J Serving Nebraska and Eastern Iowa for more than 75 Years Vol. LXXV
No. 47
. HIST SOCIETY _ JO R ST LINCOLN NE 6850B-1651
Omaha, NE
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avoid military conscription, Mr. Blumkin left by Carol Katzman and Morris Maline Russia for the United States, where Rose planned Rose Blumkin, affectionately known as 'Mrs. B', to join him as soon as she could. died Sunday, Aug. 9. She would have celebrated her It had been her ambition to go to the United 105th birthday in December. Services were Tuesday States since she learned about Russian antiat Beth El Synagogue with burial at Golden Hill Semitism at the age of six, Cemetery. More than 1000 people attended. "Cossacks came into our village and chopped the. ""Mrs; B' was a pillar of our community, and a very Jews into little pieces," she said. "I hated them.' I charitable woman," said Howard Kooper, President didn't want to live in Russia any more. People of the Jewish Federation of Omaha. used to write from America that it was a better "I remember a story my father (the late Robert place for Jews. I thought to myself that when I Kooper) told me that really demonstrated her spirit grow up 111 go there." ' '.'.-.. ;•''.:. of tzedakah," he continued. "Everyone knows about Meanwhile, in orider to earn the money for pasher million dollar gift to build the Rose Blumkin sage to America, Rose went back to work peddling. Jewish Home for the Aged and her later gift of a Finally, on the same day that Rasputin was killed, half-a-million for its addition. she began her journey. "What most people don't know is that when the old A problem presented itself when Rose reached the JCC on 20th and Dodge was built, it was three stoRussian-Chinese border, but with characteristic ries tall. As the community aged, however, it was good humor, she surmounted it. apparent that an elevator was needed. "There was a soldier standing guard with a rifle," Rose Blumkin, 1893-1998 "One day, my father told me, the money just she said, "and I didn't have a passport. So I said to showed up," Kooper recalled, "It was from 'Mrs. B." True to her word, when Rose turned 13, she left him, 'I am on my way to buy leather for the army. Rose Blumkin was born Rose Gorelick in 1893 in her village for the big city and found a job there in When I come back I'll bring you a big bottle of vodka.' a village near Minsk, Russia. She was the daugh- the dry goods department of a general store. She I suppose he's still waiting for his vodka." ter of a kindly but impractical rabbi whom she proved such a natural at sales that she was quickly Mrs. Blumkin booked passage on a peanut boat described as a "genius in books." While her father promoted to department head and began to boss a that took six weeks to arrive at Seattle. studied and prayed, it was her mother who sup- staff of six married men. She also had no entry permit for the United States, ported the family by runnings little grocery store "Don't worry," she assured her mother in a letter, but immigration officials on the West Coast were not during the daytime and baking bread and doing "They mind me." as bureaucratic as those at Ellis Island. ' ' {' laundry at night. Rose worked until she was 20. "If you were healthy, they let you in," she Mrs. Blumkin once said it was the image of her "I made pretty good money," she said. "I used to explained. "And I was healthy." She had 200 rubles mother working so hard that inspired her to send anything I could to my mother, to help her ($66) with her. , improve the family's situation. buy shoes and other things. I always worried for Mrs. Blumkin: soon joined her husband in Fort - "I can't stand the way you work"," she told-Kisro- •imy family.:.Wa:were very close.'*' ,.:• . .,<•;.•.,;.•"."DoUgeJIowa, ; ..~« whe're IsaJdbre'Blitiirikin had operated mother. "When I grow up, you're not going to work In 1913, Rose married a shoe salesman named first a dry cleaning then a junk business. The so hard." •' ' Isadore Blumkin. Three years later, in order to (Continued on page 14)
Livingston Foundation aids The Livingston Foundation has announced a grant to the Jewish Federation in the amount of $40,300 to fulfill Omaha's entire 1998 commitment for the Hunger Relief Program for Soviet Jewry. "After Joe Kirshenbaum, J a n Perelman and I returned from Minsk in January of this year, the Hunger Relief Program became people and ' not statistics," said Robert Kully, President of the Foundation. "The other Livingston trustees immediately understood the need. •This grant is part of a series of grants being made by the Livingston Foundation this year in commemoration of its 50th anniversary," said Kully. "It will enable the Jewish Federation of Omaha to pay its full share of the cost of this program to the Joint Distribution Committee.'' Jan Perelman, Executive Director of the Jewish Federation, said, "I cannot emphasize enough the significance of this contribution which goes directly and entirely towards feeding the starving Jewish elderly in the former Soviet Union. The fact that the Livingston Foundation has helped the Omaha Jewish Federation to fulfill this mitzvah for the Jewish world says so much for its • own leadership." J The Joint Distribution Committee
(JDC) estimates that there are between 520,000 and 600,000 Jewish elderly in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), and as many as 300,000 are in need of assistance, according to Perelman. Currently, JDC is financially able to reach only 70,000. Before Glasnost, people in the FSU looked forward to retirement the same way most Americans do. Accumulated savings and government pensions provided a seemingly secure safety net. However, by the early 1990s, the former Soviet republics were in the midst of economic collapse. In some countries, annual inflation soared above 10,000 percent, according to information told to the three Omahans on their fact-finding trip last January. Life savings were quickly wiped out. Pensions plummeted as governments struggled to meet monumental financial obligations. Deterioration in the health and welfare of the people, particularly the aged and disabled, followed. For Jews, the problems often are worse. Many,Jewish women never married or had children because the Holocaust and the war caused a shortage of Jewish men. Those who did marry became victims of the Holocaust in other ways. Their children were killed by the Nazis or died ;
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Judge Lindsey £\/3i!ler-Lerman named to Nebraska Supreme Court Nebraska Appellate Court Judge Lindsay Miller-Lerman was named last week to the Nebraska Supreme Court. A 22-year resident of Omaha, Miller-Lerman is a former associate of the Kutak Rock law firm and a graduate of Wellesley College and the Columbia University School of Law. It was at Columbia, where MillerLerman was a student of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, today a member of the United States Supreme Court. "The diversity on the Nebraska Supreme Court is beginning to reflect the population of this state," Judge Miller-Lerman said in a recent interview. "People have increased • confidence in a judiciary which looks as though it can comprehend the complex nature of modern society." While a student at Columbia, Miller-Lerman worked as a research assistant for the Center for the Advancement of Criminal Justice at Harvard Law School. After graduation, she clerked for Chief Judge Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court, Southern District, in New York. She originally came to Omaha as a trial lawyer, and after three.years, was named a partner in Kutak Rock & Campbell. Son, Jeremy, a 1997 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, has returned to Omaha as an independent film producer. Daughter,
Miller-Lerman, center, won the gold medal in swimming at the 1961 Maccabiah Games in Israel. Hannah, also a graduate of Penn, (Class of 1995), is the admissions director for the San Dominico Schools of Marin County, CA. Miller-Lerman is no stranger to the Jewish community. In the mid1980s, she established the Avy L. and Roberta L. Miller Endowment, in memory of her parents. The fund supports Jewish cultural and performing arts, in addition to Jewish film festivals. Her commitment to the Jewish community and to Israel dates back to her participation in the 1961 Maccabiah Games in Israel. She represented the U.S. in swimming and earned two gold and one silver medal, all while she was still in high school. (Continued on page 13)