ELENORE LESTER (1920-1990)
Until 1967, Elenore Lester – a Bronx girl who knew little of her
Jewish background --
wrote primarily about theatre and the arts. A literary drama critic she concentrated
on New York’s avant garde
artistic scene and “Off-Off Broadway.” But Israel’s victory
in the Six Day War sparked her interest in Jewish subjects, which she pursued
throughout her remaining career as an editor, writer, and activist. This included an interest in the
Yiddish language, which she pursued with great seriousness, even attending an
advanced seminar at Oxford University in the mid-1980s.
It was Elenore
Lester, according to the Jewish Week for whom she worked as a writer and senior
editor, that made Raoul
Wallenberg a household word. Elenore’s cover story in the March 30, 1980 New York Times Magazine, “The Lost Hero
of the Holocaust: The Search for Sweden’s Raoul
Wallenberg” was credited with turning the world’s attention to this
controversial case. It was this
article which alerted Dr. Marvin Makinen to the
realization that the Swede referred to by fellow prisoners in the
Soviet’s Vladimir isolation prison could well be Wallenberg. This resulted in his commitment,
with Dr. Guy von Dardel and the other Independent
Investigators, to the resolution of the case through active search in archives
and by other means in the former Soviet Union.
Lester also wrote Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web (Prentice Hall, 1982), which Simon Wiesenthal deemed
“an important weapon in this battle” to determine Wallenberg’s
fate. The Jerusalem Post, in its review of this book, stated that: “Elenore
Lester’s love for her subject is held in check by her meticulousness and
her rejection of fanciful conjecture.”
Following publication of the
book, Elenore lectured widely on this topic and was
active in organizations that urged the Soviet Union to disclose what had
happened to Wallenberg. She
was also a consultant to the Jewish Women’s Task Force, which served to
increase women’s involvement in Jewish organizational life in the 1970s,
and was a member of the founding committee of Lilith,
a Jewish feminist magazine.
With special thanks to
Steve Lipman of the Jewish Week for providing us with
Elenore Lester’s obituary published on
September 14, 1990 from which much of the information in this biography has
been derived.