was hired by Professor Hans Strasser as first female assistant at the Bern Institute of Anatomy.

Sophia Getzowa began analysis of goiters and parathyroid tissues and along with Langhans and other of his students was one of the key researchers who clarified the origin of thyroid tumors.

Sophia Getzowa continued with her studies, this time at the Institute of Pathology, under the direction of Theodor Langhans and Ernst Hedinger,.

In 1913, Sophia Getzowa was appointed first assistant at the Institute and with the beginning of World War I in 1914, she stood in for the director who had been called to military duty.

Sophia Getzowa returned to Bern, and experienced both emotional and financial difficulties, which did not dissipate until 1921 when the American Putman-Jacoby Foundation arranged for her to work as a freelance researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

At the time she left Paris, Sophia Getzowa learned of another opening, that of working for the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America in a pathology institute in Eretz Yisrael, but she was unsure of its financial reliability as there was a dispute between the Swiss officials who were providing the chairs for the medical facility and the Palestinian bankers.

Sophia Getzowa sought advice from Albert Einstein and he wrote to the authorities in Jerusalem recommending her and suggesting they offer reasonable, well-defined conditions.

Sophia Getzowa, reluctantly, asked Chaim Weizmann for support, as it was he who was involved in founding a Jewish university in Jerusalem.

Finally matters were sorted out and Sophia Getzowa was engaged as a pathological specialist.

Sophia Getzowa set sail on a steamer in the autumn of 1925, having been appointed director of an as yet non-existent pathological institute to be located at the Rothschild Hadassah Hospital.

In 1927, Sophia Getzowa became the first female professor of Israel, when she was appointed as a lecturer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Sophia Getzowa began working at hospitals in Tel Aviv, undertaking abdominal examinations which in some cases identified tumors in need of removal.

In 1931, Sophia Getzowa returned to Basel, seeking international support to complete the pathological institute, visiting her European friends, and keeping up with pathological practice.

In 1933, the death in Paris of her friend, colleague and financial supporter, Leo Motzkin, caused Sophia Getzowa to fall into a deep depression.

In 1939, Sophia Getzowa returned to Jerusalem, where her pathology center had been completed as an addition to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.

Sophia Getzowa was offered the chance to obtain a habilitation in Jerusalem but she refused, maintaining it would take years off her career.

Sophia Getzowa died on 11 or 12 July 1946 in Jerusalem, where she was buried in the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery.