Mindella Lamm, 88, Wife Of Former Yeshiva University President
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen April 20, 2020
NEW YORK (JTA) — To those she met accompanying her husband on university business, she was the elegant woman known simply as Mrs. Lamm. To her four children and 17 grandchildren, she was a loving mother who took them on regular outings to Broadway shows and the opera.
For years, Mindella “Mindy” Lamm had a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera. One year she brought her daughter, Sara, to see Tosca. Opera was not one of Sara’s loves, and during the death scene she laughed so loudly she was escorted out by staff.
Rabbi Mark Dratch, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America who was married to Sara until her death in 2013, said Lamm wasn’t embarrassed by the incident. “She was amused,” he recalled.
Lamm, the wife of former Yeshiva University President Norman Lamm, died on April 16 of COVID-19. She was 88.
Raised in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, Lamm was one of five sisters. After graduating from Bais Yaacov she studied education at Hunter College. She married Norman Lamm in 1954 at the age of 20 and soon became deeply involved in the Yeshiva University Women’s Organization, which provides financial support to university undergraduates.
Joshua Lamm recalled the help his mother provided to a single mother and her son who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union. Her help so impacted the boy, now in his 40s, that he sat in his car outside the cemetery during her burial April 17, just to pay his respects.
“She was a tremendous mother, and a second mother to her many nieces and nephews,” Joshua Lamm said. When he and his siblings were children, “every Sunday we went to the park, to the zoo or carousel. In the winter we would go ice skating and sledding. She would climb the mountain with us, put four little kids on sleds and stood knee-deep in snow.”
Lamm is survived by her husband, Norman Lamm, and three children: Chaye Warburg, Joshua Lamm and Shalom Lamm, as well as 17 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.
The post Mindella Lamm, 88, wife of former Yeshiva University president appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
