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In Memoriam

On the eve of Thanksgiving, we feel grateful for one of the most extraordinary things about the Reconstructionist movement — the caliber of people who are attracted to it. We are lucky that so many of these extraordinary people step up into leadership, on our behalf and in the wider world. Over the last several months, we have lost several national leaders, and we write now to share some reflections on these folks who offered the best of themselves to us and on our behalf.

Two former presidents of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation died in close proximity this year. Richard Haimowitz preceded Dan Cedarbaum in the presidency and also in death. Richard’s death came after a long battle with pancreatic cancer; Dan’s death was sudden and shocking for many. We share a eulogy for Richard by Rabbi Les Bronstein of Bet Am Shalom and one for Dan by Dr. Eric Caplan, his partner and colleague at the Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood.

Senator Carl Levin was one of the most prominent Reconstructionists—and certainly the highest ranking one. Carl was part of the extended Levin family who are all multi-generational Reconstructionists, and he was a longtime member of the Reconstructionist Congregation of Detroit. We share a beautiful tribute by his nephew, Representative Andy Levin (a former president of Congregation T’chiyah).

Mimi Levin Lieber was Carl’s first cousin and was equally remarkable in her own right. Mimi introduced her husband Charles to the Reconstructionist movement. They became active members of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (now SAJ: Judaism that Stands for All) and Charles became chair of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation (the parent organization for the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College until the early 1980s). We’re moved to share this obituary from the New York Times.

Herb Krasnow served on the board of governors of first the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and then Reconstructing Judaism for more than four decades. He died this summer at age 99 while planning his centennial birthday celebration. We share here remarks delivered by Deborah when Herb received the Presidential Recognition Award in 2019.

And this summer we also lost Myrna Sigman. A long-time member of the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore (RSNS) even after she and her husband Don moved to Colorado, Myrna served on the boards of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and then Reconstructing Judaism, and chaired the 2006 JRF Convention. Here is a beautiful, personal tribute from Rabbi Lee Friedlander of RSNS.

And we learned recently of the death of former JRF board member Jeanne Saletan. Here is her obituary from Houston’s Jewish Herald-Voice.

As Hanukkah approaches, may we be inspired by the ways they lit paths forward for us in their leadership and their menschlikhkeit and may their memories be a blessing.

 


 

Richard Haimowitz z”l (פסח בן יהודה ועליזה)
Died April 7, 2021; 25 Nisan 5781

In memory of my beloved friend, Richard Haimowitz:

V’heishiv lev avot al banim; v’lev banim al avotam. “He shall turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents.”

I had innumerable long thoughtful conversations with Richard over the course of thirty-two years. Long, relaxed, relaxing, probing, contemplative, sometimes meandering, always far-ranging conversations.  Invariably I would emerge from those conversations having learned a new way to look at pretty much everything. Richard was a great counselor and advisor.  And friend.   I say this for myself, of course, but also on behalf of our grateful community, which he led with wisdom, dignity and skill.

In his modest way, Richard was an expert philosopher of life.  He was clear as glass about his own convictions, and equally clear about the integrity of other people’s points of view, especially of people from the generations after his.  He seemed never to have a moment of hesitation about trying to understand and accept the emerging world views of an emerging generation.

Especially after he got sick, and especially after it seemed that he would get the rare gift of “extra time,” he zeroed in on that very thing:  in his opinion, every day of life was a gift, an extra unearned privilege; and every day presented a chance to love more and to be with those one loves.

We were walking together through south Tel Aviv.  This was a “family trip,” with emphasis on grandparents and grandchildren.  Richard, now a good few years into his “gift of extra time” era, was looking at the grandkids walking ahead of us, watching them take in the sights and sounds of this new place that was old home for Richard and Raphy.  He was already philosophizing on what it was that they were seeing, and how different their take on it would inevitably be from what we understood this place to mean.  “I just want to live long enough to come here with the next grandchildren,” he told me.  “But you have to be grateful for what you get.  We’re here now.  I never thought I would live to see this.  So that’s something to be celebrated.” And we walked on together.

That’s more or less what he said about everyone and everything, especially in these “gift” years, but even before.  Always loving, always accepting, always keenly aware of the generational changes morphing before his eyes, always ready to affirm and go forward.

