Yiddishe Mamas (35 page)

She’s the Jewish mother of sex but known to millions as Dr. Ruth. Karola Ruth Siegal was born on June 4, 1928, in Frankfurt, Germany. She escaped death during the Holocaust when her family sent her to a school in Switzerland. Ruth never saw her parents again and assumed they perished in Auschwitz. She remained at the Swiss school, which became an orphanage, until after the war. In 1948, she joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground movement, and received training as a sniper. She has a daughter, Miriam, and a son, Joel.

She received her PhD in 1970 from Columbia University in family counseling, and trained at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center, with noted sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan.

After an academic stint, the diminutive lady with the laughing eyes and distinctive accent managed the improbable. She made her mark in radio, virtually initiating media psychology in 1980, with her radio program
Sexually Speaking.
Dr. Ruth’s expertise can be found on television, in books, newspapers, video, and software.
The Dr. Ruth Show
aired on Lifetime and has been syndicated nationally and internationally. Ruth has been a pioneer in spreading what she has labeled “sexual literacy,” and she advises in a straightforward, motherly, and even humorous fashion that promotes safe sex and contraception.

She was twice named “College Lecturer of the Year” by the National Mother’s Day Committee, which has also honored Dr. Ruth as Mother of the Year.

She has said that her ability to talk about sexuality “has to do with my being Jewish. … For us Jews … sex is a mitzvah and an obligation.” In 1995, she published
Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition,
coauthored with Jonathan Mark, tying together Orthodox Judaism and her views of sex.

Westheimer credits her escape from Nazi Germany with giving her a certain amount of chutzpah. Her collection of toy turtles provides an apt analogy: “If a turtle stays in one place, he is very safe. But if he wants to move, he has to stick his neck out. You have to take a risk if you believe in something.”

As early as 1981, Dr. Mathilde Krim knew that AIDS not only raised critical medical and scientific issues but that its sociopolitical impact would have grave consequences. She determined to dedicate herself to AIDS research and activism.

But then Krim had always been determined to fight the good and fair fight. Born Mathilde Galland, in Como, Italy, on July 9, 1926, and raised Protestant in Geneva, “I was the subject of taunts and ridicule starting at the age of six.” After seeing a newsreel about the liberation of the concentration camps during World War II, she was so outraged and impassioned about these inhuman atrocities that she sought out Jews, and joined the Irgun (the militant commando group), then led by Menachem Begin. The blue-eyed blond would often ride her bicycle into France to smuggle messages for the Irgun.

Mathilde fell in love with fellow medical student, David Danon, also a member of the Irgun. When she married him and converted to Judaism, her father fainted.

The couple had a daughter, Daphna, and in 1953, they went to Israel, where Mathilde worked at the Weizmann Institute, and contributed to studies that laid the foundation for amniocentesis. She became one of the first experts in culturing cells, and studied the viruses thought to cause some forms of cancer.

After her marriage fell apart, the chancellor of the institute introduced the thirty-year-old biologist to his friend Arthur Krim, a forty-seven-year-old American, a governor of the Weizmann Institute and a film mogul.

They married in 1958 and settled in New York where Mathilde joined the research faculty at Cornell Weill Medical College and later, the Sloan-Kettering Institute for cancer research. But her concern for AIDS with all its ramifications at
a time when it was considered a “shameful” or “gay” problem was still uppermost.

Krim eventually left full-time research, and became involved in AIDS treatment, and in 1985, she founded the AIDS Medical Foundation (AMF). In 1990, AMF merged with a California-based group. With the incomparable Elizabeth Taylor, the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) became the preeminent organization devoted to raising funds for research, prevention, and the development of AIDS-related public policies.

Dr. Krim holds fifteen doctorates
honoris causa
and, in August 2000, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

J
ewish mothers and business have a long tradition in Jewish history, as many of these women worked so that their husbands could study.

At the beginning of the twentieth century in America, women from Eastern Europe often worked in factories and sweatshops. It’s not surprising then, that as feminism progressed—although slowly—these women used their skills to seize any opportunity afforded … Some even grabbed hold of the golden ring in the Golden Land.

Today, a number of entrepreneurs are Jewish mothers who have achieved enormous success in all aspects of business—from Donna Karan to Linda Kaplan Thaler. The bios that follow celebrate some of these moms who cracked through the ceiling and paved the road, with brains, talent, and often, sheer chutzpah.

According to Howard M. Sachar’s book
A History of the Jews in America,
at the turn of the century Jewish women constituted 70 percent of the workforce in the shirtwaist, or women’s blouse, factories. Typically they’d work sixty-five to seventy-five hours a week in horrid and unsafe conditions. On November 22, 1909,
the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union—composed primarily of Jewish women—revolted against their sweatshop employers in a famous strike that became known as the “Uprising of 20,000.”

These Jewish mothers who believed in economic equality and worked avidly for the labor movement were poised for feminism.

Ida Cohen Rosenthal was born on January 9, 1886, near Minsk in Russia. She was the daughter of a Hebrew scholar, while her mother ran a small general store.

At seventeen, Ida immigrated to New Jersey to join her boyfriend, William Rosenthal, who had come to America a few months earlier. They married in 1907 and had a daughter and a son, Lewis.

Ida was a dressmaker and, with her husband, and their business partner Enid Bisset, they formed their own clothing business. But … they were never satisfied with the way a dress fitted around the bosom. In the 1920s, women wore a towel-like brassiere with hooks in the back. Despite the popularity of the “flat-chested” look, Ida believed a natural bust line would enhance appearance. So she set about to design a brassiere— two cups, separated by a piece of elastic. It was a hit, and the Maidenform company was born.

