Nadaline Wolfson Dworkin

Nov 6, 2023

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in 1910-1929 (Born), Activists and Community Leaders, Education, Museums and Libraries, Jewish Women

Aug 5, 1928 -May 17, 2017

Born in NYC, Nadaline Wolfson married Donald Dworkin in 1947 and they lived in Newark’s Weequahic section by the late 1950s. By 1958 she was on the Board of the Newark Business and Professional Chapter of American Jewish Congress, where she was chairman of the Y Nursery School Committee.

By 1959, she was involved in education activism, speaking about overcrowding in the Weequahic section schools at a meeting of the Clinton Hill Neighborhood Council. In 1960, she was elected secretary of the Weequahic Community Council and soon became Education Action Committee Chairman, and by 1965 Vice President. By 1963, she was Chairman of Newark Committee for Better Schools saying, “Education must get top priority in Newark.” She also helped organize a reading program with the WCC.

In 1965, she helped lead pickets from the Weequahic Community Council in front of neighborhood schools in response to overcrowded schools. In 1967, she advocated for Wilbur Parker to be appointed to the school Board, the first African American to serve on Newark’s Board of Education.

John Johnson wrote, “[Nadaline Dworkin] actively confronted educational inequalities in Weequahic schools. Her particular block association, the Stengel Avenue-Porter Place Neighborhood Association started in 1956 and succeeded in averting the influence blockbusters and panic selling. Nadaline’s children attended Maple Avenue School, one of the city’s better performing middle schools. In contrast to Maple Avenue, many of the city’s majority Black middle and high schools were over crowded; older and dilapidated; staffed a disproportionate amount of substitute teachers; lacked up-to-date text books; and because of a 1961 redistricting plan that maintained an all-White school zones in the North Ward, operated on a split day schedule…

Nadaline Dworkin, WCC Education Committee Chair, along with another Weequahic resident, Estelle Greenburg, devised a plan of direct action to create integrated schools in Weequahic. In 1963, Dworkin, before an audience of women at the Weequahic branch of the Newark
Public Library, stated, “integration is the accepted morality of our nation. We have to live
according to our morality rather than just speak about it. There is a human need for every
person to live a life full of opportunity.”

Dworkin and Greenberg organized a sit-in where Weequahic’s Black students would
attend class at the less crowded and racially segregated Maple Avenue School….the significance of direct action in Weequahic cannot be dissociated from the Civil Rights Movement and acts of non-violent protest in the South.”

Later, she was a psychotherapist in West Orange and served on a panel in 2009 about Jews and Blacks in Weequahic.