For most of her life, Henrietta Heiman Kuhn shared her love of literature with those from her students at San Francisco’s Balboa High School to her fellow Rossmoor seniors. The seniors, she found, were often more receptive students.
“Balboa was kind of a rough school and some of those teenagers weren’t too into Shakespearean literature,” recalled longtime friend Connie Carlson. “She had a tremendous love of literature. She was an excellent analyst.”
Kuhn, a teacher, Jewish community volunteer and former executive director of the American Jewish Congress’ San Francisco office, died Dec. 24, following an auto accident. She was 88.
Friends and relatives remember Kuhn as a strong, outspoken and independent woman who wasn’t afraid to say what she thought.
When Kuhn served as the president of the West Portal Parent-Teacher Association during the height of the McCarthy years, for example, a rumor began spreading that two of the mothers on the board were communists.
Kuhn, however, angrily rebuked the rumors, labeling them a “witch hunt” and incurring no small degree of acrimony.
“She had a certain amount of opposition, but she didn’t equivocate on this at all,” said Carlson. “I thought that was very typical of her to get up there and say that.”
After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in the 1940s, Kuhn got her teaching credential at San Francisco State and taught for several years before marrying Harold “Hack” Kuhn, the brother of longtime San Francisco Jewish community leader Marshall Kuhn.
After Henrietta and Harold divorced in 1957, she went back to work, and her first job was a stint with the AJCongress. Kuhn also served as president of the San Francisco chapter of Hadassah and on the boards for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and the Homewood Terrace orphanage. Kuhn grew up attending San Francisco Reform Congregation Sherith Israel, where she also taught Sunday school for a time.
“She didn’t stay at home raising us,” recalled son Michael Kuhn, who lives in Moraga. “She was out doing all these things. She did an awful lot of work with the Jewish community.”
In the 1970s Kuhn moved from her native San Francisco to San Mateo, and, in 1984, relocated across the bay to Rossmoor in Walnut Creek, not far from her son Michael and grandchildren.
Kuhn continued to teach high school-level English in Walnut Creek and led a literature class with her fellow Rossmoor seniors into her late 80s.
“She was an extremely intelligent, educated and involved person,” recalled Michael Kuhn. “I saw her almost every day.”
In addition to Michael, Kuhn is survived by sons Jeffrey of Walnut Creek and Jonathan of Haifa as well as five grandchildren.