Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish Pioneer

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who was considered the spiritual father of the Jewish Renewal movement — an influential camp of religious pioneers who reintroduced to synagogue services ancient Judaic traditions of mysticism and meditation, gender equality and ecstatic prayer — died Thursday at his home in Boulder, Colo. He was 89.

His death was announced by Aleph, an umbrella organization that represents about 40 Jewish Renewal congregations around the world, most of them in North America.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, left, and Ram Dass in 2008. Credit Joan Halifax/Upaya Zen Center

 What joy they exude.


Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi’s strain of Judaism had its roots in Chabad-Lubavitch, a branch of Hasidism that itself began as a revival movement in 18th-century Russia, drawing ideas from mystical Judaic texts like the kabbalah. But he traced the spark for his renewal movement to the intellectual and spiritual ferment he encountered on American college campuses in the 1960s.

As an ordained rabbi of the Lubavitch movement, which sends emissaries around the world to keep the Jewish faith alive, he was dispatched to meet with secularized Jewish students throughout the Northeast. Along the way, he befriended fellow spiritual seekers like the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, the Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton and Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), an educator and proponent of hallucinogens and Hinduism.

His exposure to Eastern religion, medieval Christian mysticism and LSD — he had the first of a handful of hallucinogenic experiences in 1962, under Leary’s tutelage — helped him formulate some of the innovations he brought to contemporary Jewish practice.

From his LSD experience in particular he concluded that “what I’d experienced in prayer and meditation before — the oneness and connection with God — was true, but it wasn’t just Jewish,” he told the writer Sara Davidson, author of “The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery,” a book, published this year, about her conversations with Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi on aging and mortality.

Alice Herz-Sommer, Who Found Peace in Chopin Amid Holocaust

Alice Herz-Sommer in her London apartment in 2012. Credit Yuri Dojc  

 

Throughout her two years in Theresienstadt, through the hunger and cold and death all around her, through the loss of her mother and husband, Alice Herz-Sommer was sustained by a Polish man who had died long before. His name was Frédéric Chopin.

It was Chopin, Mrs. Herz-Sommer averred to the end of her long life, who let her and her young son survive in the camp, also known as Terezin, which the Nazis operated in what was then Czechoslovakia from 1941 until the end of the war in Europe.

Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who died in London on Sunday at 110, and who was widely described as the oldest known Holocaust survivor, had been a distinguished pianist in Europe before the war. But it was only after the Nazi occupation of her homeland, Czechoslovakia, in 1939 that she began a deep study of Chopin’s Études, the set of 27 solo pieces that are some of the most technically demanding and emotionally impassioned works in the piano repertory.

For Mrs. Herz-Sommer, the Études offered a consuming distraction at a time of constant peril. But they ultimately gave her far more than that — far more, even, than spiritual sustenance.

 

“They are very difficult,” Mrs. Herz-Sommer told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2010. “I thought if I learned to play them, they would save my life.”

And so they did.

In recent years, because of her great age; her indomitability; her continued, ardent involvement with music (she practiced for hours each day until shortly before she died); and her recollections of her youthful friendships with titans like Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler; Mrs. Herz-Sommer became a beacon for writers, filmmakers and members of the public eager to learn her story.

She was the subject of biographies, including “A Century of Wisdom: Lessons From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor” (2012), by Caroline Stoessinger, who confirmed her death.

Mrs. Herz-Sommer was also profiled in documentary films, one of which, “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” a 38-minute portrait directed by Malcolm Clarke, is a 2014 Oscar nominee for documentary short subject. The awards take place on Sunday.

 It won the Oscar, and the director gave a moving speech about her.

Alice Herz was born in Prague on Nov. 26, 1903, one of five children of a cultured, German-speaking, secular Jewish family. Her father was a prosperous businessman; her mother moved in the city’s shimmering artistic circles and numbered Kafka and Mahler among her friends. As a child, Alice knew both men; Kafka (“a slightly strange man,” she recalled) attended one of the family’s Passover seders.

Shulamit Aloni, Outspoken Israeli Lawmaker, 86

Shulamit Aloni, a longtime left-wing Israeli minister and Parliament member who was an early champion of civil liberties, challenger of religious hegemony and outspoken opponent of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, died Friday at her home in Kfar Shmaryahu, a Tel Aviv suburb. She was 86. One of her sons, Nimrod, said she had not been seriously ill, “just very old.” 

 In 2008, at age 80, she published  “Israel: Democracy or Ethnocracy?” a harsh assessment of her homeland. She wrote on the cover, “The state is returning to the ghetto, to Orthodox Judaism, and the rule of the fundamentalist rabbinate is becoming more profound.” 

Reuven Rivlin, a Parliament member from the conservative Likud Party, described Mrs. Aloni on Friday as “the last politician in her generation who said what she thought.” But her outspokenness also made for problems. In 1992, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rebuked her for questioning the biblical version of Creation and speaking in the same breath of the Hebrew matriarch Rachel and the prostitute Rahav. The next year, after Mrs. Aloni’s challenging of religious political leaders provoked a coalition crisis, Rabin demoted her from education minister to minister of communications and science and technology.

After Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslims at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, she was among the first to call for the expulsion of hundreds of Jewish settlers from the West Bank city of Hebron. She also said that high school trips to Holocaust sites were turning Israeli youths into xenophobes, and she incited outrage by holding official meetings abroad in nonkosher restaurants.

