Ruth Sherbok wasn’t a musician, but some of her best friends were.
Sherbok, who died Oct. 24 at 90, was an early supporter of the Denver (now Colorado) Symphony Orchestra in the 1940s and 1950s when the orchestra couldn’t afford to entertain its guests.
So Sherbok and her husband, the late Dr. Bernard Sherbok, opened their Park Hill home after concerts to entertain longtime conductor Saul Caston and the players.
Her son, Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok, said by telephone from Wales he can still remember as a kid meeting performers such as pianist Glenn Gould.
Ruth Sherbok supported a lot of causes in Denver, the city she loved, her son said, including the League of Women Voters, Rose Hospital, Temple Emanuel and the Denver Public Library.
“She was proud to be an American and a Jew,” her son said. “She believed completely in the American dream.”
Sherbok belonged to a study group – eight women who got together to study everything from the works of historian Will Durant to Greek tragedies, said longtime friend Ruth Stark of Denver.
Sherbok loved being a homemaker as well as being a community enthusiast, her son said.
“She was very cross when Betty Friedan wrote ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ a book that criticized her entire way of life,” her son said. “My mother felt very emancipated and had a life outside the home.”
A short woman with fiery red hair, Sherbok was “gregarious, jolly, witty and had a lot of friends,” said Cohn-Sherbok, a Judaism professor at the University of Wales.
“Everyone loved her,” Stark said. “She had a way of making everyone feel special.”
Sherbok was a high-energy volunteer who managed to get other people into causes.
“She was sort of like a very friendly sheepdog who could herd people into various activities,” her son said.
Sherbok also was a watercolorist, and her abstract-impressionist work was exhibited in one-woman shows. One of her paintings hangs in a building at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Some of her friends “were shocked” at the abstract paintings Sherbok did of them, Cohn-Sherbok said.
She was an avid exerciser, going to the gym every day at 7 a.m., usually the time her husband, who took up piano at age 50, practiced, said her son, laughing.
Ruth Goldstein was born May 5, 1916, in Denver, graduated from Manual High School and the University of Denver, where she majored in drama.
She met Bernard Sherbok, an orthopedic surgeon, at a Sabbath evening meal and decided on the spot, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” They did so in 1938. He died in 2002.
In addition to her son, Sherbok is survived by her daughter-in-law, Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at vculver@denverpost.com or 303-954-1223.
