By Ellen Braunstein
When guests gathered around her Passover table, Shirley Feldbaum made sure no one felt like an outsider. Among the family and longtime friends were newcomers: Soviet Jewish refugees she had helped resettle through her work as a social worker. Many had never seen a Seder before. Feldbaum welcomed them warmly, explaining the rituals and making space for them at her table.
“She wanted people to feel included,” her daughter Janet Rosenzweig said. “Some of those families became part of our lives forever.”
Feldbaum, a Philadelphia native whose life reflected resilience, service and deep Jewish commitment, died on Aug. 10 at 96.
Born Shirley Perlstein, she grew up on the edge of Society Hill, raised largely by her mother and grandparents after her parents’ separation. She was a standout student from an early age and graduated in 1947 among the top five in her class at West Philadelphia High School.
Though she earned scholarships, her family did not believe they could afford the expenses that came with college, and she went to work as an office administrator. Soon she married and became a stay-at-home mother to three children.
Her children remember a loving home life in Pine Valley, where the family joined the newly opened Rhawnhurst Jewish Center. “Being Jewish was very important to her,” daughter Marsha Pincus said. “She made sure all three of us had Hebrew school and bar or bat mitzvahs.”
In the early 1960s, Feldbaum faced a challenge that would define much of her life. After her divorce, she became a single mother at a time when few supports existed for women in her position. “My mom was a quiet pioneer,” said her son, Larry Rosen. “She lived a life that millions of women later experienced, but she did it 20 years earlier. She was a single mom in the mid-’60s with three small children. She put herself through college, built a brilliant career, and gave back to women and others her entire life.”
Feldbaum entered a pilot program known as New Career Ladders, one of the early efforts aimed at “displaced homemakers” who needed education and job training to reenter the workforce. The program placed her as a school community coordinator at Frankford High School and gave her a college tuition benefit. Over six years she earned a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in social work at Temple University.
“There was a point when all four of us — my mother and her three kids — were all in college at the same time,” Rosenzweig said. Her mother became an expert at navigating grants and financial aid and taught her children to do the same. “She made sure we took advantage of every bit of financial assistance,” Rosenzweig added.
As a social worker, Feldbaum built a career at Jewish Family Services, the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging and other agencies. At PCA she led in-home services, overseeing programs that supported older adults while staying closely involved with the families she served. At JFS, she was especially active during the resettlement of Soviet Jewish immigrants to Northeast Philadelphia in the 1980s. Well into her 80s, she taught English as a second language at the Klein Branch of the JCC, using her fluent Yiddish to help families build new lives.
Jewish culture and language were a constant. Feldbaum supported Jewish charities, contributed to the Yiddish Book Center and helped start a Yiddish club at Ner Zedek to encourage conversation and reading. She stayed involved in her synagogues through decades of mergers and moves, always volunteering on sisterhood committees or chairing events.
Feldbaum also loved dance and literature. In retirement, she and her second husband Eugene Krouse were frequent ballroom dancers. “They were the first ones on the floor at any event,” Rosenzweig said. Feldbaum counted dancing as her exercise, often going out several nights a week when live music was easy to find in Northeast Philly restaurants. At home, she read constantly and joined book clubs wherever she lived. Even after moving to assisted living late in life, her shelves quickly filled with books.
After Krouse’s death, Feldbaum later married Irving Feldbaum; the couple spent 17 years together until his death in 2020. She cherished time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and adapted to keep close to them. When travel became difficult, she learned to use video to watch lifecycle events, including a great-grandson’s bar mitzvah she viewed on Zoom. “She was so proud,” Pincus said.
Her children say the qualities that best describe their mother are kindness, determination and an instinct to lead with the heart. “She always had a smile,” Rosen said.
“She believed in making every day the best it could be,” said Rosenzweig. “My mother epitomized resilience. Whatever it took, she bounced back. If she had a goal, she met it.”
Her family sees in her story a bridge between tradition and independence. She valued education and insisted upon it, first for herself when the opportunity finally arrived, then for her children and grandchildren.
Pincus said that her mother’s deepest satisfaction came from watching then accomplishments of the next generations.
“She was a wonderfully kind, smart person who did everything she could to make other people’s lives better,” Rosen said.
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.