Edgar M. Bronfman, Who Built a Bigger, More Elegant Seagram

As president of the World Jewish Congress, from 1981 until 2007, Mr. Bronfman turned a loose, cautious federation of Jewish groups in 66 countries into a more focused, confrontational organization. Under his leadership, the Congress pressed the Soviet Union to improve conditions for Jews living within its borders and to allow freer emigration. Spurred by Mr. Bronfman, the Congress led efforts to expose the hidden Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations who became president of Austria. And it campaigned successfully to force Swiss banks to make restitutions of more than a billion dollars to the relatives of German death camp victims who deposited their savings in Switzerland before World War II. 

Mr. Bronfman shrugged off criticism from those who feared that his aggressive tactics were risking an anti-Semitic backlash. “The answer isn’t to say, ‘Don’t make trouble,’ and hide our heads in the sand,” he wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Good Spirits: The Making of a Businessman.” “We may not earn the friendship of others, but we will demand their respect.”

Paul Reichmann, Who Helped Develop the World Financial Center

“I think that what I did in those years was a greater achievement than what I’ve done since,” he was quoted as saying in a 1996 biography of his family, “The Reichmanns,” by Anthony Bianco. Paul Reichmann was born in Vienna on Sept. 27, 1930, the fifth of six siblings. His parents, Samuel and Rene, were Orthodox Jews who had moved from rural Hungary to Vienna, where they owned a prosperous egg export business. But Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 forced the family to flee to Paris.

Two years later, when the Nazis overran France, the Reichmanns fled to Tangier, Morocco, where Samuel Reichmann became a successful currency trader.

The Reichmanns filed for bankruptcy protection in London, Toronto and New York simultaneously.

Only three years later, Mr. Reichmann regained the helm at Canary Wharf, which finally gained nearly full occupancy in 2000 thanks to a booming real estate market in London. By 2000, the Reichmann family’s net worth reached $1 billion. But in an interview with Institutional Investor that year, Mr. Reichmann said his business accomplishments had never given him the sense of fulfillment he experienced as a youthful religious social worker and teacher in North Africa. But “what could have been is a silly way to look at things,” he said. “You are what you are.”

. 

Benzion Netanyahu, 102

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/world/middleeast/benzion-netanyahu-dies-at-102.html

Benzion Mileikowsky was born on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe and America making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan took the family to Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means God-given.

Dying To Get Into The Paper

Novelist of life in Nazi-run Europe

Hans Keilson, a German-born psychoanalyst who won literary fame at the very end of his long life when two of his long-forgotten works of fiction, set in Nazi-occupied Europe, were republished to great acclaim, died on Tuesday in Hilversum, the Netherlands. He was 101. Dr. Keilson, a physician by training, published his first novel at 23. That book, “Life Goes On,” offered a dark picture of German political life between the wars, reflected in the troubles encountered by Max, a Jewish store owner modeled on Dr. Keilson’s father, a textile merchant. It was banned by the Nazis in 1934.

Two years later Dr. Keilson emigrated to the Netherlands with his future wife, Gertrud Manz. He began a new novel, “The Death of the Adversary,” about a young Jewish man’s experiences in Germany as the Nazis gain a grip on power, but he put the manuscript aside after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 forced him to live in hiding in Delft. His experiences provided the material for the novella “Comedy in a Minor Key,” about a Dutch couple who shelter an elderly Jew who dies of natural causes. After disposing of the body carelessly, they too must go into hiding. The novella was published by a German-language Amsterdam press in 1947, the same year Anne Frank’s diary was released. “The Death of the Adversary,” which Dr. Keilson resumed writing after the war, came out in Germany in 1959, and a stilted English translation appeared in 1962. A brief notice in The New York Times described it as a “novel of suspense.” Although the novel sold well and Time magazine named it one of the top 10 books of the year, along with works like Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Ship of Fools,” Dr. Keilson slipped into literary obscurity. He wrote no more fiction, he later said, because he believed that he no longer had an audience.

In 2007 Damion Searls, a literary translator,chanced upon "Comedy in a Minor Key" in an Austrian bookstore's sidewalk bargain bin and mounted a successful campaign to resurrect Dr. Keilson's works. In 2010 Farrar, Straus & Giroux  reissued "The Death of the Adversary"  which was translated to English by Ivo Jarosy in 1962.Mr. Searls's translation of "Comedy in a Minor Key," was also published in Britain by Hesperus Press. The novelist Francine Prose, in The New York Times Book Review, declared both works masterpieces and their author a genius. “Rarely have such harrowing narratives been related with such wry, off-kilter humor, and in so quiet a whisper,” she wrote. “Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers.” 

After his first novel was banned, his publisher, Samuel Fischer, told him to leave Germany as quickly as possible. His future wife, a graphologist, had also sensed impending disaster. After Dr. Keilson showed her a sample of Hitler’s handwriting in 1935, she said, “He’s going to set the world on fire.”

Promoted Arab-Jewish Ties

Alan B. Slifka, a New York investment manager who used his fortune to promote harmony among Israeli Arabs and Jews and to give the Big Apple Circus its start, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81 and also had a home in Manhattan.

Seven years after starting the company, Mr. Slifka visited friends in Israel and could not understand why so few of them were friendly with Arab-Israeli citizens. “He toured Arab villages,” Ms. Ritvo-Slifka said, “and was troubled at the discrepancies in how they lived.” With $500,000, Mr. Slifka started the Abraham Fund Initiatives, named for the biblical patriarch of both Arabs and Jews. Since its establishment, the fund has provided more than $10 million in grants for a range of educational programs to dispel stereotypes and to foster Jewish-Arab cooperation in health, social services and women’s rights. Among many projects, it has supported an Arab-Jewish theater workshop, touring chamber music quartets and a karate program for Jewish and Arab youngsters.

Mr. Slifka also donated more than $20 million to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan, and in 2003 gave $5 million to Brandeis University to create a master’s degree program in coexistence studies. 

