Before Naomi Schiff’s family moved to the West Coast, they lived in New York, in a world, she said, “swimming with Jewish immigrants.”
The Oakland resident — who recently was named “Oakland Mother of the Year” by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department because of her exceptional record of volunteerism and activism — knows her Jewish background somehow motivates her.
“Civic activism is part of the package of being a modern Jewish person and my particular way of interpreting that is the whole community, not just the Jewish community,” she said. “My focus is on having a healthy community in Oakland, and doing whatever it takes to do that.”
“Whatever it takes” can sometimes be a lot. The 56-year-old Schiff, who has been in Oakland since 1974, is married and has two daughters — one in college, and another at Oakland Tech.
She is a partner with her husband and a friend in Seventeenth Street Studios, a graphic design firm in downtown Oakland. And she has long been involved with the Oakland Heritage Alliance, currently serving as its president.
She also happens to be the granddaughter of Roman Vishniac, renowned photographer of Eastern European Jews in the years leading up to World War II.
Calling her grandfather “eccentric,” and “secretive,” Schiff said that he was also well-known in the scientific world for his pioneering color photographs through a microscope.
“He had a lot of photographs in Life Magazine of unicellular creatures,” she said. “I knew his pictures of blood cells were in my biology book.”
But in the Jewish world, Vishniac is known for his collection of portraits known as “A Vanishing World.”
Schiff said these photographs are a mixed legacy, because the Jews of Europe are so often only seen as victims.
“It’s important to see them as a strong, living culture,” she said. “While tragic things can happen to any group of people, what you want to remember about those people is not only what happened to them, but their culture and what of value disappeared.”
In Oakland though, Schiff is known for her activism on behalf of efforts in the areas of preservation, public land use and affordable housing.
Schiff first got involved in civic affairs when the city of Oakland was slated to tear down the historic Oakland Fox Theater to make way for a parking lot. When they saved the theater, she moved on to helping a landscape architect save some street trees, and one thing led to another. Most recently, she helped prevent the Diocese of Oakland from building a new cathedral on the shores of Lake Merritt.
“Community members have some say in what happens to their tax monies, to city planning and to publicly-owned land, and what the priorities of a city should be,” Schiff said.
The Oakland parks department will present Schiff with her award 10:30 a.m. Saturday, May 7, at Morcom Rose Garden, 700 Jean St., Oakland.