By Stephen Silver
When Bobbie Morgenstern passed away in May at 88, she left behind four children, 13 grandchildren and a legacy as a leading Jewish community activist, most notably her work in the 1970s and 1980s on behalf of Soviet Jews.
On Monday, Sept. 9, Morgenstern was honored with a memorial service and plaque dedication at Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, attended by family members and friends.
Terry Katz, her longtime friend, organized and led the dedication of the plaque, while Rabbi Shraga Sherman of Chabad of the Main Line also spoke.
“She was a very strong woman. When she wanted to do something, she got it done,” Peggy Sterling, Morgenstern’s younger sister, told the Jewish Exponent. “And she had some very interesting experiences along the way.”
In 2011, Morgenstern wrote a letter to one of her grandsons, laying out much of her life story, and the family shared that letter with the Jewish Exponent. She was born in Philadelphia in Aug. 1935, and her given name was Barbara Sue Rasner. She married her husband, Leslie, in 1955, and they had four children.
“My early years were lived through the events of World War II, and the aftermath of the Holocaust loomed greatly during the 1940s,” she wrote in the letter. “The greatest miracle of our times happened in 1948 when the State of Israel was born. It became the place I most wanted to see!”
Morgenstern visited Israel many times, beginning in 1970, and some of her grandchildren lived there.
Morgenstern became interested in the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union, who were stripped of their rights and forbidden from leaving, in 1975. That year, she made the first of three trips to the USSR, arranged by the Soviet Jewry Council of the Jewish Community Relations Council.
“Upon my return to the United States, I began my life as an activist,” she wrote in that letter. “I spoke to anyone who would listen. I told the story of what I had seen. My [friends] in the Soviet Union were not free — we had to tell the world their stories!”
The Philadelphia-area women active in the Soviet Jewry movement, including Enid Wurtman, Connie Smukler and Lana Dishler, called themselves the “Housewives.”
“They went to the Soviet Union, saw what was going on and met with all kinds of diplomats along the way,” Sterling said of her sister. They also pushed local for help from leaders, including then-Mayor Frank Rizzo.
In addition to meeting with political figures, their tactics included delivering Star of David bead necklaces to the Soviet Union — Morgenstern owned a bead store, Beads ’n’ Things, in Jenkintown — and encouraging the concept of American kids “twinning” their bar and bat mitzvahs with their Soviet counterparts.
In 1976, Morgenstern attended the famous hockey game between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Soviet Red Army team at the Spectrum. At that game, she and others held banners that called for freedom for Soviet Jews — one that she said her refusenik friends could see when the game was televised in the Soviet Union.
Through her work, she met many Soviet refuseniks who later became well-known, as well as several Israeli prime ministers. She recalled discussing with Benjamin Netanyahu that her children, like him, were alumni of Cheltenham High School. She once met with Simon Weisenthal in Vienna, and on a visit to Israel in 1994, she met Jordan’s Queen Noor on the eve of Israel’s peace agreement with Jordan.
“It is the energy and enthusiasm of Bobbie and people like her in organizing demonstrations, vigils, petitions, and other actions on behalf of the Soviet Jewry that kept our struggle at the center of world attention for almost two decades until our full victory.
May her memory be a blessing,” Natan Sharansky and his wife, Avital, wrote in a letter to be read at the memorial service.
Sharansky, a refusenik and activist in the Soviet Union in the 1980s who later served as an elected official in Israel, was among the people Morgenstern and her colleagues sought to free.
“Today, as a result of 3,000 brave original refuseniks, over one million Soviet Jews have emigrated to Israel, and an equal amount are living in freedom worldwide,” she wrote in that 2011 letter.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Morgenstern continued her involvement in Jewish community organizations.
She became involved with Israel Bonds, later rising to the local and national chair of the organization’s women’s division. She held an honorary seat on the Jewish Federation’s Board of Trustees for many years. She was active at both Germantown Jewish Center and Har Zion, in addition to her lifetime membership in Hadassah.
“If she could, even though she was 88 years old, she would have, if she could have gotten anything done about what’s going on right now in our country, she would have been on the front lines,” Sterling said of her sister.
Stephen Silver is a Broomall-based freelance writer.
