Vale Alice Shalvi: a ‘woman of worth’

COLIN SHINDLER farewells his friend Alice Shalvi, a trailblazer of feminism and education in Israel.

The mourners gathered round the body at Alice Shalvi's funeral in Jerusalem last Tuesday and sang with great emotion and passion, Eshet Chayil – “a woman of worth”. Chanted each Friday night to welcome in Shabbat, it summed up a woman who was deeply loved and revered. Her family, friends, community, students and colleagues in their hundreds accompanied her to her final resting place.

Many have written glowing tributes about her central concern, the struggle for women’s rights, often against frightened men in authority in Israel and the humiliation and rejection that she received at their hands. This struggle underpinned her life's work to turn Israel into Zion.

She was born in the Weimar Republic in 1926 – the Germany of President Hindenburg and during the few golden years before the economic crash. The Nazis acquired 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Years later, she remembered her brother, Willi, returning home in a torn shirt – the result of a whipping by the Hitler Youth – and the cheering crowds when Goering's motorcade passed by the house. She recalled the sight of her toys and books being strewn on the floor after a Gestapo raid.

All this persuaded Alice's parents to leave Essen for England with her and her brother. While she carried her admiration for Goethe, Schiller and the giants of German culture with her, she quickly embraced the language and literature of her new homeland, which eventually took her to Cambridge University.

Alice's father, Benzion Marguiles, born in Skalat, Galicia, was an astute businessman who strongly supported the Zionist movement as a member of Mizrahi, the religious Zionist movement. Benzion's work in the UK for Jewish refugees escaping Nazism brought Alice into contact with many notables such as the poet Itzik Manger and the artist Mané Katz.

Her father's friendship with James de Rothschild, who had worked closely with Weizmann and Jabotinsky during World War I, allowed him to bring the family to the safety of the Rothschild Estate at Waddesdon, just outside of London, to escape the Blitz.