Santa Rosa feminist, teacher Sylvia Sucher dies at 103

Learning never stopped for Sylvia Sucher, nor did teaching. The Brooklyn native, whose 104th birthday would have come next month, retired from the classroom long ago but continued the journey of education though avenues that included her pioneer role in the Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide at Sonoma State University.

“Many people considered her a mother figure,” said her daughter, Sahib-Amar Khalsa of Richmond. She said her mother wondered aloud not long ago why she was still alive when she was 103 and unable to do much for herself, in large degree because of the polio that partially disabled her at age 4.

Recalled Khalsa, “I told her, ‘Mom, you're still inspiring people, that's why you're here.'”

Sucher, a feminist, avid reader and longtime patron of the Santa Rosa Symphony, died Sunday at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

Alert, engaged and funny to the end, she remarked shortly before her death that as much as she would love to see a woman elected president she'd prefer Bernie Sanders this time around. “After all,” she said, “he's Jewish.”

Sucher was 70 years old, widowed and retired from teaching when she moved from New York State to Sonoma County in 1982 to be closer to her two daughters. She'd overcome many hardships and challenges when her elder daughter, Elizabeth Carlson, who'd worked more than two decades at Santa Rosa Junior College in positions that included assistant dean of arts, culture and communication, died of cancer in 2000.

As she'd done when polio deprived her of the use of her left arm and hand, and when she'd encountered anti-Jewish discrimination as she sought to launch her teaching career, and when her physicist husband, Max Sucher, died nearly 40 years ago, she persevered.

“The living have to live,” Sucher once declared.

Said friend Susan Miller of Santa Rosa, “She didn't kvetch. She made the most of what she had.”

Daughter Khalsa grew up hearing from her mother variations of, “Do what you have to do and don't complain about it.”

“She had an outlook on life that really served her well,” Khalsa said. “When adversity comes you just meet the challenge and go beyond and keep going, and don't let it paralyze you.”

Sucher was born Sylvia Gross in Brooklyn on July 13, 1912. When polio crippled one arm and hobbled her gait, her mother forbade self-pity and assured her repeatedly that she still could do whatever she set out to do.

For women to receive higher education was rare when Gross enrolled at Brooklyn College. There she was presented the opportunity to run the small campus bookstore. She recounted many years later being asked to hire on at the store a young man who'd graduated summa cum laude in physics but hadn't been able to find work in his field.

He was Max Sucher. They married after discovering a mutual passion for literature, classical music and poetry. They settled and began a family in Levittown, on Long Island.

Sylvia Sucher went to work teaching English and speech to high-school students. Her husband taught physics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.

Their first-born, Elizabeth, followed them into education and in 1974 began teaching at SRJC.

Max Sucher died in 1978. Four years later, his widow moved to Santa Rosa to be closer both to her elder daughter and to Khalsa, who lives in Richmond.

Sylvia Sucher immersed herself in Sonoma County and its culture and issues. She joined Congregation Beth Ami and the Jewish Community Center's Friendship Circle.

She also became an original member of the alliance at Sonoma State University that works to honor and preserve the memory of genocide victims, survivors and rescuers. Sucher said in 2003, the year she turned 90, that the program sought to prevent genocide by looking beyond Hitler's holocaust.

“It's a lesson that needs to be learned over and over again,” she said. “It's not taught as a Jewish question; it is looked at as a general problem.”

Daughter Khalsa said the lifelong teacher in her mother was fully activated when she insisted to late friend and holocaust survivor Betty Kale that she end her silence and begin to speak about what she endured. Sucher even drove Kale and Lillian Judd, a holocaust survivor who died earlier this month, to schools for presentations on the genocide of World War II.

Khalsa said Kale told her mother, “Sylvia, you gave me back my voice.”

For the past four years, Sucher lived in the care of Chuck and Maria Cabanero at their Terra Linda nursing home in Santa Rosa.

In addition to her daughter in Richmond, Sucher is survived by sister Rosalie Gabel of Boston, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Services are at 1 p.m. Wed., June 29, at the Santa Rosa Memorial Park chapel.

Donations may be made to The Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, c/o Sonoma State University, 1801 E. Cotati Avenue, Rohnert Park, 94928.