Belle Moskowitz, born Belle Lindner, was an American welfare worker, political leader and social activist.
Background
Belle Moskowitz was born on October 5, 1877, on the upper East Side of New York City. Her parents, Isidor Lindner and Esther Freyer, were of Polish, German, and Russian ancestry. Her father was a watchmaker who had started a modest business in the crowded downtown section but had moved his shop and his home to the corner of 126th Street and Third Avenue, shortly before Belle's birth.
Education
Moskowitz attended the Horace Mann School, a laboratory school of Teachers College and in 1894 she attended Teachers College, Columbia University, but stayed for only one year.
Career
At eighteen, with her formal education completed, Moskowitz looked for new activities and found them in association with the Educational Alliance, one of the principal agencies for social welfare with which her sympathies lay. During the closing years of the nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth she entered whole-heartedly into the task of helping great masses of European immigrants to become adjusted to a new way of life. One of the group most closely associated with Belle Lindner in her social-settlement activities was Charles Henry Israels, a young architect of Dutch antecedents. Meanwhile her interest was enlisted in obtaining better recreational opportunities for the children of the tenements. She uncovered serious abuses in the management of the East Side dance halls and was instrumental in getting the first regulatory law through the New York legislature.
For two years, 1914 - 1916, Moskowitz headed the labor department of the Dress and Waist Manufacturers' Association, adjusting thousands of industrial disputes. She became known in that period as an expert authority on factory legislation.
Although early attracted by liberal and reform stirrings in New York's political atmosphere, Mrs. Moskowitz took no very active part in such movements until Alfred E. Smith's campaign for the governorship in 1918, and then her effort was to advance the cause of a born-and-bred Tammany Democrat who seemed to her to have the same objectives that were held by herself and her non-partisan friends. She was given the chairmanship of the women's division of the Smith campaign committee, but perhaps even more important than the votes from outside the Democratic party that she attracted to Smith's candidacy were the statesmanlike plans she laid for an unofficial reconstruction commission to make over the state government as to the assignment of functions to the several departments and bureaus. Governor Smith served eight years at Albany.
In each of his campaigns (including that for the presidency in 1928), Mrs. Moskowitz was an untiring and efficient, but never a conspicuous, worker. She became the Governor's fully trusted adviser on social and economic problems and his publicity director in all five campaigns. She held no public office and wished none, but few American women have been able to exert so great a personal influence on statecraft. After a slow recovery from the effects of a fall on the steps of her house, she died on January 2, 1933, of a heart attack. Four thousand New Yorkers thronged Temple Emanu-El to attend her funeral service.
Achievements
Connections
On November 11, 1903, Belle Moskowitz married Charles Henry Israels, an artist and architect. The couple had four children. She was widowed in 1911 when Charles committee suicide.
On November 22, 1914, she was married to Dr. Henry Moskowitz, a settlement worker on the Lower East Side.