Feature story - profile

Foremothers Honored

By Gary Tischler

MAY 2008

(Image) From left to right Mary Frances Berry,  Edith Fierst,  Connie Morella and Marion Ein Lewin. Photo credit goes to Connie Reider

On the surface, The National Research Center for Women and Families doesn’t appear to be a name that could inspire inspiration, dedication and courage.

Nor does its mission description quite prepare you for the individuality, the record of achievement, the rich lives of accomplishment and the pioneering spirit of the five women the NRC honored at its 2008 Foremother Awards Luncheon at the Cosmos Club, appropriately just before Mother’s Day.

What brochures and position papers don’t tell you is how much has been accomplished by remarkable women pioneers in a host of issues. The NRC honors them as “foremothers” each year. That’s what the luncheon was for, to honor “foremothers” or pioneering  women  who made effective use of their talents and made the world a better place for women, children and families.

Women like Mary Frances Berry, former chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Women like Edith Fierst, a prominent attorney who looked out for the financial security of women and their social security and pension rights.

Women like Marion Ein Lewin, who provided leadership in training help care professionals from doctors to nurses to improve the shaping of health care policies.

Women like Connie Morella, a long-time former Maryland Congresswoman who  gave bi-partisanship  a good name working  on women and family issues on both sides of the aisle.

Women like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the Founder and Honorary Chair of Special Olympics International.

“These women led the way for all of us,” Katharine Weymouth, the new publisher of Washington Post Media and granddaughter of Katharine Graham, said. “We stand in awe of them and we honor them. They were and continue to be a real inspiration to all of us.”

Mary Frances Berry still appeared to have a lot of fire in her. Appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by President Jimmy Carter, she was fired by President Reagan when she criticized his civil rights policy, and was later re-instated. President Bill Clinton made her Chairperson of the Commission.

Fierst labored hard and long as an attorney in the field of labor rights, social security and income security. She did pioneering work in helping women to receive equal social security payments and accessing pensions.

Morella in her tenure as a Republican Maryland congresswoman worked with Democrats and Republicans in Congress where she served eight terms. She was co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for Women’s issues. She ruefully remembered first coming to Washington and Capitol Hill where she was routinely mistaken for a staffer by male members of the house upon arrival.

Shriver, who could not attend the luncheon, was the founder of the Special Olympics and continues to be its Honorary Chairman. “Mom,” Tim Shriver, her son who heads Special Olympics now said, “believed that everyone should be able to compete, to take part in all parts of society. She held that belief when it was not popular to hold it.”

Marion Ein Lewin brought a special back story. She, and her twin brother, are holocaust survivors, a fact, a history that led her directly to how she conducted her life in America.

“For many years, I have not spoken about this,” she said. “But the most important part is this: I felt, and still feel, so incredibly grateful to have survived ... I feel grateful to all the opportunities I have had here in the United States. My experience  is part of my belief that I have always felt that I must do something to make the lives of other people better.”

She describes her survival as “a miracle.”  “There is no other way to describe it.” She spoke about her experience for the first time last year in a speech at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. 

Her family came to Holland in the 1930s to escape the rise of Nazism, but in 1940, Hitler invaded and eventually, when she was five years old, her family was rounded up and taken to Westerbork, where Jews were being held under horrible conditions prior to being transported (often to extermination camps, by train).  “We arrived in the summer of 1943,” she wrote. “I remember the unspeakable filth, the mud and the cold.” She recalls the fear of the weekly transports. Eventually, her family was sent  in cattle cars to  Bergen Belsen, a slave labor camp which few people survived. By 1945, with the war ending, she and her family were put on a train that came to be called the “lost train” which ended up being liberated by Russians.

Somehow, the family survived, and eventually made its way to the United States in 1947.

She has been described as a “guiding light and mentor” for her work in training health care professionals to assume leadership roles in federal health care policy and programs. She was a senior staff officer at the Institute of National Academies where she directed the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship Program training doctors, nurses and other health professionals to work on and guide health policy on Capitol Hill.

She is the mother of Georgetowner and Washington entrepreneur Marc Ein.