In Memoriam: Rosaline B. Schwartz

Rosaline Schwartz, YIVO, 1992. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 100.)

YIVO mourns the passing of Rosaline B. Schwartz (1925-2015) on January 10. Roz was YIVO’s Director of Public Programs from 1981-1996, presiding over YIVO’s cultural and fundraising events for over a decade.

She was also a native-speaker of Yiddish and a linguistics scholar, who translated two books by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Her article, “The Geography of Two Food Terms: A Study in Yiddish Lexical Variation” (1969) was recently cited in the entry on “Food and Drink” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.

“When I worked at YIVO in the 1980s,” recalls Jeffrey Shandler, now Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, “Roz was part of the very special mix of people on the staff.  There were those who grew up in Eastern Europe before World War II; those who, like Roz, were American-born native speakers of Yiddish; and those of us of the postwar generation—all sharing the same fascination with and devotion to Yiddish language and culture.  We younger members of the staff, who were beginning our scholarly or artistic careers working with Yiddish, were extremely fortunate to have people like Roz to turn to as a source of knowledge.”

Read obituary.