In November 1888, when she was 29 and after her convalescence, she and her mother moved to her mother's home town of
Frankfurt, Germany. Their family environment was partially Orthodox and partly liberal. In contrast to their life in Vienna they became involved in art and science, and not only in charitable work. Shortly after moving to Frankfurt, she first worked in a
soup kitchen and read aloud in an orphanage for Jewish girls run by the ('Israelite Women's Association'). In discovering the children's delight at
H. C. Andersen's tales, she shared her own tales. In this environment, Pappenheim intensified her literary efforts and became involved in social and political activities. Her publications began in 1888 and were initially anonymous; they appeared from 1890 under the pseudonym
Paul Berthold, and she began publishing under her own name in 1902, firstly in the journal ('Ethical Culture') . In 1895 she was temporarily in charge of the orphanage, and one year later became its official director. During the following 12 years she was able to orient the educational program away from the one and only goal of subsequent marriage, to training with a view to vocational independence. – prompted a violent nationwide reaction on the part of Orthodox
rabbis and the Jewish press. The existence of the conditions Pappenheim criticized — traffic in women, neglect of illegitimate Jewish orphans — was denied, and she was accused of insulting Judaism. Also, politically liberal and emancipated Jews had a patriarchal and traditional attitude about women's rights. --> Meanwhile, the JFB grew steadily and in 1907 had 32,000 members in 82 associations. For a time the JFB was the largest charitable Jewish organization with over 50,000 members. In 1917 Pappenheim called for "an end to the splintering of Jewish welfare work," which helped lead to the founding of the ('Central Welfare Agency of German Jewry'), which continues to exist today. Her work on its board was supported by
Sidonie Werner. In May 1923, she was one of the principal speakers at the
First World Congress of Jewish Women in Vienna, where she spoke on the need to protect Jewish girls and women from trafficking and prostitution. After the
Nazis assumed power in 1933, Pappenheim again took over the presidency of the JFB. She resigned in 1934 because she could not abandon her negative attitude to Zionism, despite the existential threat for Jews in Germany, while in the JFP, as among German Jews in general, Zionism was increasingly endorsed after 1933. Especially her attitude toward the immigration of young people to Israel (
Youth Aliya) was controversial. She rejected the emigration of children and youths to Palestine while their parents remained in Germany. However, she herself brought a group of orphanage children safely to Great Britain in 1934. After the antisemitic
Nuremberg Laws were passed on 15 September 1935, she changed her mind and argued in favor of the emigration of the Jewish population. After Pappenheim died, her JFB positions were partially taken over by her friend
Hannah Karminski. In 1939 the JFB was disbanded by the Nazis.
Neu-Isenburg home Pappenheim was the founder or initiator of many institutions, including kindergartens, community homes and educational institutions. She considered her life's work to be the Neu-Isenburg home for Jewish girls (). Starting around 1906 Pappenheim devoted herself to the goal of founding a refuge to help illegitimate girls and Jewish women endangered by prostitution and traffic in women, where she could implement the theories she had developed on Jewish social work. This home was to be operated on the following principles: • In contrast to traditional Jewish charities, modern social work should be undertaken, focusing mainly on education and training for an independent life. • In accord with the principle of "follow-up aid," former home inhabitants' progress through life was to be monitored for an extended period to avert renewed negligence. • The home should not be "an establishment caring for juveniles in the legal sense, no monument in stone to some foundation, with inscriptions, votive tablets, corridors, dormitories and dining halls, an elementary school, a detention room and cells, and a dominating director's family, but rather a home, although it can be only a surrogate for the proper raising of children in their own families, which was preferable." • The residents should become involved in Jewish tradition and culture. • The home should be kept simple, so that the residents become familiar with the realities and requirements of a lower middle class household. Louise Goldschmidt, a relative of Pappenheim's mother, made available a pair of semi-detached houses where a girl's home could be established in
Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt am Main with all its clinics and social institutions. In contrast to Prussian Frankfurt, Hessian Neu-Isenburg's less rigid laws also had advantages for stateless persons. Thanks to donations amounting to 19,000 marks to furnish the house, it could begin operations on 25 November 1907 with the goal of providing "protection for those needing protection and education for those needing education." The facility was plain, and was sometimes criticized for being excessively so. There was, for example, no running water in the bathrooms, and central heating was only added in 1920. But the facilities did make it possible to strictly adhere to Jewish dietary and purity requirements, (
kashruth, kosher). In the basement a passover kitchen was available, although it was required only once a year. Art in the house and the garden was to serve to educate the residents. Examples are the children's fountain, ('The Expelled Stork'), designed by
Fritz J. Kormis to illustrate a tale by Pappenheim, lecture series, modest theater performances, and speeches, among others by
