Eva and Boris Frankfurt Fund
 Between them, Dr. Boris Frankfurt and his wife, Eva, lived in Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and several northeastern U.S. cities. It was Rhode Island, however, the couple’s home for 35 years, which they chose to honor through their estate plan. This permanent endowment will forever assist with “the care of the elderly suffering from incurable illnesses both physical and mental.”
Dr. Frankfurt was born in Kiev, Russia in 1903 and moved with his family to Berlin, Germany in 1921. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry in Basle, Switzerland. Eva (Alexander) Frankfurt was born and educated in Berlin. The couple married there in 1938, and immediately went to live in Sweden where Dr. Frankfurt’s work as a chemist took them.
They immigrated to the United States in 1941, settling in New York City before moving to Rhode Island. An internet search reveals that in 1945 Dr. Frankfurt, as an assignor to Pacific Mills in Boston, obtained a patent for a textile treatment. He later was a chemist for American Hoechst. Mrs. Frankfurt was a librarian from 1945 to 1970, retiring from Brown University.
The couple moved to Duncaster, a retirement community in Bloomfield, CT in 1984. “They were known for walking everywhere. They would walk up Duncaster Road and along the way stop and talk with the neighbors. All the neighbors knew them,” explains Jean Kendall, an employee who assisted and befriended Mrs. Frankfurt in her later years. Dr. Frankfurt died in 1995.
Mrs. Kendall knows of the Frankfurts’ early days from conversations with Mrs. Frankfurt and from stories the elderly woman wrote. “She was quite a writer,” Mrs. Kendall relates, leafing through three books of such stories that Mrs. Frankfurt’s friend and a Duncaster Road neighbor, Lois Hager, retyped for her on a computer. “Writing to others and about others was a very important part of her life,” Mrs. Kendall continues, noting that Mrs. Frankfurt corresponded with more than a dozen friends around the country until her death in February, 2008 at age 94.
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