Rhoda F Knaff

Rhoda Knaff, longtime resident of Bethesda, MD, died 29 November 2022. She was 91. She was born in June 1931, in Montreal, Canada, to Katie (Schneider) and Nathan Finkel. Rhoda learned Italian in high school, winning a prestigious scholarship to study the language in Italy, but her parents, likely hesitant to send a young woman to recently-postwar Europe, would not permit her to go. Undaunted, she studied psychology, obtaining double Bachelor of Arts Degrees in Psychology and English (1952) and a Master’s Degree (M.Ps.Sc., 1954) from McGill University, in Montreal, where she was awarded the Province of Quebec Scholarship for Graduate School in Clinical Psychology. She met her future husband, P.R. (Bob) Knaff, at McGill; the couple moved to the Washington, D.C. area, had three daughters, and encouraged a love of music in their children; they were married 30 years. They divorced in 1984. Her professional life was also rich: she was a psychologist at the Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, in Montreal, for several years, before moving to Maryland to work as a Staff Psychologist at Spring Grove State Hospital, then at D.C. General Hospital in Washington, D.C., working with children. Here, she continued her lifelong love of the arts, taking modern dance classes and becoming President of the Washington Recorder Society, while also becoming renown as a chef and hostess, famed for her dinner parties. Meanwhile, as her daughters grew in skill with instruments, she created a series of yearly concerts, inviting friends and family into the living room of their Bethesda home to watch the family perform, with Rhoda accompanying her violin- and cello-playing daughters on the piano and performing pieces herself on the recorder. The culmination of this masterwork of supervising music lessons and practicing, creating the family musical group, and organizing and executing concerts resulted in her family’s being awarded the Amateur Musical Family of the Year, a national award, in 1974. In 1978, no longer content with her educational level, she earned a second Master’s Degree, in Public Health Administration, from the University of Southern California, going on to work as a Health Planner for the government of the District of Columbia, in the division of Maternal and Child Health, for 22 years. In 2000, she retired, keeping her love of the study of languages alive by taking college courses in Japanese and, later, Yiddish. In 1988, after seeing him in the audience weekly at Kennedy Center performances, she met Jerry Feldman at a National Symphony Orchestra concert. Their adoration of classical music, and of cooking and eating good food, matched their adoration of each other and kept them together for 29 years, until his death in 2018. Staying active in dance aerobics until her mid-80s, Rhoda’s last few years were sustained, in the time of quarantine, by avid watching of Rachel Maddow on T.V., by Yiddish classes on Zoom with her longtime friends and classmates, and by her daughters, who cared for her to the end. She is survived by daughters Constance Bell (predeceased by Rick, 2015), Jennifer (Robert C. Johnson), Donna (Torrie Begaye), and granddaughter Laura Bell.