Schwester Selma

Selma Mayer, known to generations of patients and colleagues as Schwester Selma, was a German-born nurse who became the head nurse of the original Shaare Zedek Hospital on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem and held that post for nearly fifty years. She came to the hospital in 1916 at the invitation of its founding director, Dr. Moshe Wallach, and became his right-hand assistant. Working long hours with very limited infrastructure, she trained and supervised all of the hospital's personnel from 1916 into the 1930s, and in 1934 she founded the Shaare Zedek School of Nursing. She never married and lived in a room inside the hospital until the end of her life, which lasted just past her hundredth birthday. In her later years she was widely called the Jewish Florence Nightingale for her decades of devotion to patients.