Naomi Colvin Gellman

1924 - 2018
GELLMAN -- Naomi 93, died on Friday May 4. She was born on Sept. 30, 1924, in Plainfield NJ. Her father, Woolf (Cohen) Colvin, was born in London and grew up in Toronto, Canada, the eldest of nine children. He came to the United States to earn a PhD at Cornell University in 1923, married and became a High School teacher and Principal in Brooklyn.

She graduated from Cornell in 1945, followed later by her brother Alex Colvin. She married Maurice Gellman, another Cornellian, who had returned from service as an Army quartermaster in the Philippines during WWII, and moved to the new Long Island suburb of Levittown in 1949. She gave birth to four children, all of whom survive her. In addition to raising them, she was active in supporting the local public schools and working on the Long Island School Finance Commission to advocate increased state funding for NY's public schools. In the 1960s, she started teaching High School Math, a career she continued for nearly twenty years. In the 1980s she moved to Manhattan, renting an apartment two blocks from Gramercy Park where she lived for the rest of her life. She spent ten years working for the NY City Department of Health after a few years at the Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration.

She was an enthusiast who enjoyed visiting museums, attending the New York Philharmonic, sailing, swimming, and traveling to Europe, China, Japan, and the Caribbean. She took a keen interest in her students, first at Freeport HS and then at Wantagh HS, on Long Island. She has been fortunate to have friendships of about eighty years with two other women from Brooklyn who also went to Cornell, Ruth (Magid) Woolfe and Iris (Smith) Orens, who now survive her. She is cherished by surviving family, including her children, Jonathan, Rachel, Deb and David; two granddaughters, Elizabeth and Sarah and their mother and Jonathan's wife, Bette Kirschstein; and numerous nieces and nephews and their children. Contributions in her memory can be made to the College of Arts and Sciences of Cornell University in memory of Alex and Naomi Colvin or the Visiting Doctors Program of Mount Sinai Hospital.