Ruth Rappaport

Ruth Rappaport (May 27, 1923 – November 17, 2010) was a Jewish-American librarian. Her mother's cousin was Helena Rubinstein. Rappaport was born in Leipzig, in Saxony; her family moved to Switzerland in 1938. She later came to America. Her parents returned to Germany, and in 1943 her father died in Buchenwald and her mother died in Ravensbrueck.

From 1948 to 1950 she lived in Jerusalem and served as a correspondent for the Jewish Transcript. In 1959 she began working for the U.S. Air Force, and as such managed a library at Naha Air Base in Okinawa. In 1963, she began managing the libraries in Saigon for the U.S. Navy, agreeing to do so only if there would be no censorship. In 1966 the U.S. Army took over those libraries, but Ruth stayed. While in Vietnam she supervised the library system as it grew from a few books to 39 branch libraries and 117 field collections. She also organized senior officers on U.S. bases throughout Southeast Asia.

After this she worked at the Library of Congress for twenty-two years; her first assignment there was to help recatalog books in the Delta collection, which was a collection of pornography and erotica confiscated by the FBI and kept in a locked cage. Its contents are now integrated with the rest of the collections. In the mid-1970s she and other catalogers worked to start the Library of Congress Professional Guild (AFSCME Local 2910), because they felt that managers were demanding unreasonable quotas of books cataloged per day.

In 2006 she became a founding member of Capitol Hill Village, an organization created to help seniors age in place.

She was also a founding member of the Hill Havurah.

Some of her papers are held at the University of Washington as the Ruth Rappaport papers.

The Ruth Rappaport Wisdom Award was created "to recognize the work of one individual annually that has displayed remarkable warmth, wisdom, and commitment to the Capitol Hill Community."