As associates said in interviews this week, Ms. Rabkin had a keen eye for unheralded talent. (She was an early advocate, for instance, of the Pennsylvania folk painter Justin McCarthy.) From the mid-1980s till her retirement in 2007, she served on the collections committee of the folk art museum, advising it on acquisitions.  Dorothea Herz was born in Berlin on June 28, 1921, to a Jewish father and a Gentile mother. The parents’ marriage had long been shaky, Leo Rabkin said this week, and after Hitler came to power in 1933, the mother left the family and repudiated her children.  In the years that followed, Dorothea and her twin sister, Rose, were shuttled among sympathetic Christian neighbors, sometimes together, sometimes apart, often hidden in closets. They dared not go to school, and their formal education ended.  After the war began, the twins, now young adults, found themselves adrift in Berlin. Living separately and furtively, they and an older sister, Elizabeth, passed as Gentiles. (Dorothea dyed her hair platinum blond, her husband said.) During this period, their father, pursued by the Gestapo, killed himself. Their mother survived the war.  Rose made her way to New York in 1948. Dorothea arrived the next year, carrying, as she later said, “an empty suitcase.” She found work as a cook in a Schrafft’s restaurant and was later an assistant to a rare-book dealer.  In January 1958, Dorothea met Leo Rabkin on a blind date; they married that May. A native of Cincinnati, Mr. Rabkin is an abstract artist whose work is in the collections of major museums; for many years he was also a teacher of troubled adolescents at the Livingston School for Girls on King Street in Manhattan.  Ms. Rabkin’s older sister, Elizabeth, who remained in Germany, died there in the 1990s; her twin, Rose, committed suicide in the 1970s. Mr. Rabkin is her only immediate survivor.  For a refugee, outsider art is a resonantly apt passion; as Ms. Rabkin often said, she was drawn to American folk art by its wit, its character and, above all, its essential democratic roots. She collected fanciful sculptures, of course, like a soulful-looking witch astride a broomstick. But the work she loved best showed everyday Americans in all their humble diversity — sawyers and sailors, wrestlers and card players, Indians and a Mennonite, black men and white — ordinary people, going freely about their lives.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A37 of the New York edition with the headline: Dorothea Rabkin, 87, Collector, Dies. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Ms. Rabkin and her husband built a collection of American folk art noted for the whirligigs and other sculptures made by anonymous carvers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.