It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Stephen Kaufman of Eliot, Maine, who died on February 26, 2026, from pancreatic cancer. The funeral will take place at Dewey Hall in Sheffield on Monday, March 2, 2026, at 11 a.m., followed immediately by internment at Ahavath Sholom Cemetery in Great Barrington. A livestream of the funeral service will be available here.
Steve was a native of Brooklyn, born on November 25, 1943, as the eldest child of Isidore (aka Irving) and Esther (Perlman) Kaufman. He was predeceased by his parents and his sister Judy.
At the time of Steve’s birth, his father was in the Army stationed in North Africa. When Irving returned from service, much of his and Esther’s time was taken up with running the family-owned grocery store. Steve was cared for by his grandmother, who spoke no English. Yiddish was his first language, and the left-wing Yiddish-speaking community was his extended family. He carried his affection for that world all his life.
Besides Yiddish, Steve is also remembered for his gift for language in general. At Fort Hamilton High School, Steve chose to study Russian instead of Spanish or French because he said that he wanted to read authors like Dostoevsky in the original language.
After Fort Hamilton, Steve attended Brooklyn College and Downstate College of Medicine. After graduating from medical school in 1969, he was awarded a draft-substitute internship with the Coast Guard hospital in Staten Island, a facility operated by the Public Health Service. He took a strong stand against the war in Vietnam and came to feel compromised by his government-sponsored situation. Steve made the difficult choice to leave the country and spent two years in the American exile community in Sweden with his first wife, Susie Kaufman. His son Isaac was born in Stockholm during this period. Returning to the U.S. in 1972, Steve settled in upstate New York where, he began a long career (28 years) in emergency medicine at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson.
Steve married a second time to Cia Elkin, which brought him two stepsons, Noah Elkin and Samson Elkin, and a daughter, Rachel Kaufman.
In later years, Steve worked as a primary care physician at the Hawthorne Clinic in Harlemville, N.Y. His warmth, kindness. and wisdom gained him many devoted patients who “simply loved” him. During this period, he also began work as a hospice physician. Rounding out his medical career until retirement, Steve worked full time as a medical director for Community Hospice in Catskill, N.Y., for 10 years. After retiring in 2014, he devoted himself to flower gardening, continuing Yiddish education and teaching Yiddish language and Ashkenazi culture.
In 2006, Steve married his beloved soulmate Kaya Stern-Kaufman and gained two loving and devoted stepchildren, Ariel Shrum and Sophie Tracy. Steve’s support for his wife Kaya’s rabbinical work was multi-dimensional and priceless, strengthening Jewish life throughout New England over the last 20 years.
Steve’s beloved grandsons, Jonah and Asher, were born to Isaac and his wife Kim Ferencik, who wed in 2001. On December 1, 2025, Steve became a grandfather once again with the birth of James Luca Tracy to Sophie and her husband Joe Tracy.
Steve will be remembered for his warmth and kindness, his sharp intelligence and curiosity, his commitment to yiddishkeit and Yiddish language, his wit and sense of humor, his love of music and language, his spiritual searching, and the depth of his compassion.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that charitable donations in memory of Steve be given to either the New Israel Fund, YIVO, or the Temple Israel-Portsmouth Tikkun Olam Fund.
To send remembrances to the family, please visit the website of Finnerty & Stevens Funeral Home.
