A 26-year-old Jewish woman was murdered on her way home from synagogue services this week. Mrs. Binyamina Silverman (Gourgey) was returning to her Briarwood home after attending a Saturday night ‘havdola’ service at a Brooklyn synagogue when she was attacked and stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. Police said there was no apparent motive for the attack, since Mrs. Silverman was neither robbed nor sexually molested. Sylvia Weller, a neighbor of the Silvermans’, said she had always thought of the neighborhood as “pretty safe...I never believed something like this could happen here, but it did.”
Comment from Ellen: The murder of Bonnie, as we called her when we were young, though she later used her Hebrew name Binyamina, was a dreadful tragedy. She was married to Charles Gourgey, a gifted man working at the time for Bell Labs, whose life took a different path after this senseless bolt from the blue. His bio on Amazon.com reads:
Charles Gourgey, PhD, LCAT, MT-BC, is a board certified and New York State licensed music therapist. He has over 20 years of experience working in hospices and nursing homes, and for 10 years was Music Therapist for Cabrini Hospice in New York City. He has published articles on psychology and religion in various journals, notably Modern Psychotherapy, Hospice Magazine, Spiritual Life, Clergy Journal, Pulpit Digest, Fellowship in Prayer, and Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health. (Charlie later remarried.)
It's painful that when people died before the advent of Google and social media it's so difficult to find information about them on line. Bonnie was an artist. One woman - Sherri Helene Roberts - created a quilt in her honor and provided some information about Bonnie while explaining her piece of art:
IN HONOR AND MEMORY OF BINYAMINA SILVERMAN / 1953-1980 / Binyamina was born to Sanford and Sonya Silverman in South Euclid, Ohio, U.S.A. She was the second of six daughters. / I have felt compelled to honor my friend because of her gifts to me of joy, love, and caring. / As teens we shared the energy of Israeli dance and song. To top off those evenings, we would sample the freshly baked sweets and bagels at Lox and Mandel's Kosher Bakery. These were the joys. / Her caring helped me to cope with a tumultuous adolescence, showing me that I was important and valuable after all. / Biny's love of beauty surfaced during high school when she prepared artwork for the senior art show at Charles F. Brush High School in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Then, during college in Chicago, she concentrated on skills such as silk screening, paper cutting, embroidery, and other needlework. / After she married Charlie Gourgey and moved to Queens, New York, her works were displayed in both St. Louis and New York City. They portrayed her devotion to Judaism and her mastery of traditional art forms. / To Biny: '...and we ourselves shall be loved for a while [sic] and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.' -- Thornton Wilder.
Contributor's Description To properly memorialize Biny, I have chosen counted cross-stitch for the lettering and quilting for the Star of David in her triangle. The upper half of the star signifies her life, while the bottom, dark half portends her death.
Data Sources File card; documentation information, dated August 2, 1981; cataloguer's report, 1996; quilt.
So am I understanding this correctly, Ellen? This horrific unfathomable event took place way back in 1980? I am totally stunned. Being such a thoughtful, caring, concerned, involved, unafraid to speak your mind individual that you are, leave it to you to be the one to raise our consciousness over this tragedy. I could go on and on extolling your virtues, and while I'm guessing the word "mensch" has a built in masculine connotation attached to it, and while I'm also unaware of any feminine equivalent to the word, rather than referring to you as a "menschette" I will throw caution to the wind by daring to say that you are also quite the mensch. A true and loyal mensch of a friend to those you dearly love. May Bonnie Rest In Peace and be held close to G-d..
Yes. I don't know about mensch. Though I was living in NYC at the time, I did go to the funeral in Cleveland. Just have to shake my head when I think of it. All the cars near their house on a beautiful day. And the family and young husband shoveling dirt onto the coffin. Absolutely sickening. Beyond senseless.
Ellen, This is classmate Sherri Roberts(Grossman).I appreciate your posting that notice about Binyamina. We stayed close,caring friends until her death. I was overwhelmed by her loss and was so sad that I could not attend her funeral. I felt compelled to honor her with my artwork as part of the International Honors Quilt, housed at the University of Louis.
"The International Honor Quilt (IHQ) is a collaborative, grassroots feminist art project initiated by Judy Chicago in 1980 “to extend the spirit of The Dinner Party” on its tour of venues throughout North America, Europe and Australia. It consists of a collection of 539 individual quilts that can be assembled into a multi-sectional, monumental work of art. The panels, which utilize a wide variety of materials and techniques, have been made by different women or groups honoring and addressing individually selected women, women’s organizations or women’s issues, to expand the number of women honored by Chicago’s The Dinner Party.
The IHQ was gifted to the University of Louisville."
