Nelly Urbach

Nelly Mautner Urbach passed away on September 13, 2024, just a few days before she was scheduled to move from her beloved home in Potomac to a senior living community in Virginia. She said for many years that she wanted the house in Potomac to be the last place she lived and, as usual, she found a way to get what she wanted.

Nelly was born in Vienna, Austria in 1931. Thanks to the foresight and resourcefulness of her mother Hella, in 1938 she, her brother Willy and father Leo were able to escape the Nazis and flee first to Czechoslovakia, eventually making their way to Birmingham, Alabama. She attended college at Syracuse University, where she majored in sociology and met Stuart Urbach.They were married in 1952, after she spent her last year of college at Birmingham Southern so that she could help her mother with the family business, the celebrated Highland Terrace Gardens teahouse.

After a short time in California, the couple moved to New York, where Stuart earned a law degree and Nelly an M.A. in journalism. In 1959, they moved to Silver Spring, MD,where Nelly worked with a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health and they began raising their children Lynn Ellen and Jeffrey Stuart.

In 1965 tragedy struck when Stuart drowned while swimming, leaving Nelly widowed with two small children. Good friends of Nelly’s who were members of Temple Sinai in Northwest Washington, DC brought her to the congregation, where she would be an active member for almost 60 years.

In 1966 Nelly enrolled in a Ph.D. program in human development at the University of Maryland, changing her career path once again. As a graduate student she taught classes and found her way to the board of the Presbyterian Home. After earning her PhD in 1976, her career changed again from a focus on childhood development to gerontology, and she served 30 years as the director of senior centers in Arlington County, Virginia.

At Temple Sinai Nelly served on and chaired various committees including ritual, archive, and Board of Trustees, and was president of the congregation 1984-85. She contributed in numerous other capacities including chanting Torah, teaching in the religious school, singing in the choir for 50 years, and writing liturgy for special occasions, She was a loyal member of Kallah Aleph, established in the 1960s, meeting monthly for almost 60 years..

In 1978 Nelly married Paul Caldwell, moving from Silver Spring to Potomac. Nelly welcomed Paul’s children, Sunny and Dotty and their spouses Derek and Arthur, into her family, and she and Paul began annual trips to Green Lake in Maine, near where Dotty made her home.

When Nelly retired, at age 80, she knew she wanted to stay in her home in Potomac, keeping up with her gardening and her independent life. She knew about the Village movement, a network of community based organizations to support the elderly living in their homes. She also knew Potomac didn’t have one, so she got to work building it, and serving as the first president of the Potomac Community Village. She maintained an active lifestyle up until 4 weeks before her death, meeting friends weekly for lunch or dinner, attending exercise classes at the JCC, and working in her garden.

Nelly is survived by her children Lynn (Jerry Olshan) and Jeff (Janet Kahn) step-children Sunny (Derek Alwes), Dotty (Arthur Washburn), and grandchildren David, Eliana, Elana, Yael, Avi, Liza and Max, Jesse and Didi, Sarah, and great grandchildren Elijah and Ruth, Asa and Mabel, and the many communities she helped build and strengthen over the course of her remarkable life.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Rabbi Fred N. Reiner Lifelong Learning Fund at Temple Sinai in Washington, DC.