Sara Richman Harris was the daughter of Rivella Shapiro Richman and Aaron Richman, both of whom had close ties to the Reform Jewish movement.
Rivella’s grandmother had been the director of a Hebrew school in Lithuania ; her father, Michael Shapiro, a rabbi, immigrated to Cleveland in the 1870s. {Photos of those early immigrants are available in the family archives].
Aaron was born to Latvian Jews Eva and xxxx Richman; Aaron’s brother, Paul, served as director of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in the 1940s until he passed away in the early 1950s.
Sara’s parents, who married in 1918, traveled to Israel in 1920, returning to Cleveland before Sara was born, in 1921. In 1928, they founded two Jewish children’s camps–Eagle Point, for girls, and Stinson, for boys–in Stinson Lake, New Hampshire. They also founded Hawthorn Lodge, a nearby inn where Jewish artists and intellectuals, and family members, gathered during the summers.
Sara’s daughter Anita, who attended Camp Eagle Point from 1952-1955, recalls her grandmother, Rivella, leading Friday night services for campers in a large recreation room. Sara, however, had a mind of her own. In one diary entry from the early 1940s, she mentions that on a Hudson River Cruise for Orthodox Jewish College students led by the young man she is dating she “shocked everyone” by eating liverwurst–which might not have been kosher. She also writes that she feels badly for the young man, who is in love with her but “cannot bring himself to kiss lips that have touched ham.”
In Albany, in keeping with her Orthodox Jewish husband’s preferences, Sara bought only kosher meat, though sometimes served it with milk. In restaurants, she often surprised her family by ordering bacon. While she and Raymond joined Temple Israel, a Conservative congregation, and sent all four of their children to Hebrew School, the pair attended services infrequently. However, Raymond served as president of the Albany Jewish Community Center, and Sara was a gourmet cook who loved serving multi-course meals and entertaining many people for Jewish holiday dinners.
While most of Sara’s artwork was secular, her Jewish heritage emerges in several paintings, above.
Note: family history has yet to be fact-checked.