Early Life
Bella Savitsky was born on July 24, 1920, in New York City. Both of her parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her mother, Esther, was a homemaker and her father, Emanuel ran the Live and Let Live Meat Market.
When her father died, Abzug, then 13, was disallowed to say the Mourner's Kaddish for her father in synagogue, where that privilege was reserved for sons of the deceased. However, she did so as one of her first feminist actions because her father had no son.
Abzug graduated from Walton High School in New York City, where she was class president, and went on to Hunter College of the City University of New York, later earning a law degree from Columbia University in 1947. She then went on to do further post-graduate work at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Read more about this topic: Bella Abzug
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“The wind sprang up at four o’clock
The wind sprang up and broke the bells
Swinging between life and death”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)