She was a marketing genius and began a media campaign, making Maidenform the first intimate apparel company to advertise. By the end of the 1930s, department stores across the world were selling Maidenform bras. In 1949 the slogan, “I dreamed that I went shopping in my Maidenform bra” was one of the most recognized in the ad business.

Ida stayed on as honorary chairman of the board until her death in 1973 at eighty-seven. Her daughter, Beatrice, inherited the family company, and then her granddaughter, Elizabeth Coleman, took over.

Ida was an ardent philanthropist and served on many boards, including the Bronx Lebanon Medical Center. She and her husband also created the Ida and William Rosenthal Fellowship in Judaica and Hebraic studies at New York University.

In 1916, when Ida and Nathan Handwerker founded Nathan’s Famous—a Coney Island hot dog stand—little did they know it would grow into an institution. They used a special hot dog recipe developed by Ida’s grandmother.

To keep the formula secret, Nathan hired two spice providers, with each developing half of the famous recipe. Through a series of ingenious marketing ploys, long workdays, and strong celebrity endorsements, the Handwerkers catapulted the hot dog into popularity.

By 1939, Nathan’s was so popular, Mrs. Handwerker boasted that President and Mrs. Roosevelt served them to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at a picnic at Hyde Park.

Ida had two sons, Murray and Sol, and a daughter, Leah. Her son Murray was a former president of the chain.

The woman with the exotic name, Estée Lauder, was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in 1908 in Corona, Queens, to Max and Rose Schotz Mentzer. Estée was the daughter of a French Catholic mother and a Hungarian Jewish father and was raised Jewish.

She honed her skills early, with the help of her uncle, John Shotz, a chemist, who specialized in skin-care preparations. Her cosmetics business was first launched in New York during the Depression, and later in Miami Beach, Florida.

At nineteen, she met Joseph Lauter (later changed to Lauder), the son of immigrants from Galicia. They were married on January 15, 1930, and their son Leonard Allen was born in 1933.

Estée improved upon her uncle’s product, and developed an exclusive clientele. A large order from Saks Fifth Avenue advanced her business.

In 1985 she said, “I did not know how to be Mrs. Joseph Lauder and Estée Lauder at the same time.” The couple divorced in 1939, then remarried three years later, and had a second child, Ronald, in February 1944. The second time around “took.” Estée and Joseph maintained a lifelong personal and professional bond.

She had a genius for promotion, which included innovative free samples and a hands-on approach with clients. Much of her initial success came from word-of-mouth advertising, a strategy she called “Tell-a-Woman” marketing. Eventually, she invested in larger marketing concepts, using specially chosen models to sell her products. As upscale stores began to sell Estée Lauder cosmetics, she went to each store herself and individually trained the sales personnel who were demonstrating her products.

Her son Leonard became chairman of the board, while her other son Ronald became a businessman, civic leader, philanthropist, and art collector.

Estée Lauder was an ardent philanthropist during her lifetime and contributed to National Cancer Care, the Manhattan League, and various Jewish causes.

In addition to numerous awards from the cosmetics and fashion industries, she received the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Spirit of Achievement Award in 1968, was recognized by business and financial editors as one of Ten Outstanding Women in Business in 1970, was given the French government’s Insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1978, and in 1984, she and seven others were chosen as Outstanding Mother of the Year.

Jennie Grossinger, the veritable mother of the Catskills, turned a modest, run-down Catskill Mountain farm into an American resort icon.

Jennie was born on June 16, 1892, in Galicia, Austria, to Malka and Asher Selig Grossinger. Her parents came to America in search of a new and better life.

In 1912, she wed a cousin, Harry Grossinger, and became a waitress in her father’s dairy restaurant. When her father’s health started failing in 1914, they moved to a farm in Ferndale, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, where they housed summer boarders. At that time, Jews looked forward to escaping the city, and the Grossingers provided an inexpensive respite that also had kosher food.

Jennie’s mother, Malka, cooked, while Jennie was chambermaid, bookkeeper, and hostess. The first year, they charged $9 a week and cleared a net profit of $81. Word of their economical rates and good food quickly spread.

In 1919, to accommodate their growing number of guests, they sold the farm and bought a large piece of property with a hotel, in Liberty, New York. Although Jennie had two children, Paul, born in 1915, and Elaine Joy, in 1927, she still managed the hotel while raising her family.

As Jews became more affluent, and were too often rejected by “No Jews Allowed” policies of some other hotels, Jennie expanded Grossinger’s services, adding tennis courts, bridle paths, a children’s camp, a social director, and a residential theater group.

In the 1920s, Grossinger’s became a five-star destination for the upwardly mobile East Coast Jews. Many famous celebrities got their start or vacationed at the posh resort. The list is huge and includes Chaim Weismann, Vice President Alben W. Barkley, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

Jennie raised so much money in World War II war bonds that an army airplane was named “Grossinger’s” in her honor. A clinic and convalescent home in Israel also bears her name. She received a trove of honorary degrees and awards for her philanthropy.

Although she turned over the administration of Grossinger’s to her children in 1964, Jennie was still the guiding spirit. The resort was then situated on 1,200 acres with thirty-five buildings and served 50,000 people a year. She died of a stroke November 20, 1972, in her cottage at Grossinger’s.

On March 9, 1959, inventor Ruth Mosko Handler unveiled what was to become a toy icon at the American Toy Fair in New York: the Barbie doll, named after Handler’s fifteen-year-old daughter, rocketed the Mattel company to nearly overnight success.

“Barbie Teenage Fashion Model” had a long ponytail, a black-and-white striped bathing suit, and teeny feet that fit into opentoed heels. Mattel sold more than 350,000 three-dollar Barbies the first year.