Two weeks ago, we snuck Richard and Raphy into the synagogue on Shabbat morning.    It was Shabbat Hagadol.  That night would be Pesach, his last great seder with all of the kids and grandkids.  Raphy’s birthday had just passed.  Richard had always come early to shul on Shabbat morning.  He would sit quietly, meditatively, taking everything in and being one with the room and the sounds around him.  Now, deprived of that privilege for an entire year, he needed to come back just one more time.  To sit in that room and be with his inner self just one more time.

I marched the Torah over to him so that he could touch it with his tzitzit.  Through our masks I looked into his eyes.  They were deep and tearful, deep and joyful.  He had already made it clear to me weeks before that the gift of time had expired.  And that he was fine with it.  That he had lived a full life, full of love and accomplishment.  That it was fine to be going now.

The last haftarah he heard was the haftarah for that day that prepares us to sit at our seder table with those of every generation: V’heishiv lev avot al banim; v’lev banim al avotam. “He shall turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents.”  The “he” in the text is the mythical Eliahu Hanavi, Elijah the Prophet.  But the real “he” all along was Richard.  And the text concludes: lifney bo yom hashem gadol v’nora. “Before the coming of that great and awesome day of the Eternal.”

That day has come, and he has accomplished what his heart set out to do.

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Dan Cedarbaum Eulogy by Dr. Eric Caplan

As many of you know, Dan Cedarbaum spent much of the last ten years running the Mordecai M. Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood. Dan was a co-founder of the Center and its Executive Director. In truth, he was the center of the Center; the force that made the work possible.

We, the members of the Board of Directors, had the pleasure of working alongside Dan in the planning and execution of the Kaplan Center’s work. Along the way, we gained some insight into Dan as well.

Dan was, at heart, a Jewish studies scholar. His interest in Jewish classical text, Mordecai Kaplan, and modern Jewish life was boundless and he pursued his study of these with energy, seriousness, devotion and passion. Yes, passion! There was true joy and excitement in his voice when he called to share and to discuss something that he, or someone who he hired, found in one of the many Reconstructionist-related archives that Dan explored.

Dan was also, at heart, a lawyer. We’d go back and forth with him on a document and then see that the final version was so much more elegant and precise than what we had suggested. Dan would begin all of our on-line programs by informing participants that the program was being recorded and that their “asking a question or otherwise speaking will be deemed to constitute consent to our recording of what you say and posting it to our website.” He would preface that statement by apologizing for being so “lawyerly”—but the apology was never convincing. The Kaplan Center benefited greatly from Dan’s being so “lawyerly.”

Dan had a gift for networking. When he encountered an article, book or organization that interested him, he reached out to the author or institutional leader and engaged with them. And he often found a way to incorporate that person in a Kaplan Center project. So much of our work was made possible and enriched by the relationships that Dan built. 

Dan was open-minded. He was always willing to adapt his vision of a program when shown a convincing argument for approaching it differently and he would seriously consider ideas for projects that were not previously on the Center’s agenda. Dan had not personally engaged much with Jewish educational thought when Jeffrey Schein proposed to him that the Kaplan Center help to initiate and sustain a project to formulate and proliferate a 21st century vision of Kaplanian Jewish education. Dan not only integrated the project into the work of the Center; he attended and actively participated in the many seminars it convened. 

Dan was generous with time and money; so many worthy projects would not exist without this generosity. And Dan was gracious. He was careful to thank everyone who contributed to a program and to point out all Kaplan Center Board members participating in one of our events. Although he was the public face of so much of our work, he never intentionally drew attention his way. In fact, he was markedly uncomfortable when one of us would thank him publicly for his work.

Dan: knowing you has been a great blessing. We cannot believe that you are gone. We will cherish forever the conversations that we had with you and the many experiences that you made possible. We will never forget you. We will continue the work of the Kaplan Center; the institution that you created and steered with such intelligence and menschlikhkeit.

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The ‘Uncle Carl’ I Knew
By Rep. Andy Levin Originally posted in The Detriot Jewish News

Carl Levin personified integrity and the notion of putting the public good above self-interest.

