As pediatrician, psychiatrist and consultantant, Rosenberg was pioneer in child medicine

Dr. Lucille Barash Glicklich Rosenberg accomplished something rare in 1950. She graduated from UW-Madison as a pediatrician.

It was one of many accomplishments throughout her career that contributed to her reputation as a trailblazing woman in medicine in the Milwaukee area.

After meeting her first husband, Dr. Marvin Glicklich, and having five children, Rosenberg decided to continue her studies. Decades before the country would be gripped by a mental health crisis among children and teens, Rosenberg earned a degree in child psychiatry, beginning a lifelong commitment to children's mental and physical well-being.

She was the first woman to serve as president of the Medical Society of Milwaukee County and president of the Wisconsin Psychiatric Association. Her long career as a pediatrician, psychiatrist and consultant established her as a significant figure in Milwaukee’s medical community, said her daughter, Lynn Glicklich Cohen.

“I’m not sure why I wanted to become a doctor,” Rosenberg once said. “It may have had something to do with seeing Claudette Colbert playing a doctor in the movies.”

Roughly 10 years ago, Rosenberg began to suffer the effects of Alzheimer’s dementia. She spent the last five years of her life as a resident of Silverado Memory Care Community in Glendale. She died Sunday at the age of 98.

Cohen, one of Rosenberg's five surviving children, describes her mother as "spunky, vivacious" and a woman who loved to dance.

"She was a mover and always on the go," Cohen told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday. "She didn't like to sit around."

Cohen said her mother raised her children to be independent and able to take care of themselves. She taught each of her five children to cook, and then had them take turns to ensure dinner was ready when she arrived home from work.

"It was very common for her to say to us when we were kids, 'OK, see you tonight,'" Cohen said.

Yet in between her hospital shifts and numerous meetings, Rosenberg found time to be present in the lives of her children, Cohen said, carpooling them to piano lessons and Hebrew school.

Rosenberg was born on Jan. 10, 1926. She was the first American-born child of Peter and Freda Barash, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who fled antisemitic persecution and violence, according to her obituary. As a Jewish child in a small Wisconsin town, Rosenberg learned what it meant to be "different," and instead of conforming, she embraced it, nurtured it, according to the obituary.

According to her obituary, Rosenberg was raised in the back of her mother’s “ready to wear” clothing store. Her father, Peter, was a kind, mild-mannered man who worked as a junk peddler. Her childhood during the Great Depression taught her self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, the same traits she taught her five children.

After her divorce in 1983, she met and married John Alan “Jack” Rosenberg.

Later in life, she and Rosenberg created a trust fund through the Jewish Community Foundation, "to help us fulfill our dedication to tikkum olam − a Hebrew phrase meaning to repair or improve the world − even after we are no longer here," she told the Wisconsin Jewish Federation, after Rosenberg's death.

"Like my parents and late husband, I believe that money is a means to make the world a better place," Rosenberg said.

"She was smart, determined and judicious," Cohen said. "She had a ferocious social conscience."

Rosenberg is survived by her five children: Daniel, Anne, Peter, Lynn and Barry; 14 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren; nieces and nephews.

Her funeral service will be at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Congregation Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun, 2020 W. Brown Deer Road, River Hills. Interment will follow at Spring Hill Cemetery, 166 S. Hawley Court, Milwaukee.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee medical pioneer Dr. Lucille Rosenberg dies at age 98