Bayla Basch Gutman was a smart, resourceful woman who spent most of her life following the path set by Moshe Meir. She was a member of a well known family in Siemiatycze. Her father had been the head of a Yeshiva there and Moshe Meir was his star pupil. When her husband decided that he was going to America in 1927 she was left behind with five (5) children.In the picture below you see her on the bottom left with her whole family and her husband, Moshe Meir just before he left for the US.
Here you see her as the matriarch of the family once Moshe Meir and Ruth had left for the US.
She managed the household until Moshe Meir got US citizenship and she was able to join him in 1934. Now she finds herself in a new country and she has to organize a household and help Moshe Meir run the shul two floors down from their apartment. The late 30’s brought increasingly bad news from Poland. Two of her children, Chaya and Abraham, and their families were murdered by the Nazis.
In the early 1950’s Moshe Meir decided that he wanted to make a pilot trip to Israel to see whether he would like to settle there. She did not want to move again, but she did and they moved to Israel in November of 1955. The 50’s were hard years in Israel and she once again had to be the new immigrant and adjust to a totally new setting.
Both the family in America and the family in Israel have memories of her as a warm loving intelligent woman.
Seymour has many memories of her….
ROCHELE describing how intelligent she was and how much Moshe Meir relied upon her
How Moshe Meir and Bayla Basch met.
Her practicality
From the narratives above we can see the qualities that characterized Bayla Basch Gutman: intelligence, directness, and most of all emotional intelligence. She was a woman who was forced to adapt to two new cultures, first in the US and then in Israel, so different from her native Siemiatycze. Her flexibility and open-mindedness permitted her to connect and relate to her family in both places. She was more than ninety when she died but she is remembered as young in spirit and mind.
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