Throughout my adult life, wherever I went in Michigan, from Copper Harbor to Monroe, I would run into people who would say, “I don’t always agree with Sen. Levin, but I support him anyway because he is so genuine, he tells it straight and he follows through.”

Carl Levin personified integrity and the notion of putting the public good above self-interest. As he walked about the Capitol in a rumpled suit, almost always with a plain white shirt and pedestrian tie, carrying bulging files with the occasional paper flying away, Carl was the very picture of sober purpose and rectitude.

In truth, he wasn’t unfun. In fact, he often pierced tense situations with self-deprecating humor, and he privately shared incisive observations about others with staff and colleagues.

But Carl was all about the work, and the great honor the people of Michigan had bestowed upon him with their votes and their trust. He did not seek to divine their views to be popular, but rather to study the issues and advance the people’s interest to the best of his ability.

Uncle Carl met with more presidents, kings, queens and other important people than all but a few of us ever will. But he treated them all the same as he did a Detroit autoworker or a beet farmer in Michigan’s Thumb — with a full measure of dignity but no airs, ever ready to puncture self-importance, posturing, mendacity and avarice.

He was so well-prepared for every meeting, hearing and conference that he challenged conventional boundaries between senator and staff. He was one of the most challenging senators to work for and one of the most rewarding. Challenging, because you had better know your business in detail, since he surely did. Rewarding, because he had authentic relationships with staff, treated them with deep respect and was loyal to them.

Family Ties

Uncle Carl was above all a family man. No matter the pressing business he faced as a senator, he always centered Aunt Barbara, my cousins Kate, Laura and Erica and their families, devoted time to them and so obviously cherished them. And the way he loved and treated his family radiated out and served as a model for how he treated colleagues, staff, constituents, soldiers and the world.

My dad and Uncle Carl never merged their identities no matter how often and humorously they were confused for each other, but they embarked on all manner of adventure. They drove cabs and worked at auto plants in Detroit, shared a room from kindergarten to law school and were the key adviser on every campaign from City Council to state Senate to Congress.

They competed fiercely in innumerable squash matches and one-on-one basketball games, each always insisting he alone was at fault for any collision or foul. They had each other’s back always, talked almost daily, deferred to each other in their areas of expertise and bragged on the other’s leadership. 

In my childhood, we had extended family dinners every Sunday rotating between our house, Carl and Barbara’s house, our late Aunt Hannah and Uncle Bill’s house, and my Grandma Bess’ apartment. Whatever house we happened to be at on a given Sunday, it was equally full of recipes and cooking, play and sport and silliness, and endless politics — planning, strategizing, debating the issues of the day.

Indeed, this paradigmatic brotherhood arose from and symbolized a larger sense that everything started with family.

From my earliest memory to this moment, perhaps above all, he has defined with my dad how close two brothers, two siblings, two people can be. In the end, these two Jewish boys from Detroit, these grandsons of immigrants each served 36 years in Congress, 32 of them together, becoming by far the longest co-serving siblings in the 232-year history of this place. As heartbroken as we are in this moment, I feel so grateful to have experienced this love and legacy.” 

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Mimi Levin Lieber, 93, Dies; Her Focus Groups Shaped Postwar Marketing
She helped Fortune 500 companies sell to women in the 1960s and ’70s, then became a stalwart promoter of early childhood literacy. Originally posted on the New York Times

Mimi Levin Lieber, a pioneer in the use of focus groups to shape product development and marketing at some of the country’s largest companies, and later a stalwart advocate for early childhood literacy in New York, died on Oct. 16 in Manhattan. She was 93.

Her son James Lieber said the cause of her death, at Mount Sinai West hospital, was respiratory failure.

Mrs. Lieber was one of several social scientists, many of them women, who in the 1950s and ’60s took research coming out of institutions like the University of Chicago and Columbia University and applied it to marketing and advertising.

It was a time when American consumer patterns were changing and companies were struggling to keep up. What had once been a mass-market economy, in which companies sold a few products to as many people as possible, was rapidly segmenting, with consumers demanding items tailored to their needs.

Mrs. Lieber’s particular specialty, first at a Chicago advertising agency and later on her own, was the focus group — now a staple in the business world, but a novel approach at the time.

