Funeral services were held today for Mrs. Bertie G. Schwartz, author and Jewish bibliophile, who died here last Wednesday after having suffered a heart attack. She was 75 years old. A New York communal leader, she was the first woman president of the Jewish Book Council of the National Jewish Welfare Board.
Mrs. Schwartz, who devoted more than 20 years to promoting an interest in Jewish books and was committed to the idea that Jewish institutions should have reading rooms where persons of all ages could come to read Jewish magazines, newspapers and books, served for many years with the American Jewish Congress, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, and was a vice-president of the New York chapter of Hadassah and the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, and membership chairman of the Association of Jewish Libraries.
She and her late husband, Charles Schwartz, an attorney, were donors of the Charles and Bertie G. Schwartz Reading Room and Library at the Steinberg Center of the AJ Congress. Together with her husband, she wrote “A Modern Interpretation of Judaism: Faith Through Reason,” a widely used textbook for Jewish educators published in 1946. The book was reissued this year as a paperback by Schocken Books and the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism.
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