DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
NAOMI BETH ROSENFELD
“Nomi”
14 February 1936 – 7 October 2021
Labor and immigration lawyer who read every client's whole file, and a mahjong shark
At seventy-nine, Naomi Rosenfeld argued her last appeal before Florida's Third District Court of Appeal, for a Haitian family facing deportation, in a borrowed blazer because her own was at the cleaners. She won. Then she spent twenty minutes in the courthouse hallway quietly telling the young associate who had assisted her exactly which of his three best arguments he had buried.
Born in the Bronx in 1936 to a Yiddish-speaking tailor and a bookkeeper, Naomi was the first in her family to attend university: Brooklyn College, then NYU School of Law, class of 1960, where she was one of eight women among three hundred students. Firms offered her a secretarial job. She declined and went to work as a staff attorney for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union on Seventh Avenue, where she spent twelve years representing seamstresses and pressers, billing nobody and winning more than anyone expected.
In 1972 her husband Harold, a high-school math teacher, took a job in Miami-Dade, and Naomi followed with a legal pad and a plan. She opened a small practice near Biscayne Boulevard, represented hotel workers in Miami Beach, and from the 1980s took on asylum cases, mostly Haitian, Cuban and later Venezuelan families, which she handled with coffee, patience and the conviction that everyone deserves at least one person who reads their whole file. She taught immigration law as an adjunct at the University of Miami School of Law for twenty years and volunteered for Legal Services of Greater Miami well into her eighties.
She was also, famously, a mahjong shark, a daily swimmer, and a poor driver whose neighbors learned to wait at stop signs. Friday nights meant candles, her own challah and a table full of clients, neighbors and strays. A note on her refrigerator read: Did you help someone today?
Naomi died on 7 October 2021, aged eighty-five, at home in Miami, with her children beside her. Harold died in 2010. She is survived by her daughter Rebecca, her son David, four grandchildren and her sister Sylvia. May her memory be a blessing.
“Did you help someone today? If not, there is still time.”