Recha Freier, née Schweitzer (1892–1984), was a pioneering German-Israeli Zionist, educator, poet, writer, teacher, social activist, musician, folklorist, and resistance fighter. She founded Youth Aliyah in Berlin in January 1933 (initially as the Committee for the Assistance of Jewish Youth), an organization that rescued approximately 7,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany by arranging their emigration to Mandatory Palestine for agricultural training on kibbutzim, in coordination with Henrietta Szold. Facing early antisemitism, she was educated at a lycée in Glogau, completed gymnasium studies in Breslau, pursued graduate studies in philology at the universities of Breslau and Munich, and earned certification as a teacher of religion in 1912. In 1919, she married Rabbi Dr. Moritz 'Moshe' Freier (1889–1969), with whom she had four children: Shalhevet (b. 1920), Ammud (b. 1923), Zerem (b. 1926), and Ma’ayan (b. 1929). The family lived in Eschwege, Sofia (1922–1925, where she taught high school), and Berlin (from 1925). In 1938, she controversially secured permits to free 100 Jewish prisoners from concentration camps without authorization, leading to her ousting from Zionist leadership. Freier fled to Yugoslavia in mid-1940 with her daughter Ma’ayan, rescuing 150 additional youths whose parents perished in camps, before illegally crossing into Palestine in March 1941 amid tensions with Szold, from whom she later withdrew. In Israel, she established an Agricultural Training Center for children in 1943, the Israel Composer's Fund in 1958 (commissioning around 50 works by 1968), and co-founded the Testimonium festival in 1966 with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, staging six historical pageants from 1968 to 1983. A prolific author, she wrote libretti, poetry collections like Arbeiterinnen erzählen (1935), Auf der Treppe (1976), and Fensterläden (1979), and Let the Children Come: The Early History of Youth Aliyah (1961). In 1947, she sued Moshe Kol for marginalizing her foundational role in Youth Aliyah. She received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1975 and died in Jerusalem.