Ruth Gruber, A Woman of Valor

Born in Brooklyn in 1911 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Gruber became the youngest person to earn a doctorate (at the time) when she graduated from the University of Cologne in Germany at age 20.

As a Guggenheim fellow, Gruber became the first foreign journalist to visit the Soviet Arctic, where she studied the experiences of women living under fascist and communist regimes. As an employee of the US Interior Department, Gruber reported on conditions in the Alaskan frontier.

Perhaps her most notable accomplishment, however, might have been Gruber’s 1944 secret assignment to accompany 1000 Jewish refugees from Italy to the United States. According to her obituary in the Washington Post, “Aboard the ship, Dr. Gruber assumed the only rank that commands more respect than general: that of a mother. The refugees, some of them too old to walk, actually called her “Mother Ruth.” Fluent in German and Yiddish, she organized English lessons, cared for the seasick and taught at least one refugee her first English song — “You Are My Sunshine.”

The refugees were sent to a camp in Oswego, NY, and Gruber was instrumental in convincing President Harry Truman to allow them to stay in the United States.

Just three years later, Gruber was back across the world, camera in hand, when the Exodus - a ship carrying 4,000 Holocaust survivors and displaced persons - was refused entry to Palestine. And in 1984, when Gruber was in her 70’s, she was the only foreign correspondent present at Operation Moses, the covert evacuation of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan.

Gruber died in 2016 at the age of 105. Over the course of her life, Ruth Gruber documented some of the most worked as a journalist, photographer, author, humanitarian, and United States government official. She truly was a woman of valor, and we are honored to share her story with the PJ Our Way community.