My friend Lesley Urbach, who has died suddenly aged 69, was passionate about human rights, and about education against racism and prejudice. In 2016 she helped to set up Generation 2 Generation, a pioneering Holocaust charity established to empower second and third generation Holocaust survivor descendants to present and preserve their family histories.
As co-founder, associate director and trustee of G2G she shaped the organisation, not only mentoring speakers but delivering powerful presentations to schools and community groups, reaching tens of thousands of young people in the years since its inception.
Lesley’s character and beliefs were shaped by the trauma experienced by her parents’ families. Born in Willesden, north-west London, she was one of four children born to Eva (nee Wohl) and Arnold Urbach, who had arrived separately in Britain in 1938 and 1939 respectively. Eva and her younger sister escaped Nazi Germany via the Kindertransport.
Eva got a job in an east London factory making military uniforms, and on her first day she met and subsequently married Arnold, a fellow Jewish refugee from Germany, who served in the British army and later worked as an interpreter during war crimes trials.
Though Eva’s parents had attempted to flee to South America, they were murdered in Auschwitz along with more than one million others. They had sent their possessions on ahead in three trunks, which were eventually redirected back to the Urbachs when the war was over in 1947. Lesley and her elder brother Peter donated one of the trunks to the Imperial War Museum, where it is now part of the Holocaust Exhibition.
Lesley went to the Jewish Free school (now JFS) in north London, and studied history at University College London. She and I met in 1979, not long after graduation, at the University of London Library at Senate House, where we were both working as library assistants. We bonded over a Doris Lessing novel I was reading at the time and soon became friends. She was funny, warm and gregarious, and culturally voracious. She loved the theatre, and very much enjoyed music, especially jazz.
Lesley worked as an adviser for the National Careers Service for 25 years, first in Bristol and then in London, and after early retirement in about 2012 studied for an MA in Jewish history and culture at Southampton University. In 2015 she co-founded the Remembering Eleanor Rathbone Group, to promote awareness of Rathbone’s work as a campaigner for the rights of women and refugees.
Through the JUMP programme, a befriending project for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and young people managed by the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (now HIAS+JCORE), she befriended a young woman who came to Britain as a domestic slave, and between 2015 and 2020 she helped support Syrian refugees in Barnet. She was an active member of both the Beit Klal Yisrael community and the Finchley Progressive Synagogue, and worked for it to gain Synagogue of Sanctuary status earlier this year, of which she was extremely proud.
A generous and inspiring godmother to many of her friends’ children, Lesley was colourful, exacting and charismatic, and a loyal, supportive friend. Her family’s story as well as many other accounts by survivors can be found on Generation 2 Generation’s website.
She is survived by Peter.
