Sarel Kromer
Sarel Kromer, 84, of Arlington, MA, passed away after a straight set loss (7-6, 7-6) to leukemia. She was preceded in death by husband Philip Frederick Kromer III (“PF”), and is survived by her three children (Philip, Mark, and Matthew), seven grandchildren, and innumerable found family: five married couples she first introduced, and dozens of mentees who regard her as an adopted mother.
Sarel was born in 1939 in Pawling, NY to Erwin and Leah Kandell. Her childhood blended elements of small-town post-war life (working as a soda jerk at her father’s pharmacy, maintaining her family’s rental property at Whaley Lake); a Jewish-American upbringing (weekend trips to the city to visit family, lunch at Sardi’s); and precocious signs of the intellect that would define her professional life (she often reminisced about how as 14-year old she got permission to skip school to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings). Sarel attended Smith College, and then, in her words, “talked her way into Cornell Law School the week before school started in September, 1960” at a time when the campus was brimming with political fervor.
She spent the next decade as a pioneer in the field of public interest law, advocating for the causes she was passionate about: migrant rights, voting rights, women’s rights, civil rights, housing, court administration, and pursuing economic and social justice in Appalachia during stints with the New York Attorney General’s office, the Migrant Legal Action Network, the Ford Foundation, and the League of Women’s Voters, where she helped establish the National Women’s Vote Center. She married Philip Frederick Kromer III (“PF”) in 1973 after a decade-long friendship that started at Cornell, followed by a rapid courtship. Three children — Philip, Mark, and Matthew — followed quickly, and raising her children became the focus of her life for the next two decades.
Her passions included travel, tennis, scrabble, connecting people, photography, and public advocacy. She traveled to more than 100 countries, with a specific proclivity for talking her way into countries on the State Department’s “travel advisory” list. A friend could throw a wedding anywhere in the world at any time (Vietnam, India, England, France, Portugal, New Zealand, Kazakhstan, ….) and she’d be there in elegant style. She found ways to leverage her travel into something more meaningful. A 2005 trip to Rwanda inspired her to write and teach extensively on the post-genocide healing process, culminating in her contribution to the development of the Rwanda Peace Narratives Toolkit, a model curriculum for teaching the principles of non-violent conflict resolution published by the Center for Peace Building International. She also traveled extensively to the former Soviet Republics through her volunteer work with American Councils FLEX program, whose mission is to foster international understanding through foreign exchanges with future leaders.
To the end, Sarel did what she loved: in the month prior to checking into the hospital, she traveled to Kazakhstan for a friend’s wedding, played tennis with and watched her grandchildren for the weekend, and ate a lot of ice cream. She passed away in her hospital surrounded by friends and family.
In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to Search for Common Ground or the American Councils.
