Marilyn Henry was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author, columnist, journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 and historian and archivist for matters pertaining to Holocaust reparation, survivor benefits and art looted by the Nazis.

Life and career

Born Marilyn Cohen, into a Jewish family in Pennsylvania, Henry, was described as a “quintessential old-school girl reporter”, and a “fierce advocate” for Holocaust survivors. In 1974, Marilyn graduated from Livingston College, Rutgers the State University, Piscataway NJ. Afterward, she changed her last name to Henry. Earlier in her career, she was a writer for the Jerusalem Post in Israel, and then in 1988 became its New York Bureau Chief when she moved back to the United States after marrying. She lived in Teaneck, NJ with her husband until her death.

Advocacy

Henry focused much of the latter part of her journalism career in advocacy for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, but kept a neutral stance in her coverage of the myriad thorny issues involved. Beginning in the late 1990s, Henry concentrated much of her efforts on art restitution issues, writing for the Jerusalem Post and also as a contributing editor of ARTNews

ARTnews

ARTnews is an arts magazine based in New York, founded by James Clarence Hyde in 1902 as Hyde’s Weekly Art News. It is published 11 times a year.ARTnews covers all art, from ancient to Post-modernism...

. She traveled around the world to review records and interview pertinent officials from various European countries, and soon became known as the preeminent scholar on the topic.
. She was already considered an authority on German reparations and the recovery of Jewish properties looted and displaced in Europe during the Nazi and communist eras. She also sought to pressure U.S. and Czech officials to look into the apparent murder in 1967 of Charles Jordan, a top professional of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is a worldwide Jewish relief organization headquartered in New York. It was established in 1914 and is active in more than 70 countries....

 (JDC) at the time whose body was found floating in the Vltava. She also worked part-time as an archivist for the JDC.

Death

Henry died from lung cancer

Lung cancer

Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...

 at the Villa Marie Claire, a residential hospice of Holy Name Hospital in Saddle River, New Jersey. She is survived by her husband of 23 years, Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. As she faced her cancer and treatments, Henry also focused her life’s ending work on the advocacy of hospice care for people suffering from terminal illness. In one of her last newspaper columns, she wrote, "Seeing no rosy future, I chose to focus on the quality of my life rather than the amount of time I might gain with treatment."

External links

• http://www.jstandard.com/index.php/content/item/17456/
• Marilyn Henry articles in the Forward
  The Forward
  The Forward , commonly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is a Jewish-American newspaper published in New York City. The publication began in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily issued by dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon...
  
  
• A collection of Marilyn Henry articles in the Jerusalem Post