Former Citizen of the Year Emeritus Vera Gertler was crucial member of GreenTeam

Longtime Belvedere resident Vera Gertler, who was honored as the city’s Citizen of the Year Emeritus in 2013 for her role in organizing the volunteer effort to beautify the medians along Tiburon Boulevard, died May 14 in San Francisco following an illness. She was 91.

Gertler, who lived in Belvedere for more than two decades, was a “super force” and critical in the early days of the Tiburon Peninsula GreenTeam and one of its predecessor organizations, the Beautify Tiburon Boulevard Committee, GreenTeam member Jerry Riessen said. The beautification committee was founded in 1996 with the goal of restoring boulevard medians to their 1976 state, when Caltrans had planted red photinia, white oleander and blue rosemary to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial.

“All of our meetings were at her house, and that’s where we organized ourselves,” Riessen said, adding that he has “very fond and great appreciation for all of her hard work.”

Gertler spent nine years, from July 2007 to June 2016, as Belvedere’s representative on the Marin County Commission on Aging, the advisory council that advocates on behalf of older adults to the Marin Board of Supervisors. During her tenure on the commission, Gertler served on the housing-and-transportation and planning-and-communications committees, said Gary Lara, an administrative assistant with the Marin County Health and Human Services Department and the staff liaison to the commission.

Gertler was born Vera Lutomirski on June 23, 1933, in Milan, Italy, to Simon Lutomirski and Gerda Boehm. She was the second of four children, born after brother Ernesto and before sisters Gabriella and Eva.

Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother took her and her sisters to Portugal before settling in Zurich, Switzerland, after escaping the Holocaust. During World War II, Boehm started a business sending out care packages with food, clothing and blankets to prisoners in concentration camps.

Gertler went on to receive a nursing degree in Geneva. Son Peter Gertler of Oakland said Gertler originally wanted to be an interior designer but was dissuaded by her own mom, who said it wasn’t a job for women.

However, nursing proved to be a good fit, he said.

“She was a natural at it because she loved to take care of people,” Peter said. “That was her sort of M.O., you know, even later in life.”

Gertler used her language skills — in addition to English, she was fluent in German, French, Italian and Hebrew, her son said — to help rescue children who were being expelled from across North Africa to Israel, first bringing them to Switzerland so they could get healthier. She lived in Haifa, Israel, where she met her husband, Siegmund “Sigi” Gertler, who was born in Vienna, Austria, and escaped persecution via the Kindertransport, the British operation that evacuated some 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories.

The couple married in the early 1950s, Peter said, remaining together until Siegmund’s death in 1995. Siegmund, a merchant marine, enjoyed the U.S. on his work-related visits and persuaded his wife to immigrate. They first moved to New York before the cold got the best of them, Peter said, and relocated to San Francisco in 1959, the same year he was born.

The family lived in San Francisco’s Laurel Heights neighborhood, and Gertler worked for more than 30 years for Blue Shield of California as a claims-department manager.

Following her husband’s death, Gertler retired from Blue Shield and moved to Belvedere about 1998 to be near her sisters, who still live on the Tiburon Peninsula.

Her sister Gabriella’s husband, Glenn Isaacson, said Gertler was close with her sisters, creating an “even tighter bond among the women” of the family.

Belvedere resident Ginny Doyle said Gertler, a former neighbor, was a welcoming face on the block and affectionally known as “the ambassador of Tamalpais Avenue”: She was the first person to visit a new resident and invite them over to her home.

“It was such a nice effort on her part, and, consequently, our block was very close and we had block parties all the time,” Doyle said.

Peter said his mom would take care of neighbors’ dogs and was always willing to lend a helping hand whenever needed, something Doyle echoed.

“If you needed help doing anything, she would stop what she was doing and help you,” she said.

Former neighbor Scott Adelman called Gertler a “second mother” who was strong and independent, letting her opinions be known while also being caring about it.

“Once you’re under her wing, you were there forever,” Adelman said. “She was just a warm, loving person, and we became instant family.”

As a GreenTeam member, Gertler was part of some of the volunteer group’s earliest endeavors to beautify the medians, including ripping out weeds and installing drip irrigation, Riessen said.

“She truly loved plants and flowers and the beauty of them,” he said.

Gertler also spent a quarter century volunteering for social-service nonprofit Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.

She left Belvedere and returned to San Francisco in 2019, where she remained until her death.

Lara, the aging-commission liaison, said he remembers Gertler fondly, calling her a “warm personality” who went out of her way to get to know her colleagues “beyond the day-to-day aspects involved with the work of the commission.”

Similarly, Isaacson said Gertler was “a very straightforward, determined, caring person.”

Peter Gertler said his mother was also an amazing grandmother who helped him raise his children after his wife’s death and said she was artistically oriented with “impeccable taste.” She and her sisters exhibited the works of their stepfather, abstract painter Hans Otto Boehm, at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library in 2020. She was proud of being European, he said, participating in local Italian- and French-speaking clubs.

“She was always interested in people’s stories, and she was interested in sharing her story with them,” he said.

In addition to her son, Gertler is survived by sister Gabriella Isaacson and brother-in-law Glenn Isaacson, sister Eva Hudson and grandchildren Ellie and Simon Gertler. She was preceded in death by her parents, husband Siegmund Gertler and brother Ernesto Lutomirski, who died in 2022 in Zurich, Switzerland.

Donations can be made to the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco at donate.jfcs.org or to the Belvedere-Tiburon Library Foundation at beltiblibrary.org/library-foundation.

Reach Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.