Ruth Bachrach

Ruth was born in Spring Valley NY in 1916 way before Rockland County (Monsey/ Spring Valley) had a mainstay of Jewish Population. There were only a handful of Jewish families and getting a Minyan was indeed a chore. As Ruth told it, the shabbos minyans comprised barely ten men and most were not frum. After davening (services) many would open their shops and conduct business – even the Baal Korey (Torah reader) was non-Sabbath-observant. Her father Reuben Schulman was an oddity in being orthodox much less closing his business on Saturdays.

Although Ruth was American born, her first language was Yiddish which was spoken in the home. She learnt to speak English in time to attend Spring Valley Public School. It’s not that her parent’s did not speak English, but rather they felt that she would miss out on a great part of her heritage had she not first learned Yiddish first a very young child.

At the time there was no Yeshiva in Spring Valley at that time, however Ruth attended ‘Cheder’. She was versant in Tanach and Jewish Law which credited mostly to her father as he was a very learned man and he aided in her training.

She would to tell the story of when she was growing up and attending school that she would need to pass Toughie’s Bar. She was instructed to run very fast past that block (as she did) as undesirable people frequented the bar and hung out on the block. By the time she was sixteen she had graduated Spring Valley High School and began attending Hunter College in NYC.

At the time the only people that could attend Hunter (BTW an all girls school at that time) were NYC residents. To comply with the residency component, her official address listed with the college was at her grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. Indeed several days a week she stayed at her grandmother’s (Chana Neustader) house as residency was audited by the school officials.

For the days that she would travel back home to Spring Valley from Hunter College, she detailed how people would take turns holding a candle near the windshield in the winter months (no defrosters on those days) on the bus traveling down Kinderkamack Road (a road that extends from Rockland county into Northern NJ) to enable the bus driver to see out the windshield.

Ruth’s aspirations in life were to become a NYC school teacher of French. Combined with high -school, she had studied French for seven years. She was somewhat a polyglot, as she also spoke German, some Latin and of course Hebrew. She was nineteen when she graduated Hunter.

Upon graduating from Hunter she found that there were no openings in the NYC school system for school teachers and she began to work for Isaac Shalom (pronounced Shaa-lom) as a bookkeeper and worked there for ten years. Mr. Shalom owned a very large textile business in Manhattan and was the largest manufacturer of handkerchiefs at the time. He was a philanthropist and supported many Orthodox Jewish causes and employed many Orthodox Jews in his business.

After a fifteen year hiatus to raise her family she returned to the workforce as a school secretary, and then a substitute teacher and finally a teacher of special needs children – all within the NYC school system. To meet her certification requirements as special needs teacher, she had to return to school and earn a Master’s degree which she did and graduated NYU with a Masters degree at the age fifty-one.

She managed to accrue twenty-five years of service as a teacher for the NYC school system and she retired at the age of seventy. At that point she allocated her time mostly to her grandchildren and participating in shul activities.

Her Yuhrtzeit is 25 Shevat