Hemda Ben-Yehuda

Hemda Ben‑Yehuda (חמדה בן-יהודה, Hemda Ben-Yehuda; 1873–1951) was a Jewish journalist and author, and the wife of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

Hemdah Ben‑Yehuda was born Beila Jonas in Drissa (Verkhnyadzvinsk), Belarus to Shelomo Naphtali Herz Jonas (1840–1896) and his wife Rivka Leah. She was the fifth of the seven children.

During her early years she underwent several name changes. When she was nine years old, her father renamed her Belle. Upon the family’s move to Moscow she became Paula. It was not until her marriage that her husband bestowed upon her the name Hemdah. Her married name is written with or without final "h": Hemda/Hemdah, Ben-Yehudah/Ben-Yehuda.

In 1882, the family settled in Moscow. Here Beilla/Paula Jonas attended Russian primary and high school before continuing to a women’s college of science to study chemistry.

In 1891, her eldest sister Deborah (b. 1855), who was married to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, died of tuberculosis in Jerusalem. Only a few weeks later Ben-Yehuda, who knew Hemdah from his visits to her family, hastened to ask her to marry him, claiming that this had been Deborah’s wish before her death. Paula agreed at once, but her father objected to the match, both because of the fifteen-year difference in age between the two and also because he feared that, like her sister, she would be infected by the tuberculosis from which Ben-Yehuda suffered.

In the winter of 1892, a diphtheria epidemic that broke out in Jerusalem caused the death of three of the children of Deborah and Eliezer, leaving only two, Ben-Zion (Itamar), and Yemima. During the entire period Ben-Yehuda’s mother had been helping him run the household, but now, when all seemed lost, Shelomo Jonas relented. In any case, his permit to reside in Moscow had expired, so that he was compelled to leave the city. Accordingly it was decided that the entire family would emigrate to Palestine and Paula would marry Ben-Yehuda. Jonas, his wife, Paula and the two younger children departed for Istanbul where Paula and Eliezer were married on March 29, 1892. On this occasion Ben-Yehuda changed Paula’s name to Hemdah; the first Hebrew word he taught her was mafteah (key), a word which she perceived as symbolic, signifying her entrance not only into marriage but also into a new country, a new people and a new culture. Indeed, Hemdah, who was deeply involved in Russian culture, profoundly attracted to the theories of Leo Tolstoy and remote from Judaism and Zionism, abandoned everything: her studies at the college, her friends and the attractions of life in a great city. At the age of nineteen she came to develop herself in a desolate, distant land with a poverty-stricken, persecuted, consumptive widower fifteen years older than herself, and his two orphaned children.

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