Ms. Ida Schmertz, a former of Jenkintown resident, women’s activist, international relations innovator, presidential appointee, and the first female senior vice president at American Express, passed away on Thursday, July 2, of organ failure. She was 91.

An Amsterdam native and a multilinguist (English, Dutch, Russian, and French), Ms. Schmertz came to Jenkintown at the start of World War II in 1940 and “became a trailblazing American powerhouse in civil and women’s rights, international relations, corporate management, and healthcare”, her obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer said.

She earned her bachelor’s degree at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1956 and her master’s degree at Columbia University in 1960. She also studied French political science at Sorbonne University in Paris and Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont.

In the 1990s, she became the founding codirector of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, founding cochair of the International Business Incubator and Training Center in Russia, and founding chair of the board of trustees for the Romanian-American Foundation in Bucharest, according to her obituary.

Ms. Schmertz lectured and appeared on TV shows and in dozens of newspapers and was appointed by President Bill Clinton to head the Romanian-American Enterprise Fund in 1994. She was employed briefly with the C.I.A., according to her obituary in The New York Times.

You can watch her interview with the Center for American Women and Politics below:

A private memorial service is to be held later, her obituary said.

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