Pearl Gruber Kaplan, RIP

By Ruth Ellen Gruber My Aunt, Pearl Gruber Kaplan, passed away Friday in Santa Barbara, California, at the age of 94. She was my father’s oldest sister; the oldest of my immigrant grandparents’ seven children; a military veteran; a mother; a grandmother and great-grandmother; a highly independent woman who lived her life on her own [...]

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Transmission of Tradition — A Cousin Considers

By Ruth Ellen Gruber As part of this project, I am examining — in an anecdotal way, to be sure — what I call the transmission of tradition. Specifically, I am looking at what happened between the generations of my (probably fairly religiously observant) women ancestors buried in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti, Romania and [...]

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Transmitting Tradition: The Women’s Torah Project

By Ruth Ellen Gruber One of the themes I am exploring in this project is the transmission of tradition. My great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother whose tombs I found and photographed in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti, Romania were buried under gravestones marked with candlesticks, denoting the signal role of  women in Jewish tradition and practice of [...]

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Braided Candlesticks on a Great-Great-Grandmother’s Stone

At the tomb of my great-great grandmother (my Grandma Becky’s grandmother) Chaya Dvoira Herer Halpern, in the Radauti Jewish cemetery. She died Feb. 22, 1905 at the age of 69) (This is a duplicate of a post to my Jewish Heritage blog) By Ruth Ellen Gruber Sept. 8, 2009 My cousins all left, but I [...]

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Aunt Pearl and Grandma Becky’s Candlesticks

By Ruth Ellen Gruber Some time ago, I wrote a post including my aunt Pearl Gruber Kaplan’s recollections of her mother, my grandmother, Rebecca (Rosenberg Gruber) Rifkin, lighting the candlesticks on Friday night. Here is a recent picture of Aunt Pearl, with a still life she painted of the Shabbos candles, and the candlesticks themselves. [...]

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Rosa Susnitsky — No Candles

Rosa Susnitsky, my step-great-grandmother, was the daughter-in-law of Celia Susnetzky. Born in 1872, she was the second wife of Pesach Susnitsky and died in 1948. (Pesach’s first wife, Gillie, was my grandmother’s mother.) I think I was given my name, Ruth, in Rosa’s honor. I uploaded a photo of Celia’s tombstone showing that it bore [...]

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Shirley Moskowitz web site

My latest “Ruthless Cosmopolitan” column for JTA.org is about the web site we have set up to honor my mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, who died two years ago. Mom is buried in a municipal cemetery shaded by palm trees. Like most of the other grave markers there, a simple, flat plaque rather than [...]

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