Profiles of the honorees

EDITOR’S NOTE: The 8 over 80 honorees are being profiled two per issue. Ruth Klein and Sylvia Krone are featured in this installment.

Weinberg Village assisted living residence is recognizing eight seniors over 80 years of age who have long dedicated their time and talents to making significant contributions to the Jewish and general community of Tampa and elsewhere.

The honorees are Nellye Friedman, Roberta Golding, Walter Kessler, Ruth Klein, Sylvia Krone, Doris Rosenblatt, Judith Szentivanyi and Jack Wiesenfeld.

The eight honorees will be inducted in the new Jewish Senior Hall of Fame at the inaugural “8 Over 80” event, sponsored by Weinberg Village, located on the Maureen & Doug Cohn Jewish Community Campus of the Tampa Jewish Community Center & Federation.

The dessert reception will be held Sunday, Oct. 31 at 3 p.m. at Congregation Schaarai Zedek.

Ruth Klein

Still active in the Tampa Jewish community at age 85, Ruth Klein, a native of Newark, NJ, attributes her gift of giving to her mother and the idea of L’Dor V’Dor,” the passing of Jewish ideals from generation to generation.

“I was inspired by my mother,” said the one-time Radio City Music Hall Rockette. “She raised five children and worked her entire life to raise money for children’s causes.”

Klein, who moved to Tampa with her late husband Mort in 1973, has filled her life with giving to the Jewish community. She brought to Tampa a history of involvement, including serving as president of Congregation Beth Am in Colonia, NJ, president of a chapter of B’nai B’rith and president of the regional B’nai B’rith. When the couple moved to Lebanon, PA, she served as president of her congregational Sisterhood.

Klein did not slow up in Tampa. The mother of two and grandmother of seven, Klein was instrumental in founding Congregation Beth Am in the 1980s, and subsequently served as president of the congregation. At the age of 74, she became a Bat Mitzvah there.

Klein also credits her family for giving her, by example, strength and an ability to bounce bac k. Her father lost his dry goods business in the Great Depression, her husband lost his six beauty aid shops in Wilkes-Barre, PA to the floods created by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, and their son Jay got cancer at age 19.

Klein watched all three overcome their challenges: Her father, Jacob Marx, found a job in an insurance company and began saving again. Her husband took her to Ireland to start up his beauty aid business again, and Jay Klein has thrived as an active adult.

“I learned to never give up when life is difficult,” Ruth Klein said. “With work it can get better.”

Sylvia Krone

Born in 1919 in Paterson, NJ, Sylvia Krone, 91, has a head full of memories and a life filled with creativity, much of which she has devoted to the Jewish community over the 70 years she has lived in Florida.

“I have done ceramics, calligraphy, orchid growing, organic herb gardening, photography and fine cooking,” she said.

“I actually wrote a Yiddish transliteration of a Jewish play I had written, ‘Grena Cusina,’” she said, “which played to over 200 people in the old Jewish Community Center at $2 a head.”

That was in 1991, a year before the new Jewish Community Campus on Gunn Highway opened.

Krone, a long-time member of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, took an active role in that congregation as well as in the Jewish Community Center early on. She taught Jewish history at the JCC and Sunday school at Rodeph Sholom, organized jewelry making and other arts and crafts projects at the JCC and taught arts and crafts classes.

Today Krone heads the JCC’s Senior Network that she was instrumental in founding at the old Jewish Community Center. The group began with 15 members and now has more than 150 members. They participate in monthly meetings, play mah jongg and go to bi-monthly luncheons and day trips to museums and special exhibits. “The $5 monthly dues have remained the same all these years,” she said.

Much happened in Krone’s 91 years of life and her memories often carry her back to childhood. She said she remembers the ways that family members dealt with hardship and carried on. Raised by her grandparents after the youthful death of her mother, Krone witnessed the damage of the Great Depression.

Her father lost his dress shops and her grandparents, Russian immigrants, lost homes and an apartment house they owned.

Krone’s young adulthood took a path familiar to that of other young women of many eras — school, marriage and children. She attended Paterson State College, tutoring after school and working as a cashier in a deli on the weekends to make ends meet.

In 1941, at age 22, she married Milt Farber in an orthodox Jewish ceremony, and shortly thereafter the pair left for Florida where Farber’s parents owned orange groves.

Two children and fifteen years later, Milt succumbed to multiple sclerosis, leaving Sylvia Farber to raise the children, Bonnie and Richard, alone.

But life took another turn. Seven years later she married Irving Krone, a widowed friend of hers and her late husband, and they became a blended family with four children.

Krone said she was raised in a welcoming home, where during WWII servicemen were invited in to share holidays. She still carries on that tradition of welcoming crowds to her home for a meal.

“It’s always very special to have a houseful of friends and family to share a meal,” she said. “Family and ‘adopted’ family take it for granted that they are invited to our Seder.”

Asked if she would have done anything differently in her life if she could, she said “no.” She said the title of her autobiography, “Remember the Roses and Forget the Thorns,” conveys her attitude best — enjoy what you have.“Everything we do in life helps make us who we are,” she said. “We can only do the best we can at the time.”

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For more information on the 8 Over 80 event, or to place a congratulatory message or ad in the Mazel Tov Recognition Book, call Dan Sultan at Weinberg Village, (813) 969-1818 or e-mail, dan.sultan@jewishtampa. com.

—Story by ELAINE MARKOWITZ