‘Always free. Always happy.’ Beloved daughter and college student dead in collapse

Warm, kind hearted, bubbly and always positive.

That’s how college friends of Deborah Berezdivin, who perished when the Champlain Towers South collapsed in Surfside, remember the George Washington University student from Puerto Rico.

“She always brings out the best in her friends,” the message posted on GW’s Hillel Instagram page reads. “Deborah is the type of person that would do anything for her loved ones and will always tell you what is right.”

Deborah, 21, a youth leader in Puerto Rico’s tight-knit Jewish community, stayed in the condo with her boyfriend, Ilan Naibryf, 21, for a funeral. Her cousin Jay Kleiman, 52, had traveled from the island for the same event. He was staying with his mother Nancy Kress Levin, 76, the sister of Berezdivin’s grandmother, Diana, a floor below. Nancy’s other son Frank, 55, lived a few doors away with newlywed wife Ana Ortiz, 46, and her son Luis Bermudez, 26.

All died when Champlain Towers South crumbled in the night. The bodies of Berezdivin and Naibryf were both recovered July 7, police said.

Deborah Berezdivin was born on March 9, 2000, to Jeff and Clara Berezdivin. She had a sister named Yael and was the grandchild of Diana and Manolo Berezdivin and Janette and Issac Wasserstein. Like many in Puerto Rico’s Jewish community, she had Cuban roots, but was also Costa Rican on her mother’s side.

Berezdivin was raised in the San Juan metropolitan area, and attended Baldwin School, a private academy in Puerto Rico. While at Baldwin, she was an honors student active in extracurricular life, taking part in the student council and the Golden Key Club. She also presided over the Puerto Rico chapter of Young Judaea, a local youth club focused on Jewish leadership, community and values.

She was “very committed to the educational mission of the movement, something she learned from her family,” said Diego Mendelbaum, the religious leader and community director of the Jewish Community Center of Puerto Rico/Shaare Zedeck synagogue.

Berezdivin, along with her relatives, was a member of the San Juan-area temple. She was also a beloved member of her community in Camp Judaea in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where many of the island’s young Jewish people go for summers. There, she worked as a staff counselor as she got older.

Nicole Zeligman Perez’s children had the couple as counselors. “They each loved and adored them, kept in touch with them all year round and looked up to them,” she wrote. “Who wouldn’t-they truly were amazing kids!”

Deborah had a talented eye for art and photography. During travels to Cuba, she snapped photos of old street cars, plantain stands, a Havana road under the shade of a bright red Flamboyan tree.

She attended Tulane University for her freshman year of college before transferring to George Washington University in D.C. The rising college junior described herself as an “aspiring marketing major and art history minor,” who hoped to advance her education in the art business and luxury fashion.

Friends from college said Berezdivin had a “huge love” for sushi, fashion and her favorite show, “Sex and the City.” This summer, she had combined her professional passions as a marketing intern with the label of Uruguayan fashion designer Gabriela Hearst in New York City, according to her Linkedin.

Berezdivin had been dating her boyfriend for almost two years, according to Isabela Wolfson, a close friend of Ilan. He was in the Midwest and she was in Washington D.C, but the two kept their love alive through long phone calls and FaceTime.

“He adores her. Loved talking about her, he loved talking about how much he loved her,” Wolfson said. While she did not know Berezdivin well, she could tell that “she was a perfect partner for Ilan.”

Clara, Berezdivin’s mom—for whom no moment with her daughters is too big or small to record—chronicled her deep love for Deborah on her social media.

“Papi and I are filled with great joy but even more so a pride that does not fit within us,” she wrote on the day of Berezdivin’s college acceptance to Tulane in December 2017.

When her daughter cut her brown hair to her shoulders in March 2017, donating the rest, Clara thanked her child “for being so special and aware of the suffering of others.”

In an old birthday post her mother described her child, whom she called “a butterfly,” as “always free, always happy.”

“May you continue like this all your life …” the mother wished her daughter.

This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 12:02 PM.