Ben Bernanke

Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia. He is the eldest of three children, having a younger brother and sister. His younger brother, Seth, is currently a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and his younger sister, Sharon, is a prior student and longtime administrator at Berklee College of Music in Boston. His father Philip was a pharmacist and part-time theater manager, and his mother Edna was originally a schoolteacher. They were one of the few Jewish families in the area, attending a local synagogue called Ohav Shalom; as a child, Bernanke learned Hebrew from his maternal grandfather Harold Friedman, who was a professional Torah reader and Hebrew teacher.[3] His father and uncle co-owned and managed a drugstore that they bought from his paternal grandfather, Jonas Bernanke, who immigrated to the United States from Austria after World War I and moved to Dillon, South Carolina from New York in the 1940s