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NEW YORK — Upon hearing this week of the death of Bella Abzug, the first Jewish woman elected to Congress, Ira Forman, National Jewish Democratic Council executive director, said, "It is the passing of an era."

She "was a spitfire," said Forman, who worked with the Democratic lawmaker from New York when he was a staffer for one of the congressional committees on which she served.

"A lot of tough old pols on the Hill were scared of her. If she believed in something, she would go to the mat for it."

Many sad voices filled with passion this week as they remembered Abzug — for her devotion to feminist causes, her raspy voice and her wide-brimmed hats.

Most of all, "she was a force in the universe, a tikkun olam incarnate," said author and Jewish feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, using the Hebrew term for "fixing the world."

"She had a tough outside and a sweet, sweet inside, like so many Jews. She was the quintessential fighter."

Abzug died Tuesday at 77 after complications following heart surgery in her hometown, New York City.

The former congresswoman, who served from 1971 to 1977, made unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate and mayorship of New York City.

She was born of Russian Jewish immigrants and became a Zionist at the age of 12, collecting money and giving speeches for Zionist causes at subway stops.

Pogrebin and many others recalled Abzug's commitment to fighting anti-Zionist rhetoric and policy when it emerged at United Nations conferences for women during recent decades.

"Abzug fought when she could have retreated into the feminist crowd, but she stood up as a Jew."

Friends and colleagues cited story after story demonstrating Abzug's passion, fire, commitment to women's issues and loyalty to Israel.

In the early 1980s, Shirley Joseph, then the policy coordinator of the Jewish federation of Buffalo, N.Y., remembers how astonished she felt when Abzug — the over-obligated legislator — agreed to take time out to speak to a group of students about feminist and Zionist issues.

"She has done more for Jewish women and all women on both the local and international levels than any other I know," said Joseph, chair of the Jewish caucus of the '95 U.N. women's conference in Beijing.

Already suffering from illness and confined to a wheelchair, Abzug attended that conference as a member of the Jewish caucus.

"The most interesting thing about Bella Abzug," said Hyman Bookbinder, veteran D.C. Jewish activist, was that while she was extreme on the left, "she never lost her commitment to the Jewish community."

Indeed, besides supporting pro-Israel legislation, Abzug was a member of Hadassah and B'nai B'rith, and she studied at the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

In her 1972 book "Bella!" she wrote, "Those who say I'm impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash or overbearing…Whether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am …I am a very serious woman."