Ralph M. Kramer

Professor Emeritus Ralph Kramer passed away peacefully at The Reutlinger Center in Danville on Tuesday, December 29, 2020, at the age of 99. He was born in San Francisco on August 11, 1921, to Abe and Anna Kramer, who had each made their way from Eastern Europe to California. Ralph attended public schools in San Francisco, celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Temple Emanuel-El, and entered UC Berkeley in the fall of 1937 where he majored in social work and competed on the Varsity Debating Team. His affiliation with Berkeley Social Welfare goes back as far as the founding of the School in 1944. Professor Kramer was a member of Berkeley Social Welfare’s first MSW cohort, enrolling in 1944 and graduating in 1946.

After graduating with a BA in 1942, he was drafted into the US Armed Services. In 1944, he married Hadassah Goldberg, whom he had met when both were active at UC Berkeley Hillel. She joined him in Texas where he served as a social worker in the Army. After the war, Ralph and Hadassah moved back to the East Bay where they remained for the rest of their lives. They became members of Temple Beth Abraham and joined with several other young Jewish couples to form the Bay Area Jewish Forum; the families met for monthly dinners. In the mid-1980s, Ralph and Hadassah became founding members of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley.

After Ralph completed his Master’s thesis in 1946, he worked for the Jewish Committee for Personal Service, counseling Jewish prisoners at San Quentin. In the early 1950s, he was the Assistant Director of the East Bay Jewish Federation, and later coordinated social service agencies in Contra Costa County. In 1961, he entered the first class in the doctoral program in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, and received his doctorate in 1964. That fall, he began his career as a full time faculty member in the School of Social Welfare and founded its program in community organization and administration (today called Strengthening Organizations and Communities). He retired from the faculty in 1992 in time for one of his first students, Michael J. Austin, to be hired to build upon his national and international leadership role. Professor Austin compiled a selection of Kramer’s collected works in a volume, A Lifetime of Scholarship, which is available in the Social Welfare Library.

In addition to nearly 40 years of curriculum leadership, Kramer developed an extensive research career related to the operation of nonprofit human service organizations. He published four major books (in addition to 44 journal articles and numerous book chapters and reports): Readings in Community Organization Practice (1969), Participation of the Poor: Comparative Community Case Studies in the War on Poverty (1969), Voluntary Agencies in the Welfare State (1981), and Government and the Third Sector: Emerging Relationships in Welfare States (1992). His work received both national and international recognition for his contributions to the role of nonprofit voluntary social service organizations within the welfare state.

Ralph and Hadassah made many trips to Israel, often connected with his academic pursuits, to visit their daughters and grandchildren. From 1986 to 1988, Ralph directed the Education Abroad Program in Jerusalem for the University of California. Ralph was a highly regarded professor who maintained relationships with many of his former students over the years.

He championed justice and the world of ideas, loved to play his clarinet, and entertained friends and family with his keen sense of humor and wit. He was deeply devoted to Hadassah, to whom he was married for 72 years until her death in 2016. He is survived by two daughters, Miriam Shein and Alisa Kramer (daughter Debby Kramer Shalev died in 2001), six grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. 

Michael J. Austin
2021