Family Background and Jewish Roots
Jerry Edwin Abramson was born at Louisville’s Jewish Hospital on September 12, 1946, to parents Roy Abramson (1917–1998) and Shirley Botwick Abramson (1920–2002). Jerry’s father and grandfather together ran a small, family-owned grocery store called Abramson’s Market first in Taylorsville, Kentucky and later in Louisville’s historic Smoketown neighborhood in the western part of Louisville’s dissipating urban Jewish core. Grandfather Sidney Abramson had immigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire as a youth in 1905, working as a baker while he saved to open his own business. In 1916, Sidney married Sadie Russman, and their son Roy arrived a year later. Roy was drafted into the U.S. military during the Second World War, and there he met Shirley Botwick, who was serving in the Women’s Army Corps. The couple married in 1944. When Jerry was four, his sister, Sheilah, completed the family.
Practicing Jews, the Abramson family has always been deeply involved in local Jewish communal life, remaining to this day members of Keneseth Israel Congregation, formerly on Jacob Street, and since 1964 on Taylorsville Road. Holiday and Sabbath observance with family and friends and social life at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) and later the Jewish Community Center (JCC) were pillars of regular life in a close-knit Jewish community.
"You know, we've always had a very small Jewish community, but a very community-involved Jewish community" (38:00) Listen to Jerry Abramson Reflect on family history and his early uprbringing here.
In the post-war years, the eastward suburban drift of Louisville’s Jewish community accelerated rapidly, and in the early 1950s, the Abramsons joined the migration to burgeoning new Jewish neighborhoods in the Highlands area. Grandparents Sidney and Sadie remained at their home in historic Ouerbacker Court, known affectionately as “Jewish Old Louisville.”