January 2021
I originally created this website 20 years ago, shortly after my mother’s death. For a few years the site was accessible on a free hosting service, but was eventually shut down. Fortunately, I kept a backup of all the files.
Finally, I found the time, and enlisted the help of my son Doron (web developer deluxe!) , and have resuscitated and revised the website. While I will never be a great genealogist like my father Seymour, my hope is to preserve and present enough of Bernice’s life, character, achievements, and family history, so that future generations will come to know her.
Although blogging did not yet exist during Bernice’s lifetime, I can easily envision Bernice writing and publishing a blog. So I have rebuilt this site as Bernice’s Blog. Each entry has the date when the text was originally written (or delivered in a speech), making posts appear in chronological order. Each post is also assigned to a category, creating the chapters that reflect the many aspects of Bernice’s rich life.
March 2001
After mom died, I realized that my 25 years of living in Israel had unwittingly generated and endowed me with volumes of our correspondence.
Mom’s letters often read like a diary, a journalist’s notebook, a draft for an autobiography. She dispatched detailed accounts of family life cycle events. She shared her joys and sorrows. She reflected on health and aging and attitudes. She wrote about the books she read with her weekly book club, the lectures and Torah study sessions she attended, the Jewish community activities she participated in. She often rambled on describing an interesting person she had met or a remarkable connection – so often a result of her involvement in community and Israeli-oriented organizations. Reading these letters today, I can still hear her voice, her concern, her enthusiasm and her love. I can feel her amazing presence.
Mom eagerly adopted each new technology that benefited her writing and editing endeavors, and it shows in her letters – over the years they transformed from electrically typewritten onion skin pages, to dot-matrix computer printouts, to thermal-paper faxes and finally email messages – which led my brother Robert to propose we call our mother “e-ma”.
It is thus only natural that I preserve and honor the memory of our beloved Bernice Meyer Saltzman by creating this website – an anthology of excerpts from her letters and writings. This is a work in progress – it is far from complete.
Lisa Saltzman Mishli. Maccabim, Israel.
Contact us:
Lisa Saltzman Mishli – mishli06 AT bezeqint DOT net
David Saltzman – david.saltzman AT att DOT net
Robert Saltzman – saltzman AT sfsu DOT edu