Harvard Business School profile in 2001.

hic et nunc

 Tullia Zevi, who fled Fascism as a teenager and led Italy’s Jewish community during a period of improving relations with the Vatican, died on Saturday in Rome.

In the book of interviews, Ms. Zevi said that she did not believe in an afterlife and that she had lived her life with one guiding idea: “hic et nunc,” Latin for “here and now.”

“What we have to do is here,” she said. “The rest is just hypothetical.”

 [“Ti Racconto la Mia Storia” (“I’ll Tell You My Story”), a 2007 book of conversations with her granddaughter.]

Belva Plain, who became a best-selling author at age 59 and whose multigenerational family sagas of Jewish American life won a loyal readership in the millions, died on Tuesday at her home in Short Hills, N.J. She was 95. Her daughter Barbara Plain confirmed her death.

59? There's hope for us yet.

Ms. Plain’s first novel, “Evergreen,” published in 1978, spent 41 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list in hardcover and another 20 in paperback, and was made into a mini-series by NBC in 1985. It follows Anna, a feisty, redheaded Jewish immigrant girl from Poland in turn-of-the-century New York, whose family story continues through several decades and three more books.

Strong-willed women, many of them Jewish and red-haired as well, appear again and again in Ms. Plain’s fiction. Some of her novels use historical settings — “Crescent City,” published in 1984, was set in the Jewish community of Civil War-era New Orleans. Other books tell stories about contemporary issues, sometimes inspired by the headlines — divorce (“Promises”), adoption (“Blessings”), child sexual abuse (“The Carousel”) or babies accidentally switched at birth (“Daybreak”). All of them are full of passion, but there is very little explicit sex. According to her publisher, almost 30 million copies of her books are in print, and they have been translated into 22 languages. Twenty of the novels have appeared on The New York Times best-seller list. The critics were often unimpressed by Ms. Plain’s novels. In a review of “Harvest” in The Times in 1990, Webster Schott described Ms. Plain’s works as “easy, consoling works of generous spirit, fat with plot and sentiment, thin in nearly every other way and almost invisible in character development.”

There's the age-old conflict between what critics call 'good' and what the public calls 'good.' What matters, in the market, anyway, is the latter, for critics only interest a small audience, and that won't pay the rent.

Such opinions did not stop millions from enjoying her books; readers’ comments on Amazon often speak of them as “big, cozy reads.” That would have pleased Ms. Plain, who saw nothing wrong with being entertaining. “Even the real geniuses, like Dostoyevsky, entertained,” she said.

Another point critics forget: Poe was thrashed by contemporaries, and now look at who's considered a genius.

Belva Plain’s own story sounds like something out of a novel. When “Evergreen” became an overnight success, she was a grandmother approaching 60. But she was not a novice; Ms. Plain had been writing for much of her life. Born Belva Offenberg in New York City on Oct. 9, 1915, she was a third-generation American of German Jewish descent; her father was a builder. She attended the Fieldston School and graduated from Barnard College in 1939 with a degree in history. She sold her first story to Cosmopolitan (“a very different magazine then,” she told an interviewer) when she was 25 and contributed several dozen to various women’s magazines until she had three children in rapid succession. (“I couldn’t have done both,” she explained.) She married Dr. Irving Plain, an ophthalmologist, in 1941; he died in 1982. In addition to her daughter Barbara, Ms. Plain is survived by another daughter, Nancy Goldfeder; a son, John; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.


Well groomed and conservatively dressed, she looked far younger than her age. “Ladylike” was an adjective often applied both to Ms. Plain and her books. (“Oh,” she once responded to an interviewer who had used it, “I certainly hope you don’t mean ‘prissy.’ ”) For her own reading, Ms. Plain preferred the classics and spoke of rereading the novels of Anthony Trollope. Many modern novels, she thought, were “sleazy trash.”

Ms. Plain’s work routine involved making detailed outlines of her books and then writing them in longhand in spiral notebooks, rarely using a typewriter and never a computer. A disciplined worker, she wrote for several hours in the morning five days a week. She produced a 500- or 600-page novel every year or so. Ms. Plain was fiercely private about her life, but she spoke about her novels, often to Jewish groups. “I got sick of reading the same old story, told by Jewish writers, of the same old stereotypes — the possessive mothers, the worn-out fathers, all the rest of the neurotic rebellious unhappy self-hating tribe,” she said. “I wanted to write a different novel about Jews — and a truer one.”


October 17, 2010: Belva Plain, Novelist of Jewish-American Life, Dies at 95. By ELSA DIXLER

Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup

It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television. It is, of course, the Anthora, the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ coffee securely for nearly half a century. Introduced in the 1960s, the Anthora was long made by the hundreds of millions annually, nearly every cup destined for the New York area.

A pop-cultural totem, the Anthora has been enshrined in museums; its likeness has adorned tourist memorabilia like T-shirts and ceramic mugs. Like many once-celebrated artifacts, though, the cup may now be endangered, the victim of urban gentrification.

The Anthora seems to have been here forever, as if bestowed by the gods at the city’s creation. But in fact, it was created by man — one man in particular, a refugee from Nazi Europe named Leslie Buck. Mr. Buck, a retired paper-cup company executive, died on Monday, at 87, at his home on Long Island, in Glen Cove. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Robert said. Mr. Buck, previously a longtime resident of Syosset, N.Y., also had a home in Delray Beach, Fla.

Leslie Buck in 1991.

The Anthora has spawned a flock of imitations by competitors over the years, but it was first designed by Mr. Buck for the Sherri Cup Company in Kensington, Conn.

Mr. Buck’s cup was blue, with a white meander ringing the top and bottom; down each side was a drawing of the Greek vase known as an amphora. (“Anthora” comes from “amphora,” as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent, his son said.) Some later imitators depict fluted white columns; others show a discus thrower.

