Cherna Moskowitz, a leading supporter of Jewish charities and community improvement projects worldwide who with her late husband, Dr. Irving I. Moskowitz, helped expand Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, died in Florida on April 29 at the age of 93.
Cherna Moskowitz was born in 1931 in Wisconsin to parents who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. She met her husband there and they married, after which the couple moved to California. In 1968, they launched the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation, which provides aid and assistance in the wake of international natural disasters, along with numerous other charitable initiatives.
Irving Moskowitz, a physician, businessman and activist born to Jewish immigrants from Poland who lost more than 100 family members in the Holocaust, died at age 88 on June 16, 2016, in Miami, where he and his wife were living.
The couple served as board members for the Zionist Organization of America. Cherna Moskowitz was also heavily involved with education, active with Ariel University, Bar-Ilan University and Hesder Yeshiva of Sderot. Other organizations she supported include Nefesh B’Nefesh and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
“Cherna Moskowitz was an extraordinary Zionist,” Mort Klein, national president of ZOA, said in a statement on Friday. “Her love of the holy land of all of Eretz Yisroel, given to the Jewish people by God almighty, was surpassed only by her love of her fabulous family.”
Klein said along with her husband, Cherna Moskowitz “committed her life to legally securing all of the Jewish people’s eternal city Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria for the Jewish people, and helping the Jewish people in every way she could.”
United Hatzalah released a statement on Friday calling her “one of our greatest friends and supporters.”
The emergency services and first-responder organization in Israel “bid farewell to a woman whose compassion and generosity helped save countless lives across Israel.”
Its founder and president, Eli Beer, said the couple enabled the launch of “the Moskowitz Life Compass System, a lifesaving technology that allows our organization to dispatch the closest volunteer medic to each emergency. This groundbreaking technology has enabled United Hatzalah medics to treat over 6.5 million people to date.”
Yekutiel Ben-Yaakov, a friend of the family and director of the Israel Dog Unit, a nonprofit specializing in working dogs, added: “Few know that Cherna also supported the searching, finding and rescue of many missing people in Israel. In her merit, many lives of missing people in Israel were saved.”
Cherna Moskowitz wrote in a 2009 article in The Jerusalem Post that “this is a part of the Jewish tradition: charity for the poor and reclaiming the land of our country. It was perfectly normal for Irving and me to continue to fulfill these mitzvahs.”
She and her husband are survived by eight children, in addition to dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
