Charlotte Bloomberg, Mayor's Mother, Dies At 102

Charlotte Bloomberg, the mother of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, died June 19 at her home in Medford, Mass. She was 102.

Mrs. Bloomberg, a longtime president of her congregation, Temple Shalom, was a Life Member of Hadassah, and she accompanied her son to Jerusalem in 2003 for the dedication of a wing of Hadassah University Hospital named for her.

“We lost the matriarch of our community,” Charlotte Potak, president of Temple Shalom, told The Boston Globe.

Mrs. Bloomberg was a Jersey City, N.J. native and daughter of a Russian immigrant whose parents owned a wholesale grocery company. She graduated high school at 16 and then completed a degree at New York University in the 1920s and met her husband William while working at a dairy, the Daily News said. William Bloomberg died in 1963.

“Today, my sister, Marjorie, and I lost our mother, Charlotte, after an extraordinary 102 years of life,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement. “As the center of our family, our mother’s unimpeachable integrity, fierce independence, and constant love were gifts that profoundly shaped our lives and the lives of so many who knew her.”

The mayor, who frequently mentioned his mother in campaign speeches and in his initial bid for office featured her in TV commercials, endowed the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Professorship in the Humanities in her honor at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.

In recent years Mrs. Bloomberg made few public appearances after attending her son's first two mayoral inaugurations.

At the first, on January 2, 2002, Judge William C. Thompson, father of the incoming comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., said "'for Mrs. Charlotte Bloomberg and myself, this is extreme nachas'."