Ellen Freilich
Woman Is Murdered Following Services
By RANDY MEDOFF BRIARWOOD, N Y. -
A 26-year-old Jewish woman was murdered on her way home from synagogue services this week. Mrs. Binyamina Silverman (Gourgey) was returning to her Briarwood home after attending a Saturday night ‘havdola’ service at a Brooklyn synagogue when she was attacked and stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. Police said there was no apparent motive for the attack, since Mrs. Silverman was neither robbed nor sexually molested. Sylvia Weller, a neighbor of the Silvermans’, said she had always thought of the neighborhood as “pretty safe...I never believed something like this could happen here, but it did.”
Comment from Ellen: The murder of Bonnie, as we called her when we were young, though she later used her Hebrew name Binyamina, was a dreadful tragedy. She was married to Charles Gourgey, a gifted man working at the time for Bell Labs, whose life took a different path after this senseless bolt from the blue. His bio on Amazon.com reads:
Charles Gourgey, PhD, LCAT, MT-BC, is a board certified and New York State licensed music therapist. He has over 20 years of experience working in hospices and nursing homes, and for 10 years was Music Therapist for Cabrini Hospice in New York City. He has published articles on psychology and religion in various journals, notably Modern Psychotherapy, Hospice Magazine, Spiritual Life, Clergy Journal, Pulpit Digest, Fellowship in Prayer, and Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health. (Charlie later remarried.)
It's painful that when people died before the advent of Google and social media it's so difficult to find information about them on line. Bonnie was an artist. One woman - Sherri Helene Roberts - created a quilt in her honor and provided some information about Bonnie while explaining her piece of art:
IN HONOR AND MEMORY OF BINYAMINA SILVERMAN / 1953-1980 / Binyamina was born to Sanford and Sonya Silverman in South Euclid, Ohio, U.S.A. She was the second of six daughters. / I have felt compelled to honor my friend because of her gifts to me of joy, love, and caring. / As teens we shared the energy of Israeli dance and song. To top off those evenings, we would sample the freshly baked sweets and bagels at Lox and Mandel's Kosher Bakery. These were the joys. / Her caring helped me to cope with a tumultuous adolescence, showing me that I was important and valuable after all. / Biny's love of beauty surfaced during high school when she prepared artwork for the senior art show at Charles F. Brush High School in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Then, during college in Chicago, she concentrated on skills such as silk screening, paper cutting, embroidery, and other needlework. / After she married Charlie Gourgey and moved to Queens, New York, her works were displayed in both St. Louis and New York City. They portrayed her devotion to Judaism and her mastery of traditional art forms. / To Biny: '...and we ourselves shall be loved for a while [sic] and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.' -- Thornton Wilder.
Contributor's Description To properly memorialize Biny, I have chosen counted cross-stitch for the lettering and quilting for the Star of David in her triangle. The upper half of the star signifies her life, while the bottom, dark half portends her death.
Data Sources File card; documentation information, dated August 2, 1981; cataloguer's report, 1996; quilt.
Brian Peiper
So am I understanding this correctly, Ellen? This horrific unfathomable event took place way back in 1980? I am totally stunned. Being such a thoughtful, caring, concerned, involved, unafraid to speak your mind individual that you are, leave it to you to be the one to raise our consciousness over this tragedy. I could go on and on extolling your virtues, and while I'm guessing the word "mensch" has a built in masculine connotation attached to it, and while I'm also unaware of any feminine equivalent to the word, rather than referring to you as a "menschette" I will throw caution to the wind by daring to say that you are also quite the mensch. A true and loyal mensch of a friend to those you dearly love. May Bonnie Rest In Peace and be held close to G-d..
Ellen Freilich
Yes. I don't know about mensch. Though I was living in NYC at the time, I did go to the funeral in Cleveland. Just have to shake my head when I think of it. All the cars near their house on a beautiful day. And the family and young husband shoveling dirt onto the coffin. Absolutely sickening. Beyond senseless.
Sherri Grossman (Roberts)
Ellen, This is classmate Sherri Roberts(Grossman).I appreciate your posting that notice about Binyamina. We stayed close,caring friends until her death. I was overwhelmed by her loss and was so sad that I could not attend her funeral. I felt compelled to honor her with my artwork as part of the International Honors Quilt, housed at the University of Louis."The International Honor Quilt (IHQ) is a collaborative, grassroots feminist art project initiated by Judy Chicago in 1980 “to extend the spirit of The Dinner Party” on its tour of venues throughout North America, Europe and Australia. It consists of a collection of 539 individual quilts that can be assembled into a multi-sectional, monumental work of art. The panels, which utilize a wide variety of materials and techniques, have been made by different women or groups honoring and addressing individually selected women, women’s organizations or women’s issues, to expand the number of women honored by Chicago’s The Dinner Party.
The IHQ was gifted to the University of Louisville."