Mrs. Richard Bernhard is a slim, dark-haired young woman with a very gracious and friendly manner and a perfectly delightful sense of humor. She seems to accomplish so very much in her amazingly quiet and unflustered way that one is tempted to believe that the cynics are wrong and that there really are more than twenty-four hours in a day.
How she can give as much time as she does to her two children, her wide circle of friends and her interest in the various Federation organizations with which she is associated would puzzle anyone who had not had the opportunity of seeing her. The answer can of course be found in her efficiency, her flair for organizing and her real executive genius.
EXECUTIVE WORK HARD
There are very few people who are willing and able to undertake executive work in social service. In Federation it is perhaps the least amusing but certainly the most important work. Mrs. Bernhard is for instance on the board of the Home for Hebrew Infants. She herself holds no brief for the placing of children in institutions, preferring to some extent the system of boarding out. However, for some 300 babies between the ages of four weeks and three years her work has helped supply a home and a happy healthy start in life.
The institution life may have its disadvantages, but when one sees some of these three-year olds playing in the sandboxes and on the merry-go-round, or getting their sunbaths out of doors-seven and a half acres of out of doors at that!-one is rather inclined to overlook the disadvantages.
AIDS CRIPPLED CHILDREN
Mrs. Bernhard is also on the board of the Crippled Children’s East Side Free School at 157 Henry street. This school, one of the first in the city, was started by her grandfather, Mayer Schuman, and is now run by the Board of Education. The children get special physical care and are sent by Federation to a summer home in Oakhurst, New Jersey. They remain there from June to September, and most of them make such remarkable progress in health that the projects can be considered worth while quite apart from the pleasure it gives.
Mrs. Bernhard worked there one summer some twelve years ago as a play counselor.
She represented the Board of Jewish Social Service on the Family Welfare Drive this winter. She is on the board of the Y. W. H. A. and for the last three years has been chairman of their camp committee. Besides all this she is frequently called upon by Federation to help in campaigns and in organizing meetings. She says of money collecting that “People can do anything if they really want to, and if they go into things with the impersonal feeling of nothing to lose and everything to gain with the feeling that there is nothing personal in rebuff and that the work one is doing is good work.”
And that attitude may explain why she has been so successful not only in raising funds but in all her contacts with people.
D. P. E. DANCE
The Alpha and Phi chapters of Delta Phi Epsilon, one of the leading national Jewish sororities, sponsored a supper dance last night at the Plaza Hotel, Fifth avenue and Fifty-ninth street.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
