Helen Schneider Silver papers

Helen Rose Schneider (1922-2003) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Julius Jacob "J.J." Schneider (1892-1972) and Mollie Simon Schneider (1896-1960). Schneider's parents had been born in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States via New York City circa 1912. They married in 1920 and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they operated a grocery store. After retiring in 1960, they moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Helen Schneider graduated from Knoxville High School in 1940. After completing a one-year commercial course at the Knoxville Business College, she worked as a clerk stenographer for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). There she met Sidney Silver (1919-), an engineer from Atlanta, Georgia. They married in 1942.

While her husband served as a corporal in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, Silver worked from 1944-1945 as a legal secretary and clerk stenographer for the U.S. War Department. In 1946, the Silvers moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Silver was a stay-at-home mother until the 1960s when she took a job at Chattanooga's Water Quality Lab.

In 1968, the family relocated to Washington, D.C. She then took a job with the National Weather Service, which included writing articles for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA). Silver left in 1974 to pursue a career in freelance journalism. Until the mid-1980s, Silver covered the State Department and White House briefings, press conferences, and congressional hearings for the Jewish Telegraph Agency's Washington Bureau. Silver's articles were also published in Pioneer Woman Magazine (now Na'amat Magazine) and Hadassah Magazine.

In 1984, Helen and Sidney Silver retired in Charleston, South Carolina. Silver continued writing, mostly travel features for the Jewish Traveler column in Hadassah Magazine.

Helen Silver was active in several Jewish organizations. She edited the Hadassah yearbooks in the 1960s, the Southern Jewish Historical Society's newsletter from 1990-1998, and in 1994, she was a founding member and newsletter editor for the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina. Silver was also a member of the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Sisterhood and served as President of the Chattanooga chapter of Hadassah.