When Ralph Sherman first took the directorship of what in 1966 was called Jewish Family and Children’s Service, it had a professional staff of eight people and a budget of $235,000.
By the time he retired in 1989, the renamed Jewish Family Services had 45 employees, a budget of $1.5 million and a quality volunteer program.
Moreover, “under his leadership, the whole older adult department was developed, the resettlement of Russian refugees was developed amd the exceptional needs program serving developmentally disabled and seriously mentally ill people was developed,” said Elliot Lubar, executive vice president of JFS and Sherman’s protégé and successor.
As Melvin S. Zaret, who had been executive vice president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation during much of Sherman’s tenure at JFS, said, “It was an era of professionalization, and [Sherman] worked at that intensely, so that [the agency] had more skilled people than it ever had before and was able to serve people with more complicated social and emotional problems than had been true in the past.”
Sherman, who died of lung cancer on Jan. 16 at age 77, spoke of his work at JFS with pride even shortly before his death. Lubar said that about three weeks before Sherman died, Lubar taped an oral history interview with him, during which “two times he got emotional talking about his career.”
The first, said Lubar, was when Sherman spoke about “watching the staff he hired develop and mature and gradually take over the agency.” The second was the way the agency would act “like a family in times of troubles and simchas.”
In addition, Sherman told The Chronicle in 1989 that while JFS serves non-Jews as well as Jews, the Jewish character of the agency developed during his leadership.
This development expressed itself in ways from providing Judaica in the JFS waiting room to cooperating with the Milwaukee Jewish Federation on the Jewish Chaplaincy Program.
“I began to become conscious of the fact that the Jewish character of the agency was important to the Jewish community and to the clientele,” Sherman said in 1989. “And my own Jewish identity intensified over the years along with that of the agency.”
His daughter, Nancy (James) Stillman, confirmed this. Her two children attend the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, and “we did more and more holidays as the kids went to school. [And] as their grandparents are a huge part of their lives, so they started doing more and more.”
Even after his retirement, Sherman continued to work as a consultant at JFS and for such general community organizations as the Boys and Girls Clubs. He also, according to Lubar, worked as consultant to the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization and the Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. He also served on the board of Congregation Sinai.
Her father also felt deeply connected to Israel, Stillman said. He traveled there five times, including a stint teaching at Haifa University. He “supported it monetarily and whenever there were rallies, if he could go, he went,” she said.
Yet he made all these changes in his life and in his agency while having a personality that he himself described as “very deliberate. By character, I am not an impulsive person.” He mused that at least some of his caution in financial matters may have come from his having grown up during the Great Depression.
Sherman was born to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in St. Louis. He studied at the University of Missouri in Columbia and earned his master of social work degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
He worked in Illinois for seven years before becoming executive director of Lad Lake Inc., a residential treatment center for boys in Dousman. From there, he came to JFS.
In addition to his Milwaukee daughter, Sherman is survived by his wife of 53 years, Doris Jean “Doje” Sherman; daughter Lori (Gregory Coppa) Sherman-Coppa of New York; son Mark (Kazuko) Sherman of McClean, Va.; sister Ruth Solomkin of Hartford, Conn.; brothers Norman Sherman of Florida and Morris Sherman of St. Louis; and six grandchildren.
Stillman also said that her father’s caring spirit extended to her two stepchildren, Amy (Scott) Anderson and Kim Stillman, and that it was characteristic of him that “he included them in all holidays” and all other parts of the family’s life.
Funeral services were held Jan. 19 at Congregation Sinai, with Rabbi Jay R. Brickman officiating. Burial was in Spring Hill Cemetery.
The family suggests memorial contributions to Jewish Family Services, Congregation Sinai or the Milwaukee Jewish Day School.
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