Helen Rosen

Helen Rosen, of West Hartford, CT, died on the morning of April 13, 2026 at Hartford Hospital, with her son David by her side. She was 90 years old.

A true child of the Great Depression, Helen Julia Weiss grew up in modest means. Her dad, Sidney, was a truant officer, walking long beats in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before rising to the position of supervisor. Her mom, Sylvia (Sue), was secretary at a series of public schools; yes, Sue and Sid met on the job. Although they never owned their own house, they managed to be comfortable. One house they rented, on Ludlam Place, just happened to be around the corner from Ebbets Field. This was back when baseball players were treated frankly as employees by their teams, with few perks – and Helen vividly remembered such legends as Jackie Robinson and Duke Snyder parking their cars on her block before games. To say that she grew up a Dodgers fan would be an understatement; she never forgave the team, or the game of baseball in general, after they moved to Los Angeles.

Like many of her cousins, Helen went into teaching – a natural career for young women looking to move one step up the professional ladder from their parents. After graduating from Adelphi University, her first job was at an elementary school in East New York, Brooklyn; a couple of positions later, she landed at her last school, IS 99 in Midwood, where she was a beloved teacher for thirty years. This is also where she met a strapping young history teacher named Joel Rosen, and history repeated itself. She took the initiative, asking Joel out to a Mets game (her interest in Joel outweighing her ambivalence towards baseball) early in 1969. After a disastrous second date, in which Joel’s ruthless tactics playing Scrabble nearly caused her to call things off, they patched things up, and were married on July 20, the day of the first moon landing. David, their only child to survive infancy, came along two years later.

Maternity leave policies were more generous in the 1970s than now, and Helen took several years off before returning to the job. Although she had enjoyed teaching grades 4-6, she was now ready for something new, and went back to school, earning her second Master’s degree – this time in library science – from Pratt. For the last fifteen years of her career, she worked as the school librarian at 99, a position that allowed her to exercise all of her creativity as a teacher. She also amassed a formidable personal collection of children’s books in the process!

As much as she loved her job, she also looked forward to a retirement that would allow her to be a New Yorker in full. This meant the Philharmonic (a subscription had been in the family since at least the 1950s), the opera, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, restaurants, museums, all of it – but it also meant a renewed commitment to her own corner of the world. She joined the Nottingham Association (“Nottingham” being the aspirational name for a Brooklyn neighborhood notable for its lack of forests or bandits), and before long was its president. Her work with the Association was mostly thankless, but well-suited to her innate organizational skills, as well as her tenaciousness. One perk of the job was that local politicians would sometimes drop by – and so it was through N.A. that she got to meet Chuck Schumer (the current Senate minority leader), Hakeem Jeffries (the current House minority leader), as well as that charmer Anthony David Wiener (look him up).

With help from Sue and Sid, Joel and Helen were able to purchase a beautiful half-timber house on East 27th street. It had a magnolia out front, and a garden in the back where Joel raised his tomatoes, eggplants and basil, as well as lilac bushes, roses, and azaleas. They managed to keep the place going for 46 years, but as old age began to tell, they moved to West Hartford, to be closer to their son. Joel was sick with Parkinson’s by this time, but Helen threw herself into Connecticut life with gusto – even as she frequently reminded David that West Hartford was not Brooklyn. She even re-learned to drive when Joel was no longer able to do so. Until Covid put an end to such things, the family made trips to New York (the Philharmonic, especially) whenever possible. But Helen came to appreciate her new home with time.

The last years were difficult, as they tend to be. Joel’s Parkinson’s disease was a long goodbye; in the event, he died on January 20, 2026 – and Helen ended up outliving him by less than three months. Her own health was pretty good until September, 2024, when a kidney stone required hospitalization. From that point, it was one battle after another: diabetes, recurring kidney complaints requiring four additional hospitalizations, a cancer that was discovered and then quickly beaten back into remission, the slow loss of both hearing and eyesight, as well as her memory. It says something, however, that none of these things ended up killing her. With her typical stubbornness (inherited, she would say, from the Hungarian side of her family – her father’s), and a fierce will to live, she took on each of these challenges and held them at bay. On the last day of life, she was still reading the newspaper, albeit with a magnifying glass. Death came out of the blue, and quickly – the complications of an unsuspected hernia. Somehow this seems appropriate – that, in the end, she could only be taken by surprise.

Helen Rosen is predeceased by her parents Sylvia (nee Hoskwith) and Sidney Weiss, her husband Joel, and her second son Joshua, who lived for two days. She is survived by her son David. Contributions in her memory may be made to Hadassah.