MIAMI – Rochelle Shoretz, who helped thousands of women in South Florida to learn about their cancer risk, died of complications with breast cancer Sunday. She was 42.
Shoretz founded Sharsheret, a national organization that is active in South Florida. Some of her partners included Temple Beth Am in Pinecrest and the Jewish Community Services of South Florida.
Her "peer support network" had members in Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Aventura and Bal Harbour in Miami-Dade County. In Broward County, they were mostly from Plantation, Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs.
Her last post on Twitter: "Help young women learn their breast cancer risk." It was a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tweet to promote an education program.
Shoretz's main goal was to offer support to Ashkenazi Jewish women, who are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer, because some of them carry a genetic mutation that was discovered about a decade ago. The mutations, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2 are linked to a high risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
DID YOU KNOW?
The altered genes --- BRCA1 and BRCA2 -- were discovered in in 1994 and 1995. The National Institutes of Health later discovered the mutation was more common in the Jewish population and was able to trigger breast and ovarian cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.
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Shoretz served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from 1998 to 1999. She was 28 and the mother of two boys when she was diagnosed.
"I was floored. I thought I was going to go back into practice and make partner in a big law firm," she said during a 2013 ABC News interview.
Shoretz was a graduate of Columbia Law School. She loved the outdoors and was an avid biker. She said the diagnosis was beyond shocking.
"You have these life plans at 28 years old that you don't really consider will be altered by a major medical crisis at that age."
About 11 percent of all new cases of breast cancer in the U.S are found in women younger than 45 years old. The general medical consensus is that women who don't have a risk shouldn't get mammograms until the age of 40. But most women like Shoretz are not aware of their risk.
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Shoretz knew she needed to act quickly if she wanted to save lives. She founded Sharsheret, while she was undergoing chemotherapy in 2001. She named it after the Hebrew word for "chain."
"When I was diagnosed, there were a lot of offers to help with meals and transport my kids," she said during an interview with The Jerusalem Post in 2003. "But [what] I really wanted [was] to speak to another young mom who was going to have to explain to her kids that she was going to lose her hair to chemo."
Shoretz's oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Dr. Monica Fornieir, said in a 2013 email sent to ABC News that she remembered Shoretz was always busy with a lot of paperwork.
"It was of course impressive that she was able to do this while receiving therapy," Fornieir said.
Shoretz completed treatment and survived for about another eight years. She also served as a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Federal Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer in Young Women.
Shoretz was running the organization nationwide when doctors determined the cancer was back in 2009. While she had a bilateral mastectomy, surgery to remove both breast, and other surgeries, she had the network to support her.
"I was a part of the founding but I also got to see firsthand and witness firsthand the tremendous role we play in enhancing quality of life in the thousands of women we serve," she said in 2013. "That has been very rewarding."
Shoretz's service was held Monday in New Jersey. She was survived by her two teenage sons, Shlomo and Dovid Mirsky.
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