Marga Mandel

Marga Mandel Marga passed away, with her family around her, on Friday, January 16, at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View after having been brought to the Emergency Room the previous night in acute distress. Her health had been deteriorating for several years, but her mental faculties remained intact at all times. Marga was born in Hamburg, Germany on July 24, 1921, the second of three children of Bertha Oppenheim and Dr. Alfred Oppenheim, a general-practice physician in that city. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, anti-Semitism made life progressively more difficult, affecting, among other things, her father's medical practice and Marga's schooling. For some time, the family was split up, with Marga's father in the USA, her sister in England, and her brother in Sweden, but in 1938, she and her mother left Hamburg and managed to enter Sweden where the family was reunited. After two and a half years in Sweden, having realized that opportunities there were very limited, they left for the U.S., arriving in San Francisco in April of 1941. Subsequently, Marga entered the nursing program at Mt. Zion Hospital from which she graduated as an RN in 1945. In the meantime, Marga's parents had gone on to New York where her father had begun practicing medicine in a small upstate community. Marga's visit to them resulted in her obtaining a nursing position at a hospital in New York City where she subsequently met her future husband, Eugene Mandel. After their marriage in 1948, they moved to the Bay Area where they have since lived and raised a family. Marga's deepest and most abiding love was always her family, but she had considerable artistic talent and many diverse interests. She created beautiful wood sculptures; she built an excellent reflecting telescope; she was a great cook, gardener, and homemaker, and could build or fix anything with her skillful hands. Her devotion to her parents, sister and brother, nieces and nephews, and to all her children, grandchildren, and husband was exemplary. Her honesty, thoughtfulness, warmth, generosity and strength of character were evident to all who came to know her. She will be deeply missed by all of us. She is survived by her husband Eugene Mandel, their three children and their respective families: Morris, his wife Shuhong and daughter Gina; Michael, his wife Laurie, and children Olivia and Ben; Ruth (husband Ralph deceased), her daughter Jennifer and husband Jamie and their son Kaleb; her son Albert, his wife Marina; and her son Jeremy and his partner Sarah. She is also survived by her brother, Dr. Peter Oppenheim, his wife Sylvia and their family, and by her niece Suzanne Lande and her niece Janie Stewart, her family and her partner, Neal Strudler. Interment will take place on Thursday, January 22nd at 1:00 PM at Alta Mesa Cemetery, to be followed by a memorial service at 2:00 PM in the chapel of Roller, Hapgood, and Tinney Mortuary, both located in Palo Alto. The family requests no flowers; donations in Marga's name to the Multiple Sclerosis Society would be welcomed.