On front and back, Mr. Buck emblazoned the Anthora with three steaming golden coffee cups. Above them, in lettering that suggests a Classical inscription, was the Anthora’s very soul — the motto. It has appeared in many variant texts since then; Mr. Buck’s original, with its welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility, was simply this:

We Are Happy

To Serve You.

Though the Anthora no longer dominates the urban landscape as it once did, it can still be found at diners, delis and food carts citywide, a squat, stalwart island in a sea of tall, grande and venti. On the street, it warms the harried hands of pedestrians. Without the Anthora, “Law & Order” could scarcely exist.

Laszlo Büch was born on Sept. 20, 1922, to a Jewish family in Khust, then in Czechoslovakia. (It is today in Ukraine.) His parents were killed by the Nazis during World War II; Laszlo himself survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

After the war, Mr. Buck made his way to New York, where he Americanized his name and ran an import-export business with his brother, Eugene, who had also survived the camps. In the late 1950s or thereabouts, the brothers started Premier Cup, a paper-cup manufacturer in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Leslie Buck joined Sherri Cup, then a startup, in the mid-’60s. Originally the company’s sales manager (for a time, he was its entire sales force), he later became its director of marketing.

Sherri was keen to crack New York’s hot-cup market. Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success.

Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup, but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said. On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription.

Besides his son, Robert, and brother, Eugene, Mr. Buck is survived by his wife, the former Ella Farkas, whom he married in 1949; two daughters, Beverly Eisenoff and Linda Rush; and four grandchildren.

In recent years, with the gentrification of the city and its brew, demand for the humble Anthora has waned. In 1994, Sherri sold 500 million of the cups, as The New York Times reported afterward. In 2005, the Solo Cup Company, into which Sherri had been absorbed, was selling about 200 million cups a year, The Times reported.

Today, Solo no longer carries the Anthora as a stock item, making it only on request. Other companies still turn out versions of the cup, though not in the quantities of its 20th-century heyday.

But given the tenacious traditionalism of many locals (“Avenue of the Americas,” anyone?), it is safe to assume that the Anthora and its heirs will endure, at least for a while, in the city’s steadfast precincts. For some time to come, on any given day, somewhere a New Yorker will be cradling the cup, with its crisp design and snug white lid, the stuff of life inside.

April 29, 2010
Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87
By MARGALIT FOX

Mip Gies

Anne Frank House, via Associated Press - Miep Gies, front left, and Otto Frank, center, in a 1945 photograph. With them are those who helped hide the Franks: Johannes Kleiman, back left, Victor Kugler and Elizabeth Voskuijl.

This brings to mind the Anne Frank production that I stage managed in Phoenicia's Shandaken Theatrical Society in 2005.




January 12, 2010
Miep Gies, Protector of Anne Frank, Dies at 100
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Miep Gies, the last survivor among Anne Frank’s protectors and the woman who preserved the diary that endures as a testament to the human spirit in the face of unfathomable evil, died Monday night, the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said. She was 100.

The British Broadcasting Corporation said Mrs. Gies suffered a fall late last month and died at a nursing home.

“I am not a hero,” Mrs. Gies wrote in her memoir, “Anne Frank Remembered,” published in 1987. “I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more — much more — during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness.”

Mrs. Gies sought no accolades for joining with her husband and three others in hiding Anne Frank, her father, mother and older sister and four other Dutch Jews for 25 months in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. But she came to be viewed as a courageous figure when her role in sheltering Anne Frank was revealed with the publication of her memoir. She then traveled the world while in her 80s, speaking against intolerance. The West German government presented her with its highest civilian medal in 1989, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted her in 1996.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers. The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Mrs. Gies gathered up those writings and hid them, unread, hoping that Anne would someday return to claim them.

But when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family. Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday. Her sister, Margot, died there at age 19 and their mother, Edith Frank, died at Auschwitz.

Mrs. Gies gave Anne’s writings to Mr. Frank, and they were first published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an abridged version. “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” has since been translated into dozens of languages in several editions, read by millions and adapted for the stage and screen, a voice representing the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

But Mrs. Gies remained largely anonymous until an American writer, Alison Leslie Gold, persuaded her to tell her story and worked with her on “Anne Frank Remembered.”

Miep Gies was born Feb. 15, 1909, as Hermine Santrouschitz, a member of a Roman Catholic family in Vienna. When she was 11, she was sent to Leiden to be cared for by a Dutch family, being among the many Austrian children suffering from food shortages in the wake of World War I. She was given the Dutch nickname Miep and later adopted by the family.

When she was 13, the family moved to Amsterdam, and in 1933 she became a secretary to Otto Frank, who was overseeing the Dutch branch of a German company selling an ingredient for manufacturing jam. Mr. Frank had fled Hitler’s Germany, and he was soon joined by his wife and daughters.

Miep became a trusted employee and friend of the Frank family and joined in its alarm over the persecution of German Jews. In May 1940, the Netherlands fell in Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries. In July 1942, when thousands of Dutch Jews were being deported to concentration camps, the Frank family went into hiding in unused rooms above Mr. Frank’s office. He asked Mrs. Gies if she would help shelter them, and she unhesitatingly agreed.

The annex became a hiding place not only for the Franks but for three members of a family named van Pels — the father a business colleague of Mr. Frank’s — and Mrs. Gies’s dentist, Fritz Pfeffer.

Having married a Dutch social worker, Jan Gies, in 1941, Miep Gies joined with him and three other employees of Mr. Frank’s business in sheltering the eight Jews and caring for their daily needs. The protectors risked death if caught by the Nazis.

