At age 90, Hedy Epstein was still getting arrested in activist movements.
In August 2014, the nonagenarian Holocaust survivor was detained by St. Louis police at a civil disobedience action in support of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen who was killed by a white police officer.
Epstein, who died of illness in her home in St. Louis on Thursday, at age 91, was an outspoken supporter of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement, which was launched in the wake of Brown’s death.
She was also an economic justice advocate, as well as a longtime anti-war activist who staunchly opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam and the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Epstein, was however, most well-known for her outspoken support for Palestinian rights.
For more than a decade, Epstein tirelessly advocated on behalf of the Palestinians, who have lived under illegal Israeli military occupation for almost 50 years.
She was active in the International Solidarity Movement and Free Gaza movement, and co-founded the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee and the St. Louis chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Palestinians “are in a prison, they are prisoners,” Epstein explained in a 2007interview. “My participation is a small contribution that I can make compared to the sufferings that the Palestinians endure every single day.”
She called on the U.S. government, which gives more than $3 in unconditional military aid to Israel every year, to stop funding Israel, and to instead fund social programs and help the poor.
Epstein had first-hand experience of extreme oppression and discrimination. She was born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1924. She came of age during the rise of Nazism, and only survived thanks to the Kindertransport child rescue program.
In 1939, Epstein managed to flee to England. Her family was not as fortunate. Both of her parents and her extended family members were killed in Nazi concentration camps. She was their only child.
Epstein would later aid Allied forces in the Nuremberg trials, the military tribunals that tried the Nazis for war crimes and crimes against humanity, establishing the international legal framework the world has today. She also later became a member of the St. Louis Holocaust Museum.
Although Epstein was a longtime activist, she did not begin engaging in Israel-Palestine piece work until the 1980s.
She first visited Israel in 1981, and recalled being immediately struck by the racism she saw: “We were taken on a sightseeing tour, and the people on the bus would ask: ‘Who lives in this area?’ ‘These are Jewish people.’ ‘Oh, it is beautiful, the gardens are beautiful. Who lives over here?’ ‘These are Palestinians.’ ‘Oh, it stinks, it smells, it’s terrible, it’s dirty.’”
“This disturbed me, this kind of discrimination and talk against the Palestinians that they didn’t even know,” Epstein said. It “left a very bad taste in my mouth.”
Her “personal wake-up call,” however, were the Israel-backed Sabra and Shatila massacre. Israel invaded south Lebanon in 1982. With the support of the U.S., it subsequently waged a war in alliance with far-right, Phalangist Christian militias.
In September 1982, Israeli-backed Phalangist militias slaughtered thousands of civilians in Sabra and Shatila, Beirut refugee camps largely inhabited by Palestinians who were expelled by Zionist militias in the war that established Israel in 1948.
Renowned scholar Noam Chomsky called it “a horrifying massacre,” comparing it to the anti-Jewish pogroms that took place in Czarist Russia.
