Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel, a clinical social worker and long-time New Haven resident, died Saturday at home. She was 88 years old, and had lung cancer.
Irm, as she was widely known, Wessel was born in Kassel, Germany, on Nov. 12, 1925. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, her parents, Louis and Grete Kaufmann Rosenzweig, sent her to England on the Kindertransport, which brought nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany and neighboring countries to safety.
When her boat docked in England at 6:30 a.m. on a cold morning, a group of ladies handed all the children metal cups of English tea and dry biscuits. In Irm’s words, “I don’t remember much, but it hit me at that moment that there must be a better way to help kids who were used to hot cocoa and freshly baked hard rolls. I think this was the start of my becoming a social worker.”
It was a calling that lasted for more than 75 years, and a life that touched uncounted numbers of clients at Family Counseling of Greater New Haven, scores of friends for whom she was a constant confidante and counselor, a community that she sought tirelessly to change for the better and her loving family. After a 19-month separation, Wessel was reunited with her parents in 1940 in New York, sheltered by the American Friends Service Committee in Scattergood, Iowa, and eventually resettled in Eureka, Illinois, through the generosity of the members of the Eureka Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Irm attended Eureka College on a full scholarship, and graduated in 1947. She and another Eureka alumnus, Ronald Reagan, both received alumni awards of merit on the 50th anniversary of Reagan’s graduation. She later earned a Master’s in Social Work at Smith College School of Social Work, a degree of which she was very proud and an institution to which she was very loyal. In 2004, Smith recognized her with the Day-Garrett Award for distinguished service to the school and the profession.
After a 10-year break from the workforce to be at home with her four children, Wessel returned to the practice of clinical social work in 1964 at Family Counseling of Greater New Haven, where she was on the staff for nearly 40 years. During that time, she served as president of the AFSCME Local 39 and was a trustee of the New Haven Central Labor Council. She also was active in several professional organizations, including the Connecticut Society for Clinical Social Work and the Council on Social Work Education and in various local community organizations including Aging at Home, the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen, the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project and the Greater New Haven Labor History Association.
“In every conceivable way,” her social work colleagues, Barbara Berger and Ann Segal, write in a 2003 profile published in Clinical Social Work Journal, “has brought strength to those needing representation, increasing their power to be heard and effective. To ‘never to let it happen again,’ to mediate oppression when it does happen and to relieve the suffering of others are the driving forces in Irm’s life.”
Wessel is survived by her husband, Morris Wessel, a retired pediatrician, whom she first encountered when he was riding a bicycle down the corridors of the Mayo Clinic where they were both working. After a long engagement, they were married on June 1, 1952, at the Jewish Museum in New York, where her uncle was a curator They lived in New Haven for their entire marriage, nearly all of that time in the same house in Westville.
Irmgard Wessel is also survived by her their children – David of Washington, D.C.; Bruce of Santa Monica, Calif.; Paul of New Haven, and Lois of Takoma Park, Md. – and eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Her brother, Ernst Rosenzweig, died in 2011.
Funeral services will be held at the Robert E. Shure Funeral Home, 543 George Street, New Haven, on Monday at 11 a.m. Internment will follow at B’Nai Jacob Memorial Park, Wintergreen Avenue, New Haven. The period of mourning will be private. Contributions, in lieu of flowers, may be made to the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, or the Morris and Irmgard Wessel Fund at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, which recognizes unsung heroes who are creatively and compassionately serving New Haven area families.