Excerpted from The Forward, issue of March 18, 2011

Marilyn Henry, Advocate for Survivors
An Appreciation by Michael Berenbaum and Jeanette Friedman
Marilyn Henry was the quintessential old-school girl reporter. Her laser-sharp brain could cut through the most complex philosophical, financial, legal, religious and arcane data to get to the heart of a story. Her two masterworks were “Twice Stolen,” an almost-finished book project, aborted by her death, about looted art from the Holocaust era, and “Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference,” which tells about the organization responsible for negotiations and allocations of restituted funds and property.
Henry was a fierce advocate for the Shoah’s survivors. In article after article, in media outlet after media outlet — The Jerusalem Post, The New Jersey Jewish Standard, the Forward, the JTA — she demanded accountability from anyone who shortchanged them. In 2003, she called the American Jewish community to task: “The question is why American Jews… don’t help care for the needy Nazi victims among us….Yes, the Europeans have a profound obligation to Nazi victims. But the American Jewish community also has debts to survivors — and not on moral or compassionate grounds alone.”
Henry also served as the rebbitzen of the synagogue of her husband, Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer, in Cliffside Park, N.J.
A journalist to the end, she wrote this about her impending death in The Jerusalem Post on November 6, 2010.
“I am a lucky woman. I feel good and I look great. And although in grim circumstances, I know I have choices. I will choose a hospice, because, as the Torah commands us in Deuteronomy (30:19), I choose life.”
She always did that, and lived it to the fullest. Her memory is a blessing.