Honorees

Ruth Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in 1928 Wiesenfeld, Germany and raised in an Orthodox home in Frankfurt. She was the only child of Irma Hanauer, a housekeeper, and Julius Siegel, a notions wholesaler. When her father was deported to a detention camp after Kristallnacht, her mother and grandmother sent Ruth at age 10 […]

Edith Windsor, called Edie, was born in 1929, the youngest of three children, to James and Celia Schlain in Philadelphia. Her parents were immigrants from Russia who owned and lived above a candy and ice cream store, both lost during the depression. Despite hard times, her parents valued their children’s education, making financial sacrifices to

This year, Miriam’s cup honors Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a dedicated scientist, Nobel Prize winner, and Holocaust survivor, who died in 2012 at the age of 103. She was the first living Nobel laureate to reach a 100th birthday. Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in 1909 in Turin, Italy. Together with her twin sister, Paola, she was

Nechama Leibowitz is considered by many to be one of the world’s greatest Bible scholars. She was described by her admirers as the first talmida hachama, or female Torah scholar, of modern times. Leibowitz was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1905 into an Orthodox household, two years after her elder brother, the philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. However,

This year Miriam’s Cup honors Eleanor K. Baum, the daughter of Holocaust survivors and the first woman dean of an engineering school. Named after Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor was born in 1940 to Salamon and Niuta Kiszelewicz in Vilnius at the outbreak of World War II. Her parents fled in the middle of the night with

In 2009, Ada Yonath was one of three winners of the Nobel Chemistry prize. She was the first Israeli woman and the seventh Jewish woman to win a Nobel prize. This year, I’d like to tell you about the first American-born Jewish woman who won a Nobel prize, Rosalyn S. Yalow. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was