February 26, 2014

Muriel Pinkus

Muriel Pinkus was born in New York City in 1920, the oldest of three children. Her mother was born in the United States to immigrants from near Kiev in the Ukraine, and her father came from rural Hungary as a small child in 1888. Her father's family opened a grocery store on the Lower East Side and baked matzah for Passover, a venture that grew into the well-known Horowitz Margareten company, at one point led by a woman named Regina Margareten. Her father later became a lawyer and wrote a book whose royalties helped the family through the Great Depression. Raised in a religious home, Muriel attended Hebrew school, learned to read Hebrew, and carried a deep pride in her Jewish heritage throughout her life. She graduated from Hunter College in New York.

Muriel met her husband Ralph at a dance on the roof of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, drawn to his knowledge of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers, a passion she shared from her years as a Girl Scout and nature counselor. In 1942, Ralph, who worked at the New York Botanical Garden, was sent to Guatemala to cultivate quinine for the war effort, and the couple spent seven years on a plantation on the side of an extinct volcano, where their two sons were born. In 1950 they came to Dallas after Ralph answered an ad from a local florist. They eventually bought land on North Haven Road, part of which was later sold to the Jewish Community Center, and Ralph built his own nursery business.

In Dallas, Muriel and Ralph first joined Sherith Israel, then Temple Emanuel, drawn by Rabbi Levi Olan, before Muriel returned to the conservative services of Sherith Israel, where she felt most at home. She confronted the anti-Semitism and segregation of the era, including painful experiences involving the Guatemalan household helper who came with them. Fluent in Spanish, she became active in the Anti-Defamation League and traveled with Rabbi Leon Klenicki to South America for interfaith dialogue. She was a founding member of the Thanksgiving Square interfaith council and helped organize programs on figures such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Ralph helped found the Dallas Arboretum. Muriel treasured her family, her Jewish heritage, and the teaching that one must never separate oneself from the community.

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