A hearty congratulations to supermodel and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss and businessman husband Joshua Kushner on the birth of their first daughter, their third child. The couple welcomed Rae Florence Kushner into the world on Sept. 18, just a few days before the Jewish New Year, which I’m sure will now be that much sweeter for the family.
Rae joins brothers Levi Joseph, 4, and Elijah Jude, 2, and like them, she has a first name filled with Jewish meaning. Rae is named after Kushner’s paternal grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. The couple named their daughter after her in accordance with Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, where children are often named after beloved deceased relatives.
The original Rae, short for Reichel, was born in 1923 in Novogrudok, Poland, and lost most of her family to massacres by the Nazis, including her father, her mother and her older sister. After escaping the city’s ghetto by crawling through a 600-foot tunnel, she and her remaining family hid in the woods and joined the Bielski partisans, where she reconnected with the man who would go on to be her husband, Joseph Kushner. They went on to have four children, one of whom is, of course, Charles Kushner, Jared and Joshua Kushner’s father.
Rae passed away in 2004, but her legacy and name live on in the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, New Jersey — and now, in her latest great grandchild.
What a moving gesture! Mazel tov to the Kushner-Kloss family.