Martin Buber, a friend of Pappenheim and a guest on several occasions. The number of residents was initially low, but grew in the course of time from 10 in 1908 to 152 in 1928. The property and existing buildings were expanded with purchases and donations and adapted to meet increasing requirements, and additional buildings were constructed. In the end, the home consisted of four buildings, including one for pregnant women and those who had just given birth—the delivery itself took place in a Frankfurt clinic—and an isolation ward. The home's school-aged children attended the Neu-Isenburg elementary school. There was extensive medical care for the residents, and—at regular intervals—psychiatric examinations. Pappenheim rejected psychoanalytic treatment for the residents. Although she technically never experienced psychoanalytic therapy herself due to it not yet existing, her treatment by Breuer can be regarded as an early form of the therapy. Pappenheim only spoke once about
psychoanalysis in general: Since the ongoing financing of the home was preferably not to depend on rich individual patrons, an association, the ('Home of the Jewish Women's Association'), was established to act as its sponsor and owner. Membership fees of 3 marks per year were supposed to put the covering of running expenses on a broad basis. Appreciation for her Neu-Isenburg work was not at first forthcoming for Pappenheim. Orthodox Jewish circles considered the founding of the home to be a scandal, and its existence a tacit toleration of prostitution and immorality. In order to reintegrate into the Jewish community single mothers, young prostitutes and their children, who in most cases had been disowned by their families, the home would urge families to resume relations with them, and known fathers to marry the mothers of their children, or pay alimony. After the death of Pappenheim in 1936, the work in Neu-Isenburg could continue essentially unhindered until the 1936
Olympic Games. In 1937, the children residing in the home were no longer allowed to attend the Neu-Isenburg elementary school and had to be transported daily to the Jewish school in Frankfurt. In 1938, the Isenburg branch of the
NSDAP instigated the closure of the home. On 10 November 1938, one day after the November Pogrom (''), the home was attacked. The main building was set afire and burned down, and the other buildings were wrecked. On 31 March 1942 the home was disbanded by the
Gestapo. The remaining residents were deported to the concentration camp in
Theresienstadt, where many died.
Literary works Stories, plays, poetry Pappenheim published her first works anonymously, and later under the pseudonym
Paul Berthold, a common practice among women writers of that time. She derived the pseudonym by modifying her first name
Bertha to a surname,
Berthold, and using the initial of her surname,
P, as the first letter of the first name,
Paul. Starting in 1902 she published
novellas and plays under her own name. ('Little Stories for Children') appeared anonymously in 1888, to be followed in 1890 by a volume of tales, (In the Junk Shop). The nine novella in this volume have as their subject in each case a defective or otherwise useless item, such as a piece of lace, a music box, or a coffee pot. In 1913 she published the play ('Tragic Moments. Three Scenes from Life'). The scenes correspond to three episodes in the life of a Jewish couple. In the first scene the young couple experiences the atrocities of the 1904
Kishinev pogrom in the
Russian Empire and flees to
Frankfurt. In the second scene, as
Russian Jews, they are not accepted in the community. A Jewish innkeeper wants to employ the woman as a hostess and the man as a trickster. When they turn down his offer, he denounces them as political criminals, and they flee to
Palestine. The third scene shows the man as a widower waiting for his son to return from Europe. When the son confesses that he cannot imagine a life as a farmer in Palestine, his father commits suicide. Pappenheim refused to have the play performed at a JFP assembly of delegates in 1933, "since the 'Tragic Moments', which I wrote without an ulterior motive, would certainly give rise to objections in Zionist circles because of their timeliness." She advised against "scattering explosives among the women". In addition, she wrote numerous texts that were unpublished during her lifetime. Most are lost, and what remains is scattered. Among the scattered texts are the so-called
Denkzettel ("Memoranda"), short maxims and sayings, some of which are dated and some of which she later had her secretary Lucy Jourdan collect and copy. An example: "Whoever foregoes his freedom without an urgent necessity does not deserve it." These texts also include the prayers published by the League of Jewish Women shortly after Pappenheim's death. These are not prayers in the sense of traditional Judaism, but personal poems addressed to God. One of Pappenheim's poems was written in 1910–1912:
Translations One of her first productions was a translation from English of
Mary Wollstonecraft's programmatic paper in English on the women's rights movement,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It appeared in 1899 under the title
Mary Wollstonecraft – Eine Verteidigung der Rechte der Frau. Starting in 1910 she translated several important
Yiddish texts into German: • The memoirs of Glikl bas Judah Leib (also known as
Glückel of Hameln), one of Pappenheim's ancestors (1910). • The
Maysebukh "Storybook", also known as the "Women's Talmud", a collection of stories from the
Talmud and the
Midrash (1929) • Parts of ''
Tz'enah Ur'enah'', also known as the "Women's Bible." Only the first part of her translation of the Women's Bible appeared, the
Book of Genesis. The translations of
Exodus and
Deuteronomy have reportedly been lost. Pappenheim dealt exclusively with texts written by women or for women. The ''Ma'assebuch'' and the Women's Bible were the most widely distributed works of Yiddish women's literature. She described the purpose of her translations in the foreword to the memoirs of Glikl: And in the foreword to the ''Ma'assebuch'' she wrote: Together with her brother Wilhelm and their relative, Stefan Meyer, she found out while researching her family tree that she was distantly related to Glikl. She also had Leopold Pilichowski (1869–1933) make a portrait of her as Glikl.
Articles and information pamphlets The focus of her writings was to provide information, especially about the social situation of Jewish refugees and the
traffic in women. In 1924 she published her most well-known book,
Sisyphus-Arbeit (Sisyphean Labor), a study on the traffic in women and prostitution in Eastern Europe and Asia. == Personal life ==