Selma Mayer, known as Schwester Selma (German for "Sister Selma" or "Nurse Selma") was the head nurse at the original Shaare Zedek Hospital on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem for nearly 50 years. Selma Meir left the pristine cleanliness and order of life in Germany to become the head nurse at Sha'arei Zedek Hospital braving epidemic, filth, and war. Schwester Selma stayed on from what was meant to be a three-year stay, for seventy years, treating the ill, adopting the orphaned, and transforming a primitive, disorganized hospital into a clean, well-functioning one.

For many years she was the right-hand assistant of the hospital's founding director, Dr. Moshe Wallach. Working long hours and with limited infrastructure, she trained and supervised all personnel at the hospital from 1916 to the 1930s, and founded the Shaare Zedek School of Nursing in 1934. She never married, and resided in a room in the hospital until her last day. In her later years she became known as the "Jewish Florence Nightingale" for her decades of selfless devotion to patient welfare.