Elisabeth Maxwell, widow of the former Daily Mirror owner, Robert Maxwell, died on Wednesday (7 August) in the Dordogne, France. She was 92.
According to the New York Times's report, her death was confirmed by her youngest daughter, Ghislaine.
She was married to the newspaper and book publishing magnate for 46 years until he died in mysterious circumstances in 1991. His body was found floating in the Atlantic after he had been sailing on his yacht off the Canary Islands.
Within months it emerged that he had plundered the Mirror Group pension funds to the tune of £600m in order to overcome increasing indebtedness. Thousands of Maxwell's employees either lost their pensions or saw them drastically reduced.
Insurance companies, in the belief (well-founded in my view) that Maxwell had committed suicide, refused to grant Mrs Maxwell her pension.
Betty, as she was generally known, was fiercely loyal to her husband despite his offhand treatment towards her, as her 1994 autobiography, A mind of my own: my life with Robert Maxwell, made clear.
Born in France in 1921, she studied law at the Sorbonne and later took a modern languages degree at Oxford before gaining a doctorate in philosophy.
She met Maxwell in Paris towards the end of the second world war and they were married in 1945. They went on to have nine children, two of whom died young.
Though she was not Jewish - as he was - she dedicated her life to researching the Holocaust, during which most of Maxwell's immediate family were slaughtered. He referred to his wife as "the keeper of my Jewish soul."
He was given the equivalent of a state funeral in Israel and buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Betty edited two books on Holocaust memorial and was an honorary fellow of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, which promotes the study of relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Betty's family issued a statement, carried in the Jewish Chronicle, which said: "Her devoting the rest of her life to work on the Holocaust and to Judaeo-Christian 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.
Sources: New York Times/Jewish Chronicle Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
According to the New York Times's report, her death was confirmed by her youngest daughter, Ghislaine.
She was married to the newspaper and book publishing magnate for 46 years until he died in mysterious circumstances in 1991. His body was found floating in the Atlantic after he had been sailing on his yacht off the Canary Islands.
Within months it emerged that he had plundered the Mirror Group pension funds to the tune of £600m in order to overcome increasing indebtedness. Thousands of Maxwell's employees either lost their pensions or saw them drastically reduced.
Insurance companies, in the belief (well-founded in my view) that Maxwell had committed suicide, refused to grant Mrs Maxwell her pension.
Betty, as she was generally known, was fiercely loyal to her husband despite his offhand treatment towards her, as her 1994 autobiography, A mind of my own: my life with Robert Maxwell, made clear.
Born in France in 1921, she studied law at the Sorbonne and later took a modern languages degree at Oxford before gaining a doctorate in philosophy.
She met Maxwell in Paris towards the end of the second world war and they were married in 1945. They went on to have nine children, two of whom died young.
Though she was not Jewish - as he was - she dedicated her life to researching the Holocaust, during which most of Maxwell's immediate family were slaughtered. He referred to his wife as "the keeper of my Jewish soul."
He was given the equivalent of a state funeral in Israel and buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Betty edited two books on Holocaust memorial and was an honorary fellow of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, which promotes the study of relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Betty's family issued a statement, carried in the Jewish Chronicle, which said: "Her devoting the rest of her life to work on the Holocaust and to Judaeo-Christian 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.
Sources: New York Times/Jewish Chronicle Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.