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Miriam Rosen

Miriam “Miri” Rosen was a Deaf Polish Ashkenazi Jewish Holocaust child survivor, seamstress, and longtime member of Baltimore’s Jewish Deaf community. Born while her family was in hiding in Warsaw in 1944, she reached the United States through a postwar rescue route and was adopted by a Deaf Jewish family in Boston. American Sign Language became her first full language in early childhood. She later attended the New York School for the Deaf, where she met Saul Rosen, and they built a seventy-nine-year marriage and an ASL-using Jewish household in Baltimore.

Early Life and Rescue

Miri was born in the spring of 1944 while her Jewish family was in hiding in occupied Warsaw. She was not born inside the Warsaw Ghetto, which had been destroyed the previous year. The names of her biological parents were not recovered, and they did not survive the Holocaust.

The surviving family account traced Miri’s rescue through the Polish Council to Aid Jews, commonly known as Żegota. After Warsaw, she passed through a chain of caregivers and postwar Jewish relief contacts that included Łódź and a Bricha-adjacent refugee route. She arrived in Boston in late 1946 at approximately two and a half years old.

Miri was adopted by Hannah and Ira Goldfarb, a Deaf Jewish couple in Dorchester whose families came from Polish Ashkenazi communities. She arrived underweight and without a full signed or spoken language. The Goldfarbs signed to her continuously, cared for her through the effects of repeated caregiver disruption, and gave her stable access to Deaf community life. ASL became Miri’s first full language; she was fluent by approximately three and a half. Her acquisition began too late to describe her as a signer from infancy, but it occurred early enough that ASL shaped the rest of her childhood and adult life.

Education and Work

Miri entered the New York School for the Deaf at five. She met Saul there in the 1958–1959 school year, when both were fourteen, and graduated in 1962.

After graduation, Miri trained as a seamstress with a Jewish tailor in Manhattan. She moved to Baltimore with Saul in 1966 and worked full-time at a Jewish tailor shop specializing in suits and custom menswear until 1985. She continued part-time until progressive retinitis pigmentosa made fine needlework unsafe around age sixty.

Marriage and Family

Main article: Saul and Miri Rosen

Miri and Saul married in October 1965 and moved to Mt. Washington the following year. They raised their only child, Annie, in an ASL-using household and remained closely involved with Annie, Robbie, and their grandchildren.

Miri shared family stories with Lindsay and taught both twins to bake. Her recipes passed principally to Leslie, while her cream-colored mixing bowl later passed to Lindsay. With RJ, she shared the experience of progressive deafblindness and began learning Protactile communication after his 2012 diagnosis.

Cultural and Community Life

Miri joined the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore in 1966 and became one of the community’s longstanding social anchors. Her household maintained Shabbat dinners, challah baking, high-holiday observance, and yahrzeit remembrance. She worked grief and care through domestic routines: soup for sick neighbors, cookies for children, and Friday challah made in the same chipped mixing bowl she had inherited from Hannah.

Miri did not return to Poland. She understood remembrance through the life her family rebuilt in Boston and Baltimore rather than through visiting the place where her biological family had been destroyed.

Communication and Access

Miri used ASL as her primary face-to-face language from early childhood. Her signing was compact, measured, and precise. She also read and wrote English but did not use speech as a regular communication mode.

Miri was profoundly Deaf from birth and developed night blindness and progressive peripheral-vision loss in adulthood. For decades, clinicians treated the retinal disease and congenital deafness as unrelated. After RJ was diagnosed with USH1F-linked Usher syndrome in 2012, genetic testing confirmed that Miri also had Usher syndrome type I, although hers was caused by a different Usher-related gene. She did not carry the family USH1F variant that passed from Saul through Annie to RJ.

Miri learned braille in the 1950s in anticipation of further vision loss and began using refreshable braille technology in the 1970s. She used a white cane from her sixties. She began learning Protactile after RJ’s diagnosis in 2012, used it increasingly as her visual field narrowed, and relied on it as a primary communication method by her late eighties.

Her medical history also included a difficult pregnancy with Annie, a 1991 hysterectomy for fibroids, mild cardiac arrhythmia beginning in her sixties, and cataract surgery in 2018.

Physical Characteristics and Personal Effects

Miri stood approximately five feet two inches and had a small, round frame, warm olive skin, and dark brown hair that silvered from her forties and was fully silver-white by her seventies. She usually wore it in a long braid or low bun. Her small, quick hands reflected decades of sewing, baking, and compact signing; a white scar crossed the pad of her left index finger from a 1974 sewing accident.

She dressed in practical house dresses, cardigans, modest Shabbat and holiday clothing, and sensible shoes. She wore a small gold Star of David that Hannah had given her and kept her adoptive father’s silver kiddush cup in the household’s Friday ritual.

Death

Saul died at home in October 2044. Miri remained with Annie and the rest of the family for approximately thirty-six hours, sleeping with Saul’s pocket watch in her hand. She then died in her sleep at the Whitaker-Rosen home. A physician recorded acute grief-related cardiac failure, with takotsubo cardiomyopathy treated as the presumed mechanism rather than a diagnosis proven through hospitalization or autopsy.

The Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore held a joint memorial for Saul and Miri. Approximately three hundred people attended, and the eulogies lasted three hours.

Memorable Quotes

“It has a name now. It had one all along. I just didn’t know.”

Miri signed this to Annie on the evening her Usher diagnosis was confirmed.

“You are not alone. I know this road. I will walk it with you.”

Miri signed this on RJ’s hand after his infant Usher diagnosis.

“I’m not sad. I’m just finished. Tell them I was grateful. Tell them I loved them.”

Miri signed this to Annie on the afternoon before her death.

“I got a hundred years. Don’t cry too much. Make challah.”

Miri signed this to her grandchildren on her final afternoon.

Characters Supporting Characters Deceased Characters Deaf Characters Jewish Characters Ashkenazi Characters Polish Characters Disabled Characters ASL Users