In 1909, Pessa Polasky (Kandinoff) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She attended the University of Cincinnati where she became a member of the Lambda Chapter of Phi Sigma Sigma. She earned a Bachelor’s in 1931 and a Master’s in Pyschology a year later.
The Phi Sigma Sigma Sphinx, May 1930
In 1931, she was elected as Secretary of Tau Pi Epsilon, a professional household administration sorority. In March 1933, she spoke at the sorority’s banquet.
She headed to New York where she studied at the New York School of Social Work. In 1935 she was a caseworker for Cincinnati’s Department of Public Welfare and the Department of Aid to Dependent Children. In 1941, she worked for the Ohio State Department of Public Welfare, a job she held until 1944.
During World War II, she went to Europe where she was a welfare officer in refugee camps in Italy and Palestine. The camps were under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and they house primarily Greek and Yugoslav refugees. The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College houses some of the case histories and personal accounts of the World War II refugees with whom she worked.
After the war she was Psychiatric social worker in Cincinnati, first at Longview State Hospital and then at Cincinnati General Hospital. In 1956, Pessa Polasky married Meir Kandinoff in New York City. The next year, she began teaching at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She retired in 1971 and moved to Israel where she died in 1994.
