Susan Feingold, who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a girl, led a grass-roots effort to improve the lives of thousands of underprivileged children with a program that became a model for the national Head Start program, an early-childhood federal outreach initiative for low-income families. 

At first, Susan Feingold and her group of parents wanted only to make things better for their own children, calling their group the Bloomingdale Family Program, named after their sliver of a neighborhood on the Upper West side of Manhattan. In a neighborhood park, they provided gardening classes, athletic programs and reading lessons. The idea grew and ultimately reached President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, which adapted Bloomingdale into a signature initiative of Johnson’s War on Poverty. Susan Feingold became Head Start’s director for more than 40 years.

She was born in Krefeld, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. Her parents arranged for her to be sent to England through the Kindertransport. The last time she saw her mother and father was at a train station in Düsseldorf. They died in a concentration camp.

Susan Feingold died at age 95 on Sept. 27 at her home on the Upper West Side.