Mrs. Gies, while continuing to work for Mr. Frank’s business, which remained open under figurehead Christian management, played a central role in caring for the hidden. She found food for them, brought books and news of the outside world and provided emotional support, bringing Anne her first pair of high-heeled shoes and baking a holiday cake. On one occasion, Miep and Jan Gies (he is referred to in the diary as Henk, one of many pseudonyms Anne used) spent a night in the annex to experience the terror there for themselves.

At their apartment a short bicycle ride away, Mrs. Gies and her husband, a member of the Dutch resistance, hid an anti-Nazi university student.

When the Gestapo raided the hiding place — tipped off by someone unknown to this day — Mrs. Gies was working in the building. But one of the Nazi agents spared her from arrest, probably in light of their common Austrian heritage. Mrs. Gies later went to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam in a futile attempt to offer a bribe for the lives of the eight arrested Jews.

Mrs. Gies endured the “Hunger Winter” in the Netherlands during the war’s final months, then lived quietly in Amsterdam, a homemaker. But upon publication of her memoir, she began to travel widely as a living link to Anne Frank and spoke on the lessons of the Holocaust, often talking to schoolchildren who were reading Anne’s diary. A small woman — just a shade over 5 feet tall — whose hair had turned white, she bore a single remembrance of those days in the hiding place, a black onyx ring with a diamond in the center, worn on her left hand. It was a gift from Auguste von Pels, one of the doomed Jews she had sheltered.

Every Aug. 4, the anniversary of the raid on the annex, Miep and Jan Gies remained at their Amsterdam home. They withdrew from the world and reflected on the lost.

Mrs. Gies is survived by her son, Paul, and three grandchildren. Her husband died in 1993. The other three people who helped shelter the Frank family — Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Elisabeth Voskuijl — died earlier.

Otto Frank, who lived with Miep and Jan Gies for a time after the war, died in Basel, Switzerland, in 1980. The building housing the secret annex, at Prinsengracht 263, has become a museum.

In her diary entry on May 8, 1944, Anne Frank wrote how “we are never far from Miep’s thoughts.”

In her memoir, Mrs. Gies told of her emotions when she finally read the diary.

She wrote: “The emptiness in my heart was eased. So much had been lost, but now Anne’s voice would never be lost. My young friend had left a remarkable legacy to the world.

“But always, every day of my life, I’ve wished that things had been different. That even had Anne’s diary been lost to the world, Anne and the others might somehow have been saved.

“Not a day goes by that I do not grieve for them.”

Exodus Skipper in Defiant ’47 Voyage

United Press International, 1961 - Capt. Yitzhak Ahronovitch



The Exodus, a ship used to try to take Jewish refugees to British-controlled Palestine in 1947


December 24, 2009
Yitzhak Ahronovitch, Exodus Skipper in Defiant ’47 Voyage of Jewish Refugees, Dies at 86
By MARGALIT FOX

Yitzhak Ahronovitch, the captain of the refugee ship Exodus, whose violent interception by the British Navy as it tried to take thousands of Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1947 helped rally support for the creation of the state of Israel the next year, died Wednesday in northern Israel. He was 86.

Family members said Captain Ahronovitch died after a long illness, The Associated Press reported.

An antiquated former Chesapeake Bay steamship originally known as the President Warfield, the Exodus 1947, as it was formally renamed, was acquired by the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, in 1946. The group planned to use it to transport refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, to Palestine, then under British control.

The refugees had no legal authority to enter Palestine, and the British were determined to block the ship. In the battle that ensued, three Jews aboard the Exodus were killed. The ship’s passengers — more than 4,500 men, women and children — were ultimately deported to Germany.

The attack and its aftermath, which focused attention on the plight of many European Jews after the war, made headlines worldwide and helped marshal support for an Israeli state.

In a statement on Wednesday, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, said Captain Ahronovitch had “made a unique contribution to the state which will never be forgotten,” Agence France-Presse reported.

The story of the ship’s thwarted journey formed the loose basis for Leon Uris’s novel “Exodus,” published in 1958. In 1960, the novel was made into a film starring Paul Newman as a character based on Yossi Harel, the overall commander of the Exodus operation. Neither book nor movie, apparently, included a character based on Captain Ahronovitch.

Mr. Harel died last year.

Yitzhak Ahronovitch, familiarly known as Ike, was born in Poland in 1923. (His family name has been rendered in news accounts over the years as Aronowicz, Aronowitz, Aharonowitz and Aharonovitz, among other spellings; his first name was sometimes given as Yehiel.) At 10, he moved with his family to Palestine.

As a young man, he was a member of Palmach, the Haganah’s strike force, The New York Times reported in 1961. In World War II, he sailed on British and Norwegian merchant vessels.

Captain Ahronovitch was 23 when he took the helm of the Exodus. On July 11, 1947, he picked up the refugees at Sète, in southern France. On July 18, as the ship neared the coast of Palestine, the British Navy intercepted it. Captain Ahronovitch tried to break through, but two British destroyers rammed the ship.

Several hours of fighting followed, with the ship’s passengers spraying fuel oil and throwing smoke bombs, life rafts and whatever else came to hand, down on the British sailors trying to board, The Times reported at the time. Soon the British opened fire. Two immigrants and a crewman on the Exodus were killed; scores more were wounded, many seriously. The ship was towed to Haifa, and from there its passengers were deported, first to France and eventually to Germany, where they were placed in camps near Lübeck.

Afterward, Captain Ahronovitch lived out of the limelight. In the early 1960s, he studied for a master’s degree in business administration at Columbia.

His survivors include two daughters, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, The A.P. said.

For five years after its violent end, the Exodus lay derelict, moored off Haifa. In 1952 it burned to the waterline, and in 1963 it was scrapped.

Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Marek Edelman at the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes memorial.




October 3, 2009
Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90
By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

Marek Edelman, a cardiologist who was the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Germans, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 90.

A friend, Paula Sawicka, told The Associated Press that Dr. Edelman had died “among friends, among his close people,” at her home, where he had lived for the past two years. For many years he lived in Lodz, Poland’s second largest city.

Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans.

He was 20 when the Germans overran Poland in 1939, and in the months that followed he watched as they turned his Warsaw neighborhood into a ghetto, cutting it off from the rest of the city with brick walls, barbed wire and armed sentries. By early 1942, as many as 500,000 Jews had been herded into the area.

In worsening conditions of hunger and brutality, the ghetto residents, wearing the obligatory Star of David armbands, were forced to sew military uniforms and produce other war materials.

Then, starting on July 22, 1942, the ghetto population began to shrink ominously. Each day, armed Germans and the Ukrainians serving with them prodded and wedged 5,000 to 6,000 Jews into long trains, which departed from the Umschlagplatz, a square at the southern end of the ghetto. At times they lured people onto the trains with loaves of brown bread. The Germans said the trains were going to factories where work conditions were better.

Marek Edelman and the young people with whom he had forged clandestine links knew that such claims were lies and that the human cargos were in fact being taken to camps near Lublin, where they were shot, put into boxcars with quicklime or forced into gas chambers. He and his colleagues talked about armed resistance but had no weapons at the time.

He spent every day at the Umschlagplatz watching as trains were loaded and sent off. He was there ostensibly in his official capacity as a messenger for the ghetto hospital, carrying documents in his pocket that enabled him to pull people off the trains by designating them too ill to travel. Since the Germans held to the fiction that the passengers were being sent to better surroundings, they made a show of holding back the sick. In fact, young Marek used the passes to save people who would be useful to the Jewish Combat Organization, then being formed.

“I was merciless,” he recalled many years later. “One woman begged me to pull out her 14-year-old daughter, but I was only able to take one more person, and I took Zosia, who was our best courier.”

On Sept. 8, when according to German records 310,322 Jews had been put on the trains and sent to the death camps and 5,961 more had been murdered inside the ghetto, the liquidation was suspended. There were some 60,000 Jews still in the ghetto. The leaders of the Jewish Combat Organization were certain that the Germans would try to finish the liquidation, and for the next six months the organization planned for armed resistance.

At 4 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1943, as German soldiers and their Ukrainian, Latvian and Polish henchmen marched through the ghetto to round up people, they came, for the first time, under sustained fire. By midafternoon they were forced to withdraw without having taken a single person.

The fighting continued for three weeks. On one side were 220 ghetto fighters, hungry and relatively untrained youths deployed in 22 units. Each unit had a pistol, five grenades and five homemade bottle bombs. They also had two mines and one submachine gun.

Ranged against them, on a daily average, were 36 German officers and 2,054 others with an arsenal that included 82 machine guns, 135 submachine guns and 1,358 rifles along with armored vehicles, artillery and air power used to set the ghetto ablaze.

Dr. Edelman buried his fallen comrades and used his knowledge of the neighborhood, where he had grown up, to find escape routes for units that were pinned down. Many years later he would say that no one ever established how many Germans they had killed: “Some say 200, some say 30. Does it make a difference?”

“After three weeks,” he recalled, “most of us were dead.”

At the end he found a way out of an encircled position, leading 50 others with him.

Eventually, he took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, when for 63 days Poles fought valorously but unsuccessfully to liberate their capital from the Germans.

Once the war ended, he threw himself into his medical studies and became a doctor in Lodz. For 30 years he kept his memories and thoughts about what happened to himself, concentrating on his medical work and becoming one of Poland’s leading heart specialists and the author of a much-used textbook on the treatment of heart attacks.

Even after Poland’s anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, when he was demoted at the hospital and most of the remaining Jews in Poland, including his wife and two children, emigrated, Dr. Edelman stayed. He was unwilling, and perhaps unable, to tear himself away from the place where East European Jewry had once thrived and then perished as he watched.

Then, in 1976, he suddenly spoke out, telling Hanna Krall, a Polish writer of Jewish origin, what he had so carefully remembered. The recollections were stark and surprising. He challenged those who claimed that there had been many more than 220 ghetto fighters. Most provocatively, he insisted that it was not more meaningful or heroic to die with a gun in one’s hands than to perish in apparent submission to an overwhelming and invincible evil.

“These people went quietly and with dignity,” he told Mrs. Krall, speaking of the millions killed in the Nazi gas chambers. “It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.”

After the book appeared, Dr. Edelman was often sought out by visitors from around the world, whose questions he would sometimes wave aside gruffly, saying that people who had not been there could never understand the choices made in the ghetto.

He would cite the example of a nurse in the ghetto hospital who he said was greatly admired, and deservedly so, for smothering newborn children to save their mothers the inevitable pain that would come when the babies starved to death.

He would dispute the use of the word “uprising,” saying that it normally implied some slight prospect of victory. In the ghetto, he said, there was no such prospect.

“It was a defensive action,” he would say, or, “We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.”

Marek Edelman was born on Sept. 19, 1919, the only son of a family that spoke Yiddish at home and Polish at work. His father died when he was very young; his mother, who worked as a secretary at a hospital, died when he was 14. While going to high school he was looked after by his mother’s friends from the hospital.

Dr. Edelman was an early member of the Solidarity free labor union and was among those interned when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981.

Two years later he was asked to serve on the organizing committee for an observance of the 40th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. He declined, saying that to do so “would be an act of cynicism and contempt” in a country “where social life is dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion.”

