June Jacobs, campaigner for Soviet Jews – obituary

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2018/07/30/june-jacobs-campaigner-soviet-jews-obituary/

June Jacobs

June Jacobs, who has died aged 88, was a leading figure in Britain’s Jewish community and a doughty campaigner for “Refuseniks” in the Soviet Union, for women’s rights and for peace in the Middle East.

She became involved in the Refusenik issue – that of Jewish people prevented from emigrating to Israel by the Soviet authorities – when she worked for a Jewish children’s charity, and she first came to public attention in September 1971 when, as chairman of the Jewish Women’s Association, she staged a 24-hour fast outside the Soviet embassy in London.

This was to draw attention to the plight of a Jewish woman who had fallen ill while serving a 10-year sentence in a labour camp for allegedly trying to hijack a Soviet aircraft.

An unassuming, rather shy, but strikingly attractive woman, in 1976 June Jacobs became founder chairman of the National Council for Soviet Jews, a small group of women volunteers who sought to establish links with Jews facing persecution in the Soviet Union and to raise their profile in the West.

She spent a good deal of time on the telephone to Russia, where she was known as “Madame June”, and visited the country several times with tourist groups, from which, risking arrest by the KGB, she would break away to contact those who wanted to leave.

In December 1977 she was the prime mover behind Worldwide Solidarity Week for Soviet Jewry, which was marked in 22 countries.

It was largely thanks to pressure from campaigners like June Jacobs that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started relaxing restrictions on Jewish emigration in the mid 1980s.

June Jacobs never minded ruffling feathers. She was opposed to the occupation by Israel of Palestinian territories, and as foreign affairs spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the late 1980s, infuriated some in 1989 by meeting with the PLO representative Bassam Abu Sharif at a time when the organisation was banned by the Israeli government.

There were calls for her to resign, but she remained unrepentant: “It was the right thing to do,” she told the Jewish Chronicle in 2009. “ How else can we attempt to bring peace if we don’t talk? … I would speak to Hamas now if they would speak to us.”

She was born in June 1930 into a middle-class family, married soon after leaving school and spent many years as a full-time mother, while doing voluntary work with youth groups and charities, including the Jewish Child’s Day Charity. She threw herself into campaigning after the death of her husband, Basil, in 1973.

As well as her work for Soviet Jewry, June Jacobs served as president of the International Council of Jewish Women for six years and became involved in many other Jewish and women’s organisations. Among other causes, she took up the plight of the “chained wives” – Jewish women whose husbands will not or cannot give them a religious divorce, leaving them unable to remarry according to Jewish law.

She told the Jewish Chronicle that it was her love for Israel which had prompted her to oppose its occupation of Palestinian territories: “When my children were young, I was never that worried when their friends misbehaved, but I hated it when my children did. I feel like that about Israel. Because it is so important to me, I want it to live up its high ideals.”

Yet she felt that the country was “judged by different standards to that of other countries just because the Palestinian issue seems to unify people who can’t agree about anything else.”

She was appointed CBE in 2009 and is survived by two sons and a daughter.

June Jacobs, born June 1930, died July 22 2018