Yiddishe Mamas (36 page)

Ruth Mosko was born in 1916, the youngest often children of Polish immigrants who settled in Denver. At nineteen, she vacationed in Hollywood and wound up staying. Her high-school beau, Elliot Handler, also relocated to California and they married in 1938.

The Handlers started a giftware business in their garage, with sales reaching $2 million within a few years. In 1942, they partnered with industrial designer Harold “Matt” Mattson. Eventually they specialized in toys, calling the company “Mattel”—a combination of “Matt” in Mattson and “El” in Elliot.

Earlier, the company marketed Chatty Cathy, a talking doll. But when Ruth noticed her daughter Barbara’s fascination with paper dolls of teenagers or career women, she fashioned a lifelike doll—with breasts. Despite condemnation from feminists who claimed Barbie promoted an unrealistic body image, Hendler believed it was “important to a little girl’s self-esteem to play with a doll that has breasts.”

Barbie had friends: Ken (1961), named for the Handlers’ son, then Midge in 1963, Skipper in 1965, and Christie, Barbie’s first
ethnic friend, in 1969. The first Barbie of color came out in 1981. Other dolls were later named for Mrs. Handler’s grandchildren.

In keeping with the changing times, Barbie evolved from fashion model to career woman.

Sadly, the woman who became famous by giving breasts to a doll underwent a mastectomy in 1970—but this didn’t stop Ruth Hendler. She then blazed another career by manufacturing and marketing the Nearly Me prosthetic breast for women who had undergone mastectomies. She was determined to make an artificial breast so real “that a woman could wear a regular brassiere and blouse, stick her chest out, and be proud.”

In the 1970s, she personally fit former first lady Betty Ford, appeared on talk shows, wrote to breast-cancer patients, and spoke around the country about early detection of the disease that was then a taboo subject.

Ruth Handler has received numerous awards. The
Los Angeles Times
named her Woman of the Year in Business in 1967, the United Jewish Appeal named her its first Woman of Distinction, and in 1985, she was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.

Forbes
magazine has cited Lillian Vernon as one of the twenty-five most fascinating people, and she is. Vernon parlayed her modest wedding gift money into a multimillion dollar company—the first to be listed on the American Stock Exchange by a woman, and she did all this while raising two sons.

Lilly Menasche was born in Leipzig, Germany, on March 18, 1927. She and her family fled the growing Nazi threat, first going to Amsterdam, and then to New York City.

In America, her father manufactured leather goods, which would become Vernon’s first foray into the mail-order business. “In 1951, there weren’t many opportunities to launch a small business as there are in today’s marketplace,” Vernon said. “What inspired me and caught my attention was the advertising I saw for small businesses.”

Lillian was four months pregnant when she started her mail order business. Her instinct was to advertise to young women
who loved accessories that made them feel unique. She took out a $495 ad in
Seventeen
magazine for a personalized leather handbag and matching belt she designed. That small investment returned $32,000 in orders.

And Lillian Vernon was, as they say, in business. Her novel marketing concept was monogramming.

In 1956, the first Lillian Vernon catalog was mailed to 125,000 customers who had responded to her ads. In 1965, the Lillian Vernon Corporation was formed and by 1970, her sales had passed $1 million. Lillian had hit on an ingenious concept at just the right time, as women were entering the workforce and looking for a convenient way to shop.

In 1956, she opened her first manufacturing plant. By 1990, sales had risen to $238 million, and the mailing list had grown to 17 million. Lillian Vernon has kept up with technology by offering her catalogs online at
www.lillianvernon.com
and
www.ruedefrance.com
. There are also fourteen outlet stores around the country. The company now produces special lines for children, teens, and gardening, as well as products for the home. She still travels around the world searching for new products.

Vernon has two sons, Fred and David Hochberg. David is vice president of public relations, while Fred works for several nonprofit and political causes.

She also serves on the boards of prestigious nonprofit organizations and her company supports over five hundred charities.

In recognition of her civic contributions, she has received many awards, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Gannett Newspapers Business Leadership Award, and she has been inducted into the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame.

T
here’s an old joke that Jews don’t play sports, they own sports teams. It’s interesting to note that when Jews
do
play … oy, are they good. (If not, they
quick!
change careers.)

At the 1996 Olympic Games, a four foot nine, eighty-eight pound Jewish athlete literally made viewers around the world hold their collective breath. The only way the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team could win their first-ever gold medal depended upon seventeen-year-old Kerri Strug’s final vault. But could she? She fell in her first vault, tearing ligaments and spraining her left ankle. Kerri was worried, in acute pain, and barely able to walk, but she composed herself, readied … then sprinted toward the vault! She nailed an almost perfect landing and the gold for the team.

“It never occurred to me she would be a star,” says her mother, Melanie Strug. “She sacrificed immensely. But she was a perfectionist.

“By age five or six we knew she ‘had’ it. The gymnastic coaches knew it.” They also knew her daughter could only get so much training in Arizona and needed to move on. “I thought they were crazy,” says Mrs. Strug, referring to local coaches.

“When she moved away from home to study gymnastics in Houston with Bela [Bela Karolyi, famed coach] when she was thirteen, we were devastated. Before we made the decision to let her go, we went to Houston to check this out.

“We didn’t want her to do it. To be honest, we thought she’d come home in a week or two. But then Karolyi wanted to coach her personally,” says Mrs. Strug, who loved the ballet, although her kids wanted gymnastics.

“A lot of the kids let school slide. School was always number one with us. Gymnastics was not going to be her future. Six months later she made the world champion team, and a year later, the Olympic Team. Yet she also graduated a straight A student from a good private school.”

