After Betty Rosenzweig took her son Tony to the Museum of Natural History when he was a child, a homeless man approached her asking for money. She didn’t give the man any money – instead she invited him to grab a bite to eat.
“[The restaurant owners] were not thrilled and they said something to my mother about it,” said Tony Rosenzweig, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “She said ‘If I’m good enough to eat here then he’s good enough to eat here.’”
Tony’s mother, who died March 22 in Boston at the age of 87 of a stroke, continued to ask the homeless man about his life, a story Tony believed to be mostly untrue.
But, he said, it did illustrate his mother’s outlook on life as a lover of stories and all living things.
Rosenzweig, a former resident of Great Neck and Williston Park, would go on to work for many years at the North Shore Animal League and later as a columnist for the Great Neck Record, focusing her attention on both people and animals.
“People are sending cards and notes and the reoccurring theme is that she was deeply caring and empathetic, both for people but also for animals,” Tony Rosenzweig said. “The thing that always struck me was that she didn’t think of herself as very bright, but I thought of her as very bright. She came out with these incredible human insights and wise observations.”
In the late 1970s, Rosenzweig answered an ad she saw for an “animal lover.”
That ad was for the then nearly bankrupt North Shore Animal League America in Port Washington. Betty would become the league’s first paid employee, working there for the next 20 years of her life, her son said.
“It was a very small operation when she went there – it was a very quiet place where they did an adoption maybe once every six months,” Tony said.
He said his mother had taken time off from working after trying to break into the photography, something she had studied at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. But she had always been an animal lover, often bringing home more than the occasional stray puppy, and she was looking for a job, Tony Rosenzweig said.
“We had squirrels and ducklings and all sorts of animals in the house, and she would nurse them back to health,” he said.
He said in the 1960s, entrepreneur Alexander Lewyt had begun to take over the league after seeing a lack of support for the animals. Rosenzweig helped turn the league into an enormous operation, overseeing thousands of adoptions a year, Tony Rosenzweig said.
Rosenzweig worked as both adoption manager and head of public relations during her tenure. While doing public relations, Rosenzweig used an animal’s individual story to get them adopted, putting ads in local papers advertising the animals.
The struggle was finding homes for animals that were harder to get adopted.
“It was ‘how do we find a home for this three-legged blind dog?’ It was not the first animal people looked to adopt.” Tony said. “She really wanted to place animals in good homes that were a good fit for the animals.”
Rosenzweig’s son said his mother also helped change the way the pet adoptions worked.
While Rosenzweig worked for the league, they began treating the pet adoptions like child adoptions.
“They would look at the family who wanted to adopt the pet, and make post-adoption visits and make sure everything was okay with the animal,” Tony Rosenzweig said. “They would take animals back if they didn’t think they were in the right home.”
Tony said his mother would never say that she was the key to the operation, but he said he believed she was the heart and the soul of the league while she worked there.
“I have the perspective of being her son, but in her own modest way, she would say there were lots of people who contributed to this effort,” her son said. “But she played an important role in many different capacities.”
After Rosenzweig retired from the animal league, she began writing columns for the Great Neck Record newspaper, called “Heard ‘Round the Clock,” which she would write for about 10 years.
“They were mostly little human interest anecdotes about something going on in Great Neck,” her son said. “A lot of these usually had some more enduring lesson to be learned in them.”
Tony said she wrote the columns because she was always interest in people’s stories, not matter how strange the circumstance. She would always be asking people about their life stories, even in her old age.
Rosenzweig saw her fair share of hardship through life.
During her senior year at Goddard College in Vermont, Rosenzweig dropped out after a car accident left her face severely scarred.
“She was embarrassed about it,” her son said. “She never went back to school [to get her degree in liberal arts] and she always regretted it.”
Rosenzweig and her husband Marty, who died about 12 years ago after 54 years of marriage, moved to Great Neck from Williston Park in the mid-1960s when Tony was about seven-years-old, partly to be in the Great Neck School District, but also because of instances of anti-Semitism, Tony Rosenzweig said.
“I was kind of oblivious at the time, but we were one of the only Jewish families in the area,” he said. “I remember getting into a fight with my best friend when I was very little and he ended up calling me a ‘dirty Jew.’ At the time I thought it was like being called ugly or fat or something.”
But Tony’s parents were becoming more and more aware of themselves as outliers in a predominantly Catholic area, he said. Tony Rosenzweig said years later, his parents told him that some parents in their neighborhood would not let their children play with him and his sister Micki because they were Jewish.
He said the whole area was not anti-Semitic, but his parents had seen elements of it and were sensitive to it while in Williston Park.
“My dad was born in Poland and lost family during World War II,” Tony said. “He got out and his nuclear family did, but not everyone in his family got out.”
Rosenzweig met her husband in the early 1950s, her son said, in New York City. Rosenzweig had plans to go out with her friend, but her friend had forgotten about their plans and accidentally accepted a date with a young artist — Marty Rosenzweig.
Rosenzweig’s friend couldn’t contact her to cancel their plans, so the three of them met up for a night out, and as Tony said the family story goes “It was love at first sight” between Marty and Betty.
After her husband died, Rosenzweig sold the family house in Great Neck. Her son said the house was a lot for one person to take care of, and that she was far from her children – Tony lives in Massachusetts and Micki lives in Connecticut.
“I still remember the day we moved her up,” Tony said. “She said ‘I don’t know why I’m moving up here, you won’t even have time for me.’”
But that didn’t last for long, Tony said.
At the Golda Meir House, an independent senior living home in Newton, Mass. where Rosenzweig lived from about 2005 until her death, she formed a welcoming committee. The committee would bring baked goods to new residents and listen to their stories, helping to integrate them into the home’s community, Tony said.
Once a week, Tony said, he would invite his mother to dinner, and often had more trouble working around her busy schedule of activities, which included Russian and Spanish language lessons, Zumba fitness classes and being part of the home’s welcoming committee.
Rosenzweig is survived by her children, Micki and Tony, daughter-in-law Debra Weinstein and grandchildren Leah, Paul, Ross, Jesse and Alison.
Tony Rosenzweig said the family is planning a memorial service for May in Massachusetts.
The family is asking In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Sunshine Golden Rescue.
