Elisabeth Maxwell
ALTHOUGH NOT herself Jewish, the Huguenot Protestant Elisabeth Maxwell balancedaturbulentmarriage to media mogul Robert Maxwell with a deep commitment to Holocaust education and Jewish-Christian dialogue. Her charm, elegance and dignified manner proved in many ways the acceptable face of the Maxwell dynasty.
It was her discovery of the Nazi murder of 300 of her husband’s relatives that moved her towards the subject that would become her life’s work — Holocaust education.
The initial desire to honour Robert Maxwell’sdeadfamilybecameahumanitarian mission to include the entireHolocaust. It was her Christian need to comprehend how the Holocaust could have arisen that drove this mission, according to her family.Her husband called her “the keeper of my Jewish soul”.
The daughter of the village mayor, Elisabeth Jenny Jeanne Meynard was an aristocrat by birth, tracing her family line back to the kings of France.
She studied modern languages at Oxford, but it was a doctorate she completed there in 1981 that led to the scrutiny of her family’s genealogy. She created a family tree for her children and put a little star of David in front of all the people who had been murdered in the camps. She later gave it to Yad Vashem.
AfterstudyinglawattheSorbonneshe became a volunteer welcoming Allied officers to liberated Paris. She caught the eye of a Czech-born British intelligenceagent,JanLudwigHoch,wholater changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell. They married in 1945.
The couple had nine children, although their daughter Karine died in 1957 and son Michael 10 years later.
In her 1994 autobiography, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, she speaks frankly about her husband’s character and the many difficulties she endured in their relationship. She described the cantankerous media tycoon as bullying, unfaithful and often absent. But she was equivocal in her response to repeated questions as to whether she still loved him.
Clearly she helped Maxwell reclaim his roots. Following this came his support for Soviet Jews and other Jewish charities.Butlifechangedforherandthe family after Maxwell’s mysterious death in 1991, when he was found floating near his yacht off the Canary Islands.
She now had to exchange wealth for poverty. It was found that Robert Maxwell had diverted over $1 million from pension funds to his more than 400 corporate entities. The empire came crashing down into bankruptcy. She was faced with insurmountable debts. The support of friends and the success of her autobiography helped to refocus her energies.
Dr Maxwell is probably best known for a series of three scholarly conferences which she launched in 1988, Remembering for the Future. The series followed the previous year’s inauguration of her journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, first published by Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press. She also edited two books on the Holocaust.
The first woman vice-president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, she was honorary fellow of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, dedicated to studying relations between Jews, Christians and Muslim. In 1995, she was named grand marshal of the annual Salute to Israel Parade in Manhattan.
She is survived by four daughters, three sons and 13 grandchildren.
GLORIA TESSLER