Rebecca Gratz believed that with an "unsubdued spirit" she could overcome all of life's difficulties. A pioneer Jewish charitable worker and religious educator, Gratz established and led America's first independent Jewish women's charitable society, the first Jewish Sunday school, the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum, and the first Jewish Foster Home in Philadelphia. She surmounted the grief caused her by the deaths of many family members and loved ones, confronted Christian evangelism, and became a civic leader. Gratz's accomplishments grew out of her own indomitable spirit and her commitments to both Judaism and America.

Well-educated for her day, Gratz attended women's academies and read her father's extensive library stocked with literature, histories, and popular science. To that collection Gratz herself added Judaica, seeking original new works in English, works recently translated into English, as well as requesting new books and early readings of works-in-progress from knowledgeable American Jews like hazan Isaac Leeser and educator Jacob Mordecai.  

At age nineteen, Gratz was recruited as a family nurse to help her mother care for her father, who had suffered a stroke. Although Gratz at first found nursing "agonizing," she remained the family nurse throughout her life, sharing duties with her unmarried older sister Sarah, who herself died in 1817. While nursing her father, Gratz joined her mother, sister, and twenty other women, Jewish and gentile, to found Philadelphia's nonsectarian Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances (c. 1801). Gratz was its first secretary and held that office for many years. In 1815, Gratz helped establish the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum, and served as secretary for its first forty years. In the 1830s, Gratz advised her sister-in-law Maria Gist Gratz on creating and running the first orphan asylum in Lexington, Kentucky.  

Gratz sought the post of executive secretary in each of the institutions she founded. As secretary, she not only maintained organizational records, but also annually addressed the managing boards on policy in each year-end secretary's report. The institutions regularly published her reports as pamphlets or in the popular press in order to raise public support for their work. The secretary's role enhanced Gratz's authority and provided her a public forum from which to advance her own ideas about the ways in which organizations could promote both women's roles and Judaism in Philadelphia and in America. The Jewish institutions with which she was involved especially reflected her own strong leadership.  

Gratz was the first to apply the Sunday school format to Jewish education. The FHBS women hoped to provide religious education soon after the organization's founding, but they were unable to do so until 1838, when Gratz established the Hebrew Sunday School (HSS), a coeducational institution, with herself as superintendent. She also served as secretary of the managing society and held both offices until she was in her eighties. Her sister congregants, Simha Peixotto and Rachel Peixotto Pyke, who ran a private school in their home, joined her as teachers, and the Peixotto sisters wrote many of the textbooks initially used by the school. Students ranged in age from early childhood to early teens. The HSS soon attracted students and faculty throughout Philadelphia, and it remained an independent, citywide institution until the close of the twentieth century.   By the 1840s, Gratz happily noted that Jewish women were "becoming quite literary." She touted books by British educator Grace Aguilar, who extolled Judaism and argued its importance to women, and used Aguilar's books in the HSS. Gratz hoped the school would demonstrate that Jewish women equaled Christian women in religious piety, then considered a mark of civility. The school flourished, opened several branches, and had served over four thousand students by the end of the nineteenth century.  

By the 1850s, the plight of an increasing number of Jewish immigrants convinced Gratz of the need for the Jewish Foster Home (JFH). Jewish orphan associations in New York and New Orleans, which relied on foster families, became inadequate as immigration increased. Gratz, who had served forty years on the board of the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum, became vice president of the JFH managing society. The JFH later merged with several other institutions to form Philadelphia's Association for Jewish Children.  

Gratz outlived all but her youngest sibling, Benjamin, and many of her nieces and nephews. Despite her grief in her last years, she was relieved that what she believed to be the American experiment in freedom had not ended with the Civil War. She was sure that her lasting monument would be the Hebrew Sunday School, a highly successful institution that most reflected her own unique blend of Judaism and American culture. Gratz died on August 27, 1869, and was buried in Mikveh Israel's historic cemetery in Philadelphia. By the end of her life, a legend claimed Gratz as the prototype for the character of Rebecca of York in Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe, the first favorable depiction of a Jew in English fiction. Jews pointed to Gratz, an Americanized Jewish woman who retained her Jewish loyalty, to argue the truth of the popular tale. Gratz's own life epitomized the "unsubdued spirit" she admired.

Primary Source: Jewish Women's Archive