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Gerald Jacobs

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Gerald Jacobs,

Gerald Jacobs

Opinion

Celebrating fierce woman, Elisabeth Maxwell

December 19, 2013 13:10
2 min read

Last week, I attended a memorial service in Oxford, in honour of a woman who, over the last 20 or so years of her long life, received numerous honours and awards to add to her academically earned MA and D.Phil from Oxford University.

Despite these including honorary fellowships of Tel Aviv University and the Woolf Institute, the Sir Sigmund Sternberg Award and the Anne Frank Institute’s Eternal Flame Award, the woman we were remembering was not Jewish but a French Huguenot Protestant, and although there were Jewish elements to the occasion, we were in the imposing 13th century University Church.

She was Elisabeth “Betty” Maxwell, widow of media magnate Robert “Bob” Maxwell — who of course was Jewish notwithstanding his adoption of transient Catholic and Protestant identities in the course of a spectacularly colourful life. She died in August of this year at the age of 92.

Robert and Elisabeth (the romantic echo of the Brownings is not inappropriate) had nine children, two of whom died tragically young.