Rebecca (Bella) Lazaroff

In 1920, Rosa Lazaroff, a Russian immigrant widow, married Harry Ripps. The couple lived in Mobile, Alabama with Rosa’s daughter, Rebecca Lazaroff, who was born in New York in 1913. In June 1923, Rosa died. Four months later, Harry admitted Rebecca to the Home.

While in the Home, Bella participated in the Home’s 1926 anniversary performance in which she played the role of an attendant to Pharaoh’s daughter in a biblical tableaux. In 1930, she graduated from the Joseph Kohn Commercial High School for Girls where she earned a spot as one of twelve students who obtained six months of actual retail sales experience as part of a “laboratory experiment” in conjunction with several city department stores. (“High School Girls Take New Course as Clerks in Stores,” New Orleans Item, Feb. 12, 1928)

Bella was discharged from the Home in 1930 and returned to Mobile, Alabama. In 1942, Bella married Max Binder, with whom she owned and ran a grocery and raised a son and daughter. He later worked as a sales representative for a jewelry firm..

After Max died in 1979, Bella moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she died in 1991. Bella was buried in Ahavas Chesed Cemetery in Mobile.

According to granddaughter, Kristen Cross, Bella believed her time at the Home to have been the best of her childhood. She fondly recalled the Big Sisters who took her and other Home kids to do things around the city. When she was older and in failing health, she would not consider any nursing home other than the B’nai B’rith home in Memphis because of the fraternal organization’s affiliation with the Home in which she was raised.