She would gather a few randomly selected people around an oval table after work, give them food and chat with them, first about their day, and then, once they were comfortable, about matters like their personal hygiene, underwear choices or dating preferences. She would crunch those insights into voluminous data sets for corporate clients like Hanes and General Mills.

“It may sound very basic and unprofound,” she said in an interview with Newsday in 1993, “but the problem with the American system of business is that companies think operationally, ‘This is what we’re good at producing, now how do we sell it?’ — rather than thinking as marketers, ‘What does the consumer want, and we’ll produce it.’”

Miriam Leah Levin was born on March 22, 1928, in Detroit. Her father, Theodore, was the chief judge on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan; her mother, Rhoda (Katzin) Levin, was a homemaker.

The Levins are a family thick with political achievement. Mrs. Lieber’s first cousin, Carl Levin, was a Democratic senator from Michigan (he died in July), and his brother, Sandy, was a Democratic representative from the state; Sandy’s son Andy now holds the same seat. One of Mrs. Lieber’s sons, Janno, is the acting chairman and chief executive of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Mrs. Lieber studied social psychology at the University of Chicago, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a master’s in 1951. The university was at the forefront of sociological research and education, and she and many other students were among a vanguard that brought the university’s insights into the private sector.

After graduation she moved to New York, where she worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, an institute at Columbia run by the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. During World War II, Dr. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues had developed techniques for testing and tweaking government information, most notably through the use of what they called the focused interview.

Instead of asking people to complete a survey to see whether they liked a program, Dr. Lazarsfeld’s team would assemble people in a room and probe why — an approach he brought to corporate clients after the war ended.

Mrs. Lieber helped refine those methods, at Columbia and later at a research firm in Britain. Dr. Lazarsfeld’s first groups had gathered in dingy rooms, with his team watching from a corner. Now they were given snacks and sat in comfortable chairs in well-lit areas as they chatted informally with a facilitator. The rest of the researchers were hidden behind a one-way mirror.

Mrs. Lieber returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job in Chicago with Tatham-Laird, an advertising agency renowned for its understanding of the American middle-class consumer.

“She was one of those people who was really in the nitty-gritty of figuring how to do focus groups,” Liza Featherstone, the author of “Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation” (2017), said in an interview. “She was one of the earliest people to bring the focus group into the advertising industry.”

She married Charles Lieber in 1960. He died in 2016. Along with her sons James and Janno, she is survived by her brothers, Daniel and Joseph; another son, Theo; her daughter, Angie; and 10 grandchildren.

In 1961 Mrs. Lieber struck out on her own, founding Lieber Attitude Research. She staffed it almost entirely with women and pitched herself as someone uniquely poised to explain female consumers. Within a few years she was working with leading ad agencies like Ogilvy & Mather and, through them, clients like Hanes, Citibank and General Mills.

For the next 30 years she provided a steady guide to companies trying to stay ahead of the rapidly shifting American consumer, especially as women moved into the workplace and men began to take on more domestic responsibilities.

“There was this embrace of the idea of segmenting the market, that different groups have different tastes and that companies need to market to these particular segments of the consumer public,” Lizabeth Cohen, a historian at Harvard and the author of “A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America” (2003), said in an interview.

One of Mrs. Lieber’s biggest successes came in 1969, when her research among women provided the framework for L’eggs, a line of pantyhose from Hanes sold not in department stores but at supermarket checkout lines, in plastic egg-shaped containers. It was a radical — and very successful — move, but one Hanes might never have taken had Mrs. Lieber’s research not shown that women were eager for it.

She began another chapter in her life in 1981 when Jerrold Nadler, then a member of the New York State Assembly (and now a U.S. representative), nominated her to the New York Board of Regents.

The board oversees the state’s educational activities, but Mrs. Lieber immediately chafed at what she saw as a preoccupation with higher education at the expense of elementary school, especially in lower-income neighborhoods. She spent much of her time on the board pushing for more funding for low-income schools.

In 1987 she pushed the regents to distribute state money based on the percentage of low-income children at a given school, an effort that transformed the way the state approaches educational spending.