Eight years later he served as Solidarity’s consultant on health policy in the round-table talks that led to democratic rule for Poland. In the first free elections, he ran for the Polish Senate, losing narrowly. He kept working at the hospital in Lodz, dodging any suggestion that he retire. He held an honorary doctorate from Yale.

Dr. Edelman’s wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, a pediatrician, died last year in Paris. She had worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto. He is survived by their two children, Aleksander, a biophysicist, and Ania, a chemist, both of Paris, as well as two grandchildren.

The Polish title of the book Mrs. Krall wrote about Dr. Edelman could be translated as “To Finish Before God,” with the implicit idea being one of racing with God. But when the English translation was published by Henry Holt and Company, it was called “Shielding the Flame,” a reference to a passage in which Dr. Edelman explained his philosophy both in the ghetto and later as a doctor.

“God is trying to blow out the candle, and I’m quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention,” he said. “To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than he would wish.”

Photographer Inspired by Mexico

Marcey Jacobson in 2006.






August 11, 2009
, a Photographer Inspired by Mexico, Dies at 97
By Bruce Weber (NY Times)

Marcey Jacobson, a self-taught photographer from New York City who spent decades in the southern Mexican highlands documenting the lives of the indigenous Indian peoples, died on July 26 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, in the state of Chiapas. She was 97.

The cause was heart failure, said a friend, Janet Schwartz.

Ms. Jacobson was eking out a living in New York City doing mechanical drafting when she first visited San Cristóbal in 1956, intending only a short stay. Instead she found a place she called “the solution to everything,” and, with her companion, Janet Marren, a painter, settled there for the rest of her life.

Chiapas is one of the Mexican states I have not visited, and wish to visit.

She took up photography with a borrowed Rolleiflex camera. Patiently exploring the colorful city, the central marketplace for the Mayan-speaking Indian villages of the region, she won the trust of the often camera-shy locals and taught herself the craft of making black-and-white pictures from what she saw in its cobblestone streets and muddy byways, in its dramatic landscapes and weather events, and perhaps most of all, in the faces of the inhabitants. Her portraits were haunting.

“She had to read how-to-do books on developing and ask Americans to bring paper and chemicals when they came this way to visit,” Ms. Schwartz wrote in an e-mail message on Wednesday.

The results, about 14,000 negatives produced mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, describe the local daily life, its mercantile, religious and familial rites, in sensitive detail. They are destined for the Na Bolom Museum in San Cristóbal, Ms. Schwartz said.

Most of Ms. Jacobson’s work preceded the Zapatista revolution of 1994, when San Cristóbal was one of the cities briefly seized by leftist forces demanding better treatment for Mexico’s indigenous people. But what the photos frequently reveal are the tensions inherent in an ingrained caste system and the changes in a city and a society undergoing modernization.

In 2001, when she was 90, her work was at last widely recognized; 75 of her photos were collected in a book, “The Burden of Time”/“El Cargo del Tiempo,” printed in a bilingual edition by Stanford University Press.

Marcella Jacobson was born in the Bronx on Sept. 27, 1911. She was by temperament a bohemian, and by political leaning a socialist. She traveled frequently, first visiting Mexico in 1941. In New York working for political causes, she found herself particularly moved by the plight of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, protesting on their behalf outside the White House and visiting the funeral home after their execution. Ms. Schwartz said her friend’s willing escape to Chiapas was no doubt affected by the pressures she felt, as a lesbian and a Communist sympathizer, during the McCarthy era in the United States.

No doubt. A communist lesbian in 1952? What a target she would have made for a zealot.

Ms. Jacobson leaves no immediate survivors. Her partner, Ms. Marren, died in 1998.

“I love being locked up all alone in a darkroom, where nobody can get at me,” Ms. Jacobson said in a 1990 interview published in 2006 in Bridges, a Jewish feminist journal. “You take a negative, you put it in the enlarger, you expose a piece of lined paper, you put it in the developer. It’s absolutely blank. But then it develops, and you watch it, the image floats up to you. And then — you re-experience what you experienced when you took the photograph.”

Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System

Helen Suzman, the internationally renowned anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, died in Johannesburg early on Thursday, a family member said. She was 91.

Her son-in-law, Jeffrey Jowell, a law professor in London, said she died peacefully at her home in the affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg after a brief illness.

For decades, Mrs. Suzman was among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to racial rule. As the liberal Progressive Party’s lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years until the mid-1970s, a period when many of apartheid’s most repressive features were being devised, she used her parliamentary immunity to speak out when other avenues of protest were harshly suppressed.

While she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change. More controversially, she differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa who were supportive of economic sanctions to press the country’s white rulers toward reform, saying sanctions would hurt poor blacks more than whites.

To Mrs. Suzman’s frustration, this led some of her critics to say she was unwittingly helping to prolong apartheid. This was a variation on a critique she had long endured, and to some extent accepted — that by engaging in what was largely a charade of parliamentary politics in apartheid South Africa, she became complicit, however unwillingly, in the larger deceits of apartheid, which would ultimately be ended not by a small band of white dissenters, but by the more powerful forces of the black freedom struggle and external political pressure.

Among her friends, it was a reality Mrs. Suzman conceded, though she and many opponents of apartheid believed that it was important to keep the hopes of eventual democracy in the country alive and that she could help the victims of apartheid by her efforts to expose the evils of the system in and out of Parliament.

John Parkin/Associated Press

Helen Suzman with Nelson Mandela at his Soweto home in February, 1990. 

In a 1966 profile in The New York Times Magazine, Joseph Lelyveld, the newspaper’s correspondent in South Africa at the time, recounted one of her favorite stories, about an overeager dinner host who gave a black man serving her a lecture on her parliamentary achievements.

