Elisabeth Maxwell dies at the age of 92
ELISABETH MAXWELL, THE widow of media tycoon Robert Maxwell, has died at the age of 92.
Dr Maxwell, who was not Jewish, devoted her life to Holocaust education and Jewish-Christian relations.
She is probably best known for a series of three conferences which she launched in 1988 called Remembering for the Future. The series followed the previous year’s inauguration of her journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies She also edited two books on the Holocaust.
BorninFrancein1921,“Betty”Maxwell was educated in law at the Sorbonne and then studied modern languages at Oxford, where she later went on to obtain a doctorate.
She held many prestigious positions, including honorary Fellow of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, which promotes the study of relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims.
It was research into the family background of her husband that sparked her interest in the Holocaust. She discovered over 300 of his relatives had died in the Holocaust.
In an interview with the JC in 2005, she recalled: “When [the family tree] was finished, I gave it to Yad Vashem. It was in the form of a concertina. I had put a golden star of David by each of the names of those who were killed in the Holocaust. When it was unfolded, it was like a shower of stars.”
In a statement this week, Dr Maxwell’s family said: “Her devoting the rest of her life to work on the Holocaust and to JudaeoChristian dialogue arose out of her profound need as a Christian to comprehend how such an event as the Holocaust could have happened in Christian Europe in the middle of the 20th century, and then to ensure through dissemination of the facts and teaching, that it could never happen again.”
She is survived by seven children and 13 grandchildren.
Obituary, page 21