Ruth Juskowitz (Weisbord)

Ruth was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1922, the first daughter of immigrants from Belarus. The family was very poor but valued education. Ruth, a brilliant child skipped two grades and entered college at 16, then obtained a Master’s degree from Columbia. Her first job was teaching literature in Harlem. She identified with her students’ poverty and tried to become the cheerleader her family had been for her and many of her students lacked. When later in life she had a family of her own and moved to an all white suburb, she told her children stories about her work in Harlem to make sure her children knew there were many races and all were identical in their humanity.


Ruth loved the cultural life of Manhattan: the NY Philharmonic, theater, museums, and was an avid reader. She became a devout tennis playing at the courts along the Hudson River. She met Norman Juskowitz, at a friends’ party. He was a young medical student at the time, who said he would like to see her again in two weeks because he had finals and a half of his class would be eliminated. She was miffed, and told her mother to tell him she was out, but relinquished when he called. The rest was history. They married and had two children, Alice (Weisko) and Amy (Sponseller). When Amy was two the young family received shocking news: Norman was being re-called into the Navy to address the baby boom on the Port Lyautey Base in Morocco. She fainted in the mail room, but later came to embrace this wonderful adventure. Many of you have heard her stories about this time. After their return to the States they moved to Yorktown Heights, then a small town in Westchester, and met Bob and Maggie Schwartz, their closest friends for the rest of their lives, with whom they shared wonderful summers on Martha’s Vineyard. Maggie and Ruth cooked their way through Rombauer. But neither was a typical suburban housewife. Ruth served on the board of the local library and fought fiercely to stop local fanatics from removing books on gestation, sex and civil rights. Ruth took her children to their first civil rights protest when we were at 9 and 10 years old, marched against the Vietnam war, and helped her friend Maggie run successfully for the school board, all while becoming an avid tennis player and sharpening her bridge skills.


Ruth and Norman loved Sarasota, Florida where they had spent their honeymoon. After Norman’s death from pancreatic cancer Ruth moved to Sarasota, where she had fifteen wonderful years filled with tennis, concerts, new friends and toured bridge tournaments with her friend Eric Brauner, and was eventually just a few points away from Master status. She took a class at the Shelby Arboretum in raising orchids and began to fill her home with them. In 2008 Ruth moved to Blakehurst to be near her daughters in Towson and have more time with her grandchildren Paul Weisko and Nina and Matt Sponseller. She soon became the queen of orchids and bridge. It was a rich 17 years, filled with dear friendships, the cultural life of Baltimore and wonderful times with her family.


To all of you who lightened her life here we gratefully thank you!

Inurnment services will be held at King David Cemetery, 101 Mill St, Putnam Valley, NY 10579, on Thursday, August 28, 2025, at 11am. Please omit flowers, contributions in her memory can be made to Pancreatic Cancer Research Group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, online at mskcc.org.