Remembering Ruth Cole, 1936-2026

Think of it as a master class in styles of leadership.

Ruth Gerber Cole of Ridgewood, who died at 90 last week, was a longtime leader in Jewish organizations at the local, regional, and national levels; she was a national vice president of Hadassah, and held many other positions at that influential organization 

And she was married to Leonard Cole, whose wide-ranging interests and intellectual curiosity led him far beyond his successful career as a dentist and earned him a New York Times obituary when he died in 2022.

It was an astonishing family, headed by a couple whose talents were equally sized and differently distributed.

“My mother had so many leadership positions, but she was more of an introvert,” her daughter, Wendy Cole, said. “She was comfortable leading people and making decisions, but she wasn’t a gladhander. My father would talk to anyone anywhere all the time.” Her mother, on the other hand, wouldn’t.

Ms. Cole was from Philadelphia. Her parents, Claire Weiss Gerber and William Gerber, both were lawyers, at least in theory. Mr. Gerber practiced law; he also was an international president of B’nai Brith and active in many Jewish organizations, as his daughters also would be. Ms. Gerber, who was one of three women in her law school class at Temple University School of Law in 1929 — and at least one of the other two, like Ms. Gerber was Jewish — earned her law degree, according to family lore, so she could help her husband in his practice, and so that she’d know what he was talking about when he talked shop.

Claire Gerber worked as a science teacher in a junior high school in Philadelphia.

Mr. Gerber died when his daughters, Ruth and Naomi, were young adults. Dr. Cole went to a shiva for Mr. Gerber — he hadn’t known him, but he was a friend of a friend, and felt the communal obligation to go — when he met Claire, Mr. Gerber’s widow. He was so fascinated by her that he talked to her most of the evening. Then he saw Ruth, then a student at Temple University, asked her out — and that was that.

Ruth Gerber and Leonard Cole got married in 1957. Dr. Cole was a dentist; he’d enlisted in the air force during the Korean conflict and was posted in Japan. Ms. Gerber graduated early so she could join him. They lived in Japan for two years, and the country “became a shared love,” their daughter, Wendy Cole, said. “To this day, their house has a lot of Japanese artwork in it. My mother developed a love of Japanese flower arranging, of Japanese cooking, of Japanese art. They had a lot of furniture shipped home that’s still in the house, from the 1950s.”

When he left the air force, the couple moved to Berkeley, where Dr. Cole earned his undergraduate degree — back then, you could go straight to medical or dental school without stopping at college first. He realized that his real love wasn’t dentistry — he’d already known that, although he continued to practice it, because it was his profession, and he was good at it — and it wasn’t even science, although he thought it would have been. Instead, it was the science-adjacent field of science policy.

Ms. Cole worked as a teacher in Berkeley, and it’s there that the family’s oldest child, Wendy, was born. But she didn’t like it there, so the family moved back east, to East Paterson, as the town now named Elmwood Park was called then. They moved to Ridgewood a few years later, and Ms. Cole lived there until she died.

“When they were in East Paterson, my mother started to get active in Hadassah,” Wendy Cole said. “Many of her friends were through Hadassah, and those were her friends for life. She became more and more active, and got into national leadership.

“When she was on the national board she had different big roles. She was the chair of the magazine.” That’s Hadassah magazine, which has a wide circulation and ambitous stories.

She also earned a masters degree from Montclair State University in human services, her daughter said. She had planned to become a guidance counselor but instead taught English as a second language in Ridgewood. (Why was there a need for ESL there? For the children of executives of international companies, and for the children of U.N. staffers, Ms. Cole explained.) “She loved working with kids, and her time in Japan gave her a visceral appreciation of what it is like to live in a country where you don’t know the language,” Ms. Cole said.

Ruth Cole continued to work for Hadassah until maybe six months before she died. “She had basic computer skills, so she would follow U.N. meetings where they would debate and discuss Israel,” Wendy Cole said. “She would write up summaries — sometimes quite granular — and email them to Hadassah members.” This was volunteer work, but when she was in her late 80s “she treated it as a job. She had a job with Hadassah for 60 years.”

Ruth Cole also was active in the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, and she was president of Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Bergen County. She and Dr. Cole worked together; as Jason Shames, the federation’s executive director, said in his eulogy at her funeral, at Temple Emanu-El of Closter, “There is one thing that separated Ruth from others for me, and that was her ability to transcend gender roles. She was ahead of the curve in an era when that was just awakening. 

“Ruth as not a first lady but an equal member of Team Cole.”

In fact, he added, “when we redid our board and we had room for one Cole, we picked Ruth.”

Ruth Cole is survived by her children, Wendy, who lives in Chicago; Dr. Philip, of Newton, Mass., and Dr. Bill, of Morristown; daughter-in-law Dr. Rhoda Alani; six grandchildren (each of her children had a daughter and a son), Rachel, Charlie, Hannah, Matthew, Jaron, and Lucy; her sister, Naomi Eichen of Teaneck, a retired New Jersey Superior Court Judge; a nephew, Bill, and a niece, Ann.