At the behest of Rabbi Alan Lachtman and her family, a memorial service for the community leader Reba Yudess this morning was a shimmering reflection of her spirited personality that she spread across scores of interests and hundreds of persons.
Starting with her sister, Helyn DeMattei, relatives and friends said they were sending her bouquets in heaven. “At least I think she is there,” Ms. DeMattei coyly added.
Barry Yudess, one of her three children, alluded to his mother’s well-known penchant for organizing all kinds of people for too many passionate causes to count.
Surveying the crowd at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park, he reminded them that “Mom loved parties. This is just another of her parties.”
The mood of the morning was upbeat, friends said, because Ms.Yudess was exactly that way — until she died, last Saturday at the age of 72.
Since her passing, School Board member Scott Zeidman and others have told the community about the many Culver City children who called Ms. Yudess “Mom.” They considered themselves as adopted by her.
Barry Yudess pointed out that even though his mother allotted time for throngs of young people in her life, she reserved plenty of quality moments for her own children.
In a nearly perfectly formed pearl for his mother, he said: “I loved her for doing the little things that matter.”
Living Life Large
For the friends who had intersected with Ms. Yudess during the 50 years since she and her late husband Sam moved from New Jersey to Culver City, her niece, Judi Dziuba, emphasized the sheer vastness of her life landscape.
Nothing about Ms. Yudess was small or muted. And that, said her niece, allowed Aunt Reba to accomplish more, to affect a wider circle of persons than ordinary people.
“Aunt Reba loved big, and she laughed loud,” Ms. Dziuba said.
“She lived with no boundaries. She shared every aspect of her life with all of us.”
Explaining that her family resides in Northern California, Ms. Dziuba said that she and her daughter, Katie, visited Aunt Reba two weeks before she died.
By that time, ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, had silenced Aunt Reba’s famous voice. But through exaggerated sign language, Aunt Reba declared, separately and unmistakably, her fulsome love for both of them.
Revisiting Aunt Reba’s most memorable qualities one final time, Ms. Dziuba said:
“She was giving, she was loving and, above all, she was encouraging.”
