Michael Dimenstein photo
The newly installed headstone for New Haven's former city historian.
On Sunday 40 people gathered at the Grove Street Cemetery for a secular ceremony of remembrance at the grave site of Judith Ann Schiff.
She was a long-time Yale University archivist — the university’s longest-serving staff member in recent memory — as well as the official city historian of New Haven from 2012 to her death in 2022, at the age of 84.
Sunday’s occasion was the unveiling of her headstone, a memorial monument on which, in the Jewish tradition, family members, colleagues, and friends placed individual stones or pebbles of remembrance.
In her storied career Schiff both acquired and made more accessible to the public collections that included, among scores of others, those of Mabel Loomis Todd, who was Emily Dickinson’s editor; Charles Lindbergh and Ann Morrow Lindbergh; and Edward Bouchet, an early African-American Yale graduate and the first to earn a Ph.D. in the United States.
Click here for a full obituary appreciation of Schiff’s 60 years as a devoted archivist, historian, writer, teacher, and mentor as published in Yale News at the time of her death.
She was also a famous sharer of information and insights and a founder of many organizations, including the Ethnic Heritage Society and Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven.
The society’s president, Michael Dimenstein, who was present at Sunday’s gathering, reported that under a bright accommodating sun attendees shared stories and recollections of “Judy,” as she was affectionately known.
He read a portion of the eulogy written at the time of Schiff’s death by Congregation Mishkan Israel Rabbi Emeritus Herb Brockman.
Judy’s work, Brockman wrote, was “a legacy to generations yet to be … a reminder not only of our past … how we got here, why we got here, and what we did here. Her legacy is inspiration for what we yet may come to be.”
Fellow archivists often discuss archival challenges and situations, Dimenstein reported another attendee’s graveside recollection, imagining how Judy Schiff would have handled them.
Fortunately, he added, he and his colleagues are comforted by knowing “Judy is just across the street.”