Beatrice Alexander

Bertha Alexander was born on New York's Lower East Side on 9 March 1895 to Hannah Pepper, an Austrian who had reached America by way of Russia; her father either died in a pogrom in Russia or shortly after arriving in New York. Her mother remarried Maurice Alexander, a Russian Jewish immigrant whom Bertha regarded as her real father and who ran a doll hospital repairing porcelain dolls. When the First World War cut off German porcelain, Bertha and her sisters sewed cloth dolls to sell there and saved the family's livelihood. She founded the Alexander Doll Company in 1923 and ran it for sixty-five years, and Madame Alexander dolls are still made and collected. She gave to B'nai B'rith, the Weizmann Institute, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Brandeis and the American Friends of the Hebrew University.