“Do you know who this is, John?” the host asked. “This is Helen Suzman, the champion of your cause — the champion of human rights in South Africa.”

“She waste her time,” John replied, as Mrs. Suzman retold it later, laughing brightly as she repeated the line. “She waste her time.”

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Helen Suzman in 1975.

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman confronted the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik F. Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid’s repression of the black and mixed-race populations. She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid’s leading “bullies,” who in turn dismissed her as a “dangerous subversive” and a “sickly humanist.”

Shouts of “Go back to Moscow!” greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, on at least one occasion, “Go back to Israel!” — a reference to her antecedents as the daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After the 1976 Soweto riots, Mr. Vorster mocked her for beating with what he called her “pretty little pink hands” against apartheid, while secure in the knowledge, as he claimed, that she and other white opponents could continue to enjoy the privileged lives apartheid guaranteed without fear that their demands for an end to the racial laws would succeed.

“I am not frightened of you — I never have been, and I never will be,” she told Prime Minister Botha in a parliamentary exchange in the late 1970s. “I think nothing of you.”

For his part, Mr. Botha called her “a vicious little cat.” When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.”

Her home and office telephones were constantly tapped, an intrusion she liked to counter by blowing an ear-splitting whistle into the mouthpiece.

But perhaps because of her parliamentary immunity, a feature of their showpiece democracy that apartheid leaders guarded with care, she was never detained or subjected to one of the stifling “banning orders” that apartheid leaders used to curb dissent by prohibiting people from attending political meetings, speaking in public or even leaving their homes.

Her opposition to economic sanctions made her a contentious figure among some apartheid opponents, including protesters on American college campuses, like Brandeis and Harvard, where she received honorary degrees. “I understand the moral abhorrence and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate,” she told a New York audience in 1986. “But I don’t see how wrecking the economy of the country will ensure a more stable and just society.”

She rarely faced such criticism from South Africa’s best-known black leaders. Mr. Mandela spoke with affection of her visits to the Robben Island prison in the chilly Atlantic waters off Cape Town, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964 and where he remained until he was moved to a mainland prison nearly 20 years later. Using her parliamentary visiting rights, she made her first trip in 1967 and returned frequently.

Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Helen Suzman in Johannesburg in November 2007.

“It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard,” Mr. Mandela recalled in an interview when he was released in 1990 after serving 27 years. “She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”

On Thursday, the governing African National Congress paid tribute by saying in a statement that Mrs. Suzman “became a thorn in the flesh of apartheid by openly criticizing segregation of Blacks by a Whites-only apartheid system.” Mr. Mandela’s foundation issued a statement from its Johannesburg headquarters saying that South Africa had lost “a great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, who forged a close friendship with Mrs. Suzman when they were leading proponents of peaceful change during the violent upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, said in his statement that the country owed her an enormous debt. “She really was indomitable,” he said.

By the early 1990s, when apartheid gave way to black majority rule, there was widespread affection for Mrs. Suzman in black townships like Soweto, where many people knew her simply as Miss Helen.

But while no longer in Parliament in her final years, she remained an acerbic critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing, now by the country’s new black rulers. Only recently, she joined other prominent South Africans in demanding a fresh inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s, some involving the president of the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma.

Mrs. Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on Nov. 17, 1917, in Germiston, a gold-mining town on the outskirts of Johannesburg. She was educated at the Parktown convent school in Johannesburg, and studied economics at the city’s Witwatersrand University. At the age of 19, in 1937, she married Moses Meyer Suzman, known as Mosie, a cardiologist, with whom she had two daughters, before returning to the university in 1944.

She is survived by her daughters, Frances, an art historian, and Patricia, a medical specialist.

Universities around the world awarded Mrs. Suzman 27 honorary doctorates, and she received numerous other honors from the United Nations and an array of religious and human rights groups around the world. Queen Elizabeth II made her an honorary dame, customary for citizens of countries other than Britain.

Mrs. Suzman traced her opposition to apartheid to her university years, when she studied South Africa’s racial laws and was incensed by what she learned, particularly by the so-called pass laws, which were fundamental to the apartheid system, restricting where blacks could live and work.

She ran for Parliament in Johannesburg’s upscale Houghton district and remained the district’s legislator from 1953 to 1989. She began as a member of the United Party, which had been usurped in 1949, after decades as South Africa’s governing party, by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. It was the Nationalists, under Mr. Verwoerd, who codified and extended the existing racial laws, creating apartheid.

In 1959, impatient with the United Party’s tolerance of racial segregation, she became a founder of the liberal Progressive Party, later known as the Progressive Federal Party, which favored a more inclusive, nonracial franchise that would lead to black majority rule. Some of the most relentless enforcers of apartheid eventually developed a grudging respect for her, even a hint of affection. James T. Kruger, the justice minister under Mr. Vorster during the Soweto riots, was one of the “bullies” Mrs. Suzman frequently denounced.

Years later, out of office, Mr. Kruger learned that Mrs. Suzman was planning a tourist visit to the Soviet Union with her husband. A keen amateur philatelist, he approached her in the parliamentary lobby and gave her a sheaf of self-addressed postcards and letters, each bearing new South African stamps, asking her to mail them back to him from Moscow.

When she said that the Soviet postal authorities would not accept South African stamps, she recalled, Mr. Kruger was puzzled. For Mrs. Suzman, the incident demonstrated the occluded world inhabited by many apartheid leaders, who often acted, she said, as if they belonged to the 17th, not the 20th century. “Poor old Jimmy Kruger,” she said. “Like most of them, he knew very little of the world beyond South Africa.”

Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting.
January 2, 2009
Helen Suzman, Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System, Is Dead at 91
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL