The Eulogizer

JERUSALEM ““ The Eulogizer highlights the life accomplishments of famous and not-so-famous Jews who have died recently.

Adele Starr, founder of gay rights support group for parents

Adele Starr, an important but unacknowledged figure in gay rights, died Dec. 10 at 90.

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Starr founded the Los Angeles chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in 1976 and spoke three years later at the first gay rights march on Washington.

Starr, born Ida Seltzer in Brooklyn, moved with her husband to Los Angeles in 1951 and primarily was a stay-at-home mother with four sons and a daughter. Philip Starr told his parents that he was gay in 1974.

Adele Starr launched the Los Angeles chapter of PFLAG two years later. PFLAG, which now has more than 200,000 members, has created the Starr Award in her name.

“May Adele’s family be comforted at this time of loss by the history she created and with the knowledge that the struggle for LGBT on a national scale began with her,” said Rabbi David Horowitz, PFLAG president.

Dov Shilansky, Shoah survivor, Irgun activist, former Knesset speaker

Dov Shilansky landed in Israel on the Altalena in 1948 after a horrific World War II experience in Dachau, was imprisoned four years later for a planned political bombing, and went on to become the Knesset speaker. When Shilansky died on Dec. 9 at 86, he was a respected elder statesman and lawyer.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shilansky’s story “is the story of our people.”

Shilansky, a native of Siauliai, Lithuania, was arrested in 1952 while carrying a pack of dynamite near the Israeli Foreign Ministry after Israel signed its war reparations agreement with West Germany. In 1977 he was one of many Likud Party members swept into the Knesset when Menachem Begin became prime minister.

Alan Armer, Emmy-winning TV producer of ‘The Fugitive,’ other shows

Alan Armer, a television producer whose career stretched from the medium’s earliest days to its classic era in the early 1970s, died Dec. 5 at 88. His shows included “The Untouchables,” “The Fugitive,” and “The Invaders.”

His early shows were “My Friend Flicka,” “Broken Arrow,” and “Man Without a Gun.” Following “The Untouchables” came “The Fugitive,” one of TV’s all-time classics. “TV Guide” named “The Fugitive” the best dramatic TV series of the 1960s.

Jacob Lateiner, esteemed pianist and music scholar

Jacob Lateiner, a classical pianist who came of age during a fertile period for American pianists following World War II and also became legendary for his scholarship and teaching skills, died Dec. 12 at 82.

Lateiner was a soloist with the New York and Berlin philharmonics, the Boston and Chicago symphonies, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, among others. His collection of recordings included a series for RCA Victor esteemed by critics and collectors that won a Grammy Award in 1965.

Lateiner was born in Havana in 1928 to Jewish parents who had come from Poland and was known in Cuba as a child prodigy, performing at age 7 with the Havana Orchestra.

Arnold Weiss, Army officer who found Hitler’s will

Arnold Weiss, a German-born U.S. counterintelligence officer in World War II who found Hitler’s last will and testament, died Dec. 7 at 86.

In December 1945, Weiss and his counterintelligence team tracked down a Nazi military aide who had been stationed at Hitler’s bunker during his final days. The aide took Weiss to a farm on the outskirts of Munich where he had hidden the envelope at the bottom of a dry well. Inside it were Hitler’s will and his marriage certificate to Eva Braun.

Weiss was placed into a Jewish orphanage as a child in Germany in the early days of Hitler’s reign. He was hoisted once to a lamppost and flogged by Hitler Youth members.

Weiss, a lawyer by training, lived and worked for decades in the Washington, D.C., area as a senior official in U.S. financial agencies and then in a private investment firm that funded international development projects.

Harriet Keyserling, pioneering lawmaker in South Carolina

Harriet Keyserling, a self-proclaimed New York Jewish liberal who became a political force in South Carolina for decades, died Dec. 10 at 88.

Keyserling was a feisty Democrat who went against the status quo as a liberal Yankee in the world of good-old-boy conservative Southerners.

Keyserling moved to tiny Beaufort after marrying Herbert Keyserling, a Jewish, Southern, small-town doctor. Bud Ferillo, a Columbia, S.C., public relations executive and longtime Democratic political worker, referred to Keyserling as his “Jewish mother.”

JTA Wire Service

Write to the Eulogizer at eulogizer@jta.org.