Born above the family store at 7th & Girard--one of a series of stores her parents would occupy throughout Philadelphia--Sylvia was the the first of three children of Russian-Jewish immigrants Jacob and Rose Brodsky Berman. Older sister to brothers Morton and Arnold, she was a 1934 graduate of Overbrook High School, which her future husband, Oscar, had also graduated from the year before. She worked briefly as a secretary before marrying on Feb. 11, 1940 and settling down to life as a full-time mother, eventually of five children, raised almost in a three-bedroom row house in Philly's Wynnefield section. She enjoyed dancing, reading novels, solving word puzzles and playing canasta or mah jong with her longtime girl friends and neighbors. She was devoted to her mother, Rose, and her scores of Brodsky-family cousins.

After working for a short period assisting Oscar in the Donutland shopping-mall eatery he managed, Sylvia eventually worked alongside her close friend Belle Rosen as a clerk, and then supervisor, for some 15 years at the American Board of Internal Medicine, which coincidentally certified two of her children --Richard and Marsha--as family doctors. By this time, Syl and "Ott" had moved into her late mother's former apartment in Wynnefield Heights, where they lived together until Oscar died in 2003, after 63 years of marriage. With failing health but still boasting a sharp mind, Sylvia was compelled to leave her apt. and move into Saunders House in Wynnewood for nursing care in 2010, where she spent the remainder of her life until she was found dead--by a visiting hospice nurse who'd come to meet her for the first time--sitting in a wheelchair in the TV room on a sunny Saturday morning, two days after Thanksgiving, on November 26, 2011, about a month before her 95th birthday.

Sylvia is survived by four of her five children --Edward, Marc, Marsha and Jayne--their three spouses and five grandchildren.