Ruth Gruber speaking at the Annual Awards Dinner in April 2009 after receiving the Fay Gillis Wells Award.
Longtime OPC member Ruth Gruber, an award-winning photojournalist and author, died on Thursday, Nov. 17 at the age of 105 at her home in Manhattan.
Gruber joined the OPC in March 1958 and remained a member until her death. In 2009, she received the inaugural Fay Gillis Wells Award, given in honor the OPC founder to a female journalist of exceptional achievement.
Gruber was born in Brooklyn in 1911 to David and Gussie Gruber, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. She earned bachelor and master degrees by age 19 in America and a Ph.D. in Cologne, Germany at age 20.
An extensive obituary in The New York Times lauded notable highlights of Gruber’s career, including her coverage of Stalin’s gulags, life in Nazi Germany and Jewish refugees during the Exodus to Palestine in 1947.
“I had two tools to fight injustice — words and images, my typewriter and my camera,” the Times obituary quotes Gruber as saying to a United Jewish Federation seminar at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001. “I just felt that I had to fight evil, and I’ve felt like that since I was 20 years old. And I’ve never been an observer. I have to live a story to write it.”
In May 2011, her photographs were featured in an exhibit at the International Center of Photography, with images from her reportage of the Jewish refugees, Soviet Arctic in the 1930s and later photographs of Ethiopian Jews during the country’s civil war in the 1980s.
Left: Gruber’s Fay Gillis Wells Award is prominently displayed on a mantle in her Manhattan apartment. Photo: Sonya Fry
Right: Gruber poses in front of her typewriter
Gruber is survived by her son, David Michaels, an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration; daughter Celia Michaels, a former CBS News editor; two stepdaughters, Jeri Drucker and Elaine Rosner-Jeria; nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
In this 2011 interview, TODAY’s Ann Curry talks with Gruber about her career.