Of the fateful 1996 games, she says, “Initially we didn’t know she was hurt. Then, after the first vault, when she landed on the one foot, we knew … and we were very worried, not knowing the extent of her injuries.”

The first time women’s gymnastics was on the program was at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. The team from the Netherlands won the gold medal. The Dutch team was about half Jewish, and all but one Jewish teammate, Elka de Levie, was killed during the Holocaust. The Jewish members of the Netherlands team were inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Syd Koff was born Sybil Tabachnikoff in 1912 on the Lower East Side. She beat legends Babe Didrickson, Lillian Copeland, and Stella Walsh in amateur track and field events when she was only a teen. In 1932, she represented America at the first Maccabean Games in Tel Aviv and emerged as the games’ greatest star. Koff qualified for the 1936 Olympic Team in the broad and high jumps, but boycotted the Games in Berlin, protesting the Nazi regime. She married, had children, and though she never got the chance to win Olympic gold, she played in the masters’ division, and competed from the 1960s until 1972.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Hungarian-born Agnes Keleti was the winner of eleven Olympic medals, including five gold, and ranks as one of the world’s all-time greatest gymnasts—earning more medals than any other Jewish female. Keleti was born on January 9, 1921. She overcame an early lung problem, and she suffered greatly when the Nazis moved into Hungary. Her other relatives were sent to Auschwitz, where her father was killed. Her mother and sister survived, due to the intervention of famed Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. In 1957, Keleti immigrated to Israel, married a Hungarian physical education teacher, and had two sons. She became a college physical education teacher and coached national teams. In 1991, Keleti was inducted into the Hungarian Sports Hall of Fame. She has also been recognized by the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel.

Irena Kirszenstein-szewinska was born May 24, 1945, in Russia. She moved to Poland, was the first woman to hold simultaneous world records in the 100-, 200-, and 400-meter race, and, at age nineteen, she was Poland’s Athlete of the Year. In 1967, she married photographer Junusz Szewinska and gave birth to son, Andrzej, in 1970. She felt the birth of her child boosted her ability in sports. In 1974, she was the first woman to break 50 seconds in the 400 meter and was named Woman Athlete of the Year by
Track and Field News.
Ultimately she did win seven Olympic medals, including three gold. Yet she maintained that no medals gave her as much pleasure as the
birth of her son. She went on to become an economist with the Transportation Research Center in Warsaw. Regarding her life, she has said: “[Sports], together with my family, has brought me all the joys of the world.”

When one of the greatest swimmers marries one of the greatest water polo players—what can they expect? A prodigy!

Eva Szekely competed in three Olympiads for Hungary (1948, 1952, 1956), bringing home gold and silver. In 1956, she and her husband Deszo Gyarmati arrived at the Melbourne Games at the start of the Hungarian revolt against Communism. Said Eva: “the Russians had come into power … we had no word of our two-year old daughter. I didn’t get any real sleep for a week and lost over twelve pounds.” Despite everything, she took home a silver medal in the 200-meter breaststroke.

At age fourteen, her daughter, Andrea Gyarmati, became an Olympic swimmer and, at the 1968 Mexico City games, she took home silver, and bronze in the 1972 Munich games.

In 2002, after an unprecedented dazzling final performance featuring two triple-triple combinations, figure skater Sarah Hughes took home the gold in Salt Lake City. Sarah, like many other Jewish competitors, passed up lucrative touring offers to get an Ivy League education.

She was born May 2, 1985, in Great Neck, New York. Her mother was Jewish and her non-Jewish father was an athlete. In a 2005 interview with
Lifestyles
magazine, Sarah said she and her brother received private tutoring in Hebrew at home. Rosh Hashanah dinner, Passover seders, and Hanukkah candles were all a part of her family tradition.

Sarah, like Kerri Strug, is competitive and a bit of a perfectionist. “I was always very competitive, regardless of what it was. When we were younger, we had a little rink in the back. I tried to skate faster than them [her five siblings]. I always wanted to be the first to do everything. … It wasn’t so important for me to tie my skates first. It was because I was the only one who could do it right, how I liked it,” she told the
New York Times
in 2002.

She credits her indefatigable spirit to her mother, Amy, who survived breast cancer several years ago. Hughes became an inspiration for her mother when she won the junior national championships in Philadelphia while her mother was undergoing treatment.

Figure skater Sasha Cohen was born Alexandra Pauline “Sasha” Cohen on October 26, 1984. She is the current U.S. National Champion and was silver medalist at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. (Shizuka Arakawa of Japan received the gold and won by 7.98 points over Cohen.)

Cohen was born in Westwood, California. Her mother, Galina Feldman, is an immigrant from the Ukraine and a former ballet dancer. Her father, Roger Cohen, is a business consultant who used to practice law. Cohen, a gymnast from an early age, switched to figure skating when she was seven years old.

In April 2006, she joined the Champions on Ice tour, participated in the second annual Skating with the Stars, Under the Stars gala in Central Park, and performed in the Marshalls U.S. Figure Skating International Showcase. She also announced her intention to compete at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

“One of the greatest names in American swimming history—Dara Torres—received a new name last week: Mom!” reported Philip Whitten, on April 24, 2006, in
Swimming World Magazine.com
.

Dara, now thirty-nine, was the first American woman to compete in four Olympic Games (1984, 1988, 1992, and 2000). She picked up nine medals, four of them gold. On April 18, 2006,
she gave birth to Tessa Grace Torres-Hoffman. Tessa’s already showing Olympic promise, as she weighed in at 8.1 pounds and stretches a lanky twenty-one-and-a-half inches in length. “We don’t know who she looks like [Dara or husband, Dr. David Hoffman], but she definitely has my big feet and hands, and long toes and fingers,” said the new mom.