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Betty Rubin Michaelson

Betty was the daughter of Frank and Hazel Rubin, part of the extended Rubin and Ackerman families who emigrated from a small village in Russia around 1901 to 1907. Family patriarch Ezra Rubin and his wife, Etta Rose, for whom Betty (Betty Rose) was named, came to Dallas after two relatives, Nathan Rubin and Ben Ackerman, arrived first. Etta Rose died soon after reaching America and is buried at Shearith Israel Cemetery. The family entered the grocery business in the Deep Ellum area, learning English on the job. Betty's mother, Hazel, was the only sibling born in Dallas, while the older children were born in Europe.

Betty grew up in South Dallas, which she remembered warmly as a happy Jewish neighborhood where everyone knew one another and children walked everywhere safely. As relatives prospered, families such as the Ackermans and Nathan and Fanny Rubin built handsome homes on South Boulevard. When Betty was thirteen, her family moved north to the Armstrong and Abbott area, and she continued at Forest High School with her friends. She attended the University of Texas in Austin for two years, then finished at SMU after her mother's savings, kept in a sugar bowl during the Depression, ran out. She later taught school in Oak Cliff.

The family was Orthodox and deeply devoted to one another, with all confirmed at Shearith Israel. Betty recalled large Seders that rotated among the households, sometimes seating forty people, and vividly remembered her grandmother burying knives in the soil to purify them for Passover and the shochet, Mr. Orlowitz, coming to kill chickens in the backyard. She described the iceman leaving a block of ice on the screened porch so the children could have milk. Betty married into the Michelson family, and in a small-world twist she and her first cousin John Rubin married a Michelson brother and sister. She shared the 1925 family photograph so the family's story would be preserved.

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