Mrs. Lieber left the board in 1996, the same year she founded Literacy Inc., known as LINC, a nonprofit that promotes reading in lower-income neighborhoods in New York.

Today LINC works with dozens of schools and public libraries across the city.

“Her legacy reminds us that we must support and invest in our children’s education from the earliest years, when it matters the most,” Representative Nadler said in a statement, “and that universal literacy is critical to sustaining a healthy democracy.”

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Remarks to Herb Krasnow upon receiving the Presidential Recognition Award
By Rabbi Deborah Waxman – June 2019

Herb, you are a storyteller, so you will appreciate if I begin with one of my favorite stories. One time we held a meeting of the Executive Committee of the board at the lower Manhattan location of the 92nd Street Y, which is in the old part of NYC where the streets are not numbered and it can be very confusing. I took a subway down to the Canal Street Station and emerged at an intersection with at least eight streets and in monsoon conditions. The rain was literally blowing horizontally into my face, and my umbrella was useless. This was long enough ago that I had no smartphone with a GPS on it and I was quite lost, and it seemed to me that all the stores were barricaded against the weather. I looked up and saw a tall man holding himself erect and striding with purpose and out of desperation I just decided to follow him. We walked a couple of blocks, with me an unwitting shadow, and sure enough, safely arrived at my destination. When we both got inside, I was surprised and delighted to discover that it was you I had been following. You were already close to 90 years old, but your step and your sense of direction were so sure that I was carried along in your wake.

That certainty, Herb, is a hallmark of your personality. Your clear vision and confidence define how you move through the world, whether in your business dealings or your personal relationships. In your service first to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and now to Reconstructing Judaism, you have offered your keen insight, your commitment to the future, your requirement that we consider every risk and every opportunity, and ultimately your wholehearted support. Every president, including myself, knew to listen at board meetings for you to raise a complex, multi-part question. And every president, including myself, knew that after probing and questioning, you would sign onto the initiative and remain intensely interested in its success, along with success of the entire enterprise.

This commitment to the well-being of the Reconstructionist movement—apparent at your home congregation of Bet Am Shalom as well as the North American level—is matched only by your deep pride in and love for your family. You wear the joy that you take in your blended family, in your children and especially your grandchildren, on your sleeve. One of the great pleasures of my presidency is that I have come to know you much better over these last several years, and to hear some of your stories. As ready as you are with a story from your business dealings or your childhood or the war or your travels with Deborah, the stories you tell most often and with greatest delight are about your loving marriages, your caring children and their wonderful partners, and your extraordinary 17 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Your public and private lives combine to give evidence of a life richly and well-lived, a life intertwined over these last 35 years with the Reconstructionist movement to lasting and wonderfully positive effect. Herb, it is with deep appreciation that I present to you the Presidential Recognition Award. 

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Myrna Sigman’s tribute from Rabbi Lee Friedlander

Dear Don, Lauren and Mimi, David and Robin, Eddie and Sarah:

Please forgive this unrefined tribute to my dear Myrna, but I needed to get something down on paper so I won’t explode.

I’ve been thinking of Myrna since your call last night, and I’ve been smiling, laughing and shedding a few tears, too.  The tears come from warm memories and happiness about having known such an extraordinary woman who has been so important to me and to my family for more than forty years.

Myrna and Don were among the first people to welcome me when I came to the synagogue.  They were inviting in every way.  They opened their hearts and their home to Joy and me – first in Roslyn and later in Colorado.  (I was with them in Colorado when I heard about Ira Eisenstein’s death, in fact.)  There was an ease to their graciousness that made us – well, everyone – feel like we had been friends for a very long time, and that we would be friends forever.

I have known other people who I could describe as ‘a force of nature,’ but Myrna is the only one about whom the description is an understatement.  Her energy was boundless, her capacity to get things done was incomprehensible, and her curiosity about the world and the people in it was inexhaustible; and it was all contained (if that word could really be applied to Myrna in any way) in a petite and increasingly fragile vessel.

She was opinionated, and she was perceptive, a incredible combination.  She saw the world clearly, yet had the ability to listen to others, too.  She knew what she wanted, and she acted on it.  I remember the lunch when Myrna and Don told Joy and me that they were moving to Colorado.  After listing the many reasons for the move, Myrna concluded, “It comes down to this: There has to be more to life and where you live it than the Miracle Mile.”

