August 3, 2015

Connie Rudick

Connie Rudick was born in 1933 in Waco, Texas, during the Great Depression. Her father ran a grocery store that was wiped out when the Brazos River flooded in the 1930s, and he later went into the produce business. Her father came from Waco, one of nine children of an Orthodox rabbi who served as the community's shochet, while her mother was from Beaumont, the daughter of a prominent physician born in Sweden. Her mother was highly educated, earning degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and an advanced degree from Columbia. Growing up as one of only six Jewish students in a graduating class of 300, Connie found Waco a difficult place, but she excelled academically and was valedictorian.

Connie attended the University of Texas for two years as an art major before leaving and training as a legal secretary. She married her first husband, whom she met through his brother stationed at a Waco airfield, and the couple first lived in upstate New York while he finished college at Syracuse University. Finding the northern winters unbearable, they moved back to Texas, settling in Dallas in 1955. Connie raised two daughters, worked for attorneys and later spent fifteen years with a fur company, eventually moving into sales. She and her first husband divorced in 1977. That same year she met Leon, whom she married that fall; they were married 35 years until his death in January before the interview.

A member of Temple Emanu-El since about 1958, Connie became active in Sisterhood, serving as executive vice president and co-president, and later joined the Temple executive committee and board. In 1997 she served as a national chair of the Sisterhood biennial held in Dallas as part of the Union of Reform Judaism convention, a major undertaking. She trained in Cincinnati as an outreach fellow and, beginning in 2001, has led conversion classes at least once a year, helping about fifteen people become Jewish annually. She describes this work as the most rewarding thing she has ever done. Connie also recalls living through the Kennedy assassination while at home with her young children, and she credits her father with instilling in her a lifelong curiosity she hopes to pass on.

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