Eighty-three year old Ann Burger and her 13-year-old granddaughter, Shoshana (Shoshi) Kupferman, have a lot in common. Both are short, both are artistic, both have a twinkle in their eyes — and both volunteer at the Jewish Home in San Francisco.
Burger said she was 5 feet tall at her best and has lost a few inches. Kupferman is almost as tall now and is working hard to keep up with her grandmother as a volunteer.
Burger has been volunteering at the Jewish Home for 30 years. Her granddaughter started last year as one of the requirements for her bat mitzvah at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. That obligation was fulfilled in February, but the teen has been accompanying her grandmother to the Home on Tuesday mornings during the summer.
Burger is a seamstress who started sewing when her children were young. “I made dresses for my daughter and patched and mended my son’s pants,” she said. Now she alters and mends clothes for the Home’s residents.
“A hem here, a pocket there. Mostly I let clothes out — just once in awhile I take something in a bit,” she said laughing. On the rare occasions when Burger does not have individual “customers,” she sews aprons for the resident artists and makes carryall bags for them to hang over walkers.
Burger enjoys working with residents who still care about appearance and how their clothes look. Many are Russian-born, and though language can be a problem, the German-born Burger said they have the shared values of generation and immigration. And there’s a translator if things get difficult.
Burger noted that she is older than many of her customers. “They show me their arthritic hands and I show them mine,” she said.
Kupferman seems cut of the same cloth and in the same fashion. She works in the art room, which just happens to be where the sewing machine is located.
“Ann performs miracles,” said the Home’s art director, Gary Tanner. She makes gorgeous clothes out of old shmatas. And Shoshi helps the residents with their ceramic projects. Shoshi is a great resource for the residents and they’ll miss her when she goes back to school.”
A student at Hoover Middle School in San Francisco, Kupferman also plays the violin and likes tap and jazz dance.
With young, non-arthritic hands, she can help residents fashion small clay animals — an activity they greatly enjoy. “I have some special friends there,” she said. “They pat me on my head and call me pet names in Russian.”
For her grandmother, serving others has been a lifelong endeavor. Growing up in Berlin, Burger was trained there as an infant and children’s nurse. In 1938, she was fortunate to find a position working for a Jewish family in Sweden, where she remained throughout the war. Her parents fled Germany in 1941 and later joined their only daughter who moved to San Francisco in 1949.
Burger became acquainted with the Jewish Home when her mother resided there for a short time before her death in 1970. “It took me three years to go back, but I1ve been going ever since,” she said.
“Like clockwork,” according to Carole Burns, director of volunteer services. “She has a real following of loyal residents who know her schedule. She’s a very caring woman, and Shoshi is following her example.”
Burger takes in work for two hours in the morning and stays until she is finished.
With her grandmother as the model, Kupferman also helps out at the West Portal branch of the San Francisco Public Library and takes her mother’s homemade challah to a bed-ridden neighbor once a week.
The welcome mat at the Burger home reads: “Grandchildren Spoiled Here.” Maybe so, but this seamstress grandmother doesn’t just spoil them. She has created a pattern of community service work to follow. And neither she nor Kupferman has dropped a stitch.