It’s not that Myrna didn’t like nice things.  Myrna was always dressed just right, and her home was beautiful.  She was a gifted speech pathologist – my daughter, Sara, benefited from that – but she could well have made a living, a good living, as a jewelry maker and silversmith.  I remember the silver flatware that she crafted.  After it was stolen, I asked her (a dumb question) if she planned to make another set.  “I already did that.  Now it’s time to do something else.”  That was Myrna for you: she never looked behind; she always looked ahead.  She was so eager to see what was next, to see what possibilities life held for her.  And if it didn’t happen, she made it happen.

These last years….  I’m surprised her body lasted as long as it did.  Even if it hadn’t been compromised by polio, her spirit was so large and her energy so powerful that a nine-foot giant couldn’t have contained it.  Myrna was so much bigger that her body.  She was bigger than life!  And so she will be bigger than death.  When she could not longer ‘contain’ herself, all of you – Don, and Lauren and Mimi, and David and Robin with Eddie and Sarah – you all stepped in to live life with her.  How lucky Myrna was to have received as good as she gave.  How blessed you are, how blessed we all are, to have been a part of her world.

Her life was a blessing, and so her memory will be a blessing.

With admiration and much much love, Lee

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Jeanne Saletan died peacefully at home on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, at age 93. She was born in Newark, N.J., and grew up in a community of Jewish immigrant families. While raising five children in New York and Texas, she embarked on a life of feminist activism and Jewish learning.

She loved people and liked to try new things. Over the years, she trained as an electrician and machinist, learned drafting and filmmaking, sang in a community choir, performed in a play, served as a security guard at a women’s conference and went on a 400-mile motorcycle trip across Texas.

Jeanne earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in social work from the University of California at Berkeley. In her early professional years, she taught kindergarten and helped women transition from public assistance to job training and employment. She worked with veterans, juvenile offenders and the biological parents of children in foster care.

In her 40s, inspired by Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” Jeanne joined the feminist movement. She led discussion groups, campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment and launched a sex-discrimination investigation that prompted her school district to begin hiring women in administrative roles.

She served as president of the Houston-area chapter of the Older Women’s League, worked with the National Organization for Women and the National Council of Jewish Women, and helped form the Women’s Lobby Alliance, a coalition of feminist organizations. She lobbied and testified before the Texas legislature, obtaining health insurance legislation for displaced homemakers and changing the way textbooks treated women and girls. She also worked as a vocational counselor for women.

In later years, Jeanne studied Hebrew and explored Jewish thought, particularly through the works of Rachel Adler, Mordecai Kaplan, Arthur Green, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Yehuda Amichai. She co-founded and served as the first president of the Houston Reconstructionist Havurah.

In 1992, at age 63, she became a Bat Mitzvah. She participated in Palestinian-Jewish dialogues, hosted a weekly discussion group on religious writings and became a devoted member of Congregation Shma Koleinu. She continued to work in her community, tutoring adults in English and fighting successfully for housing for single mothers. She loved to sit in her backyard and watch the squirrels.

Toward the end of her life, Jeanne lost several beloved family members: her husband, David Saletan; her son, Ira Saletan; and her brothers, Harry and Lewis Barnett. She is survived by her children, Paul, Becky, Will and Lou; by her daughters-in-law, Suzanne Shiff, Tam Voynick, Martha Hirschfield and Jynne Dilling; by her son-in-law, Marshall Messer; and by her grandchildren, Amelia Saletan, Ben Voynick, Anna and Simone Messer, and Eli and Miriam Saletan.

The family would like to thank her doctor, Theresa Vicroy; her rabbi, Scott Hausman-Weiss; and her caregivers, Hattie Johnson, Martha Smith, Karen Finley, Stephanie Rogers and Stephanie Booker.

A small, private graveside ceremony was held on Sept. 26, 2021, at the Eloise Woods Natural Burial Park in Bastrop, Texas, under the auspices of Austin Natural Funerals. A memorial service will be held at a later date.

Donations may be made in Jeanne’s memory to Congregation Shma Koleinu, Jewish Family Service or a charity of your choice.

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