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June Jacobs |
CBE for woman who went behind curtain
Peace campaigner named in Queen’s Honours list
JUNE Jacobs, a peace campaigner who has spent a lifetime fighting for civil rights and religious tolerance, joined former poet laureate Andrew Motion and actors Jonathan Pryce and Lindsay Duncan in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
Mrs Jacobs, CBE, who lives in Queens Crescent, told the New Journal that her career has not always been smooth, particularly in the 1970s when she was desperate to highlight the fate of Jewish Refuseniks living in the Soviet Union.
She joked: “I have told my grandchildren I am a Commander now, just to make sure they know where they stand.”
But as the first chairman of the National Council for Soviet Jews, Mrs Jacobs ran huge risks in making contacts in the east.
“I used to travel to the Soviet Union with a tourist group and then break away from them,” she recalled. “I took my 17-year-old daughter Keren with me.”
To get papers through the strict border controls, she passed them to Keren to carry.
Mrs Jacobs added: “It was highly irresponsible, I suppose.”
The letters KGB, rather than CBE, figured in her work then, as the Soviet secret police followed her on her trips.
Mrs Jacobs said: “They didn’t like us very much.”
She first got involved in the Refusenik issue – that of Jewish people keen to leave the Soviet Union and make a new life in Israel, but were being stopped from leaving by the authorities – when she worked for a Jewish children’s charity.
Mrs Jacobs’ CV includes work with the Black Jewish Asian Forum, and she is also former president of the International Council of Jewish Women, and involved with the European Women’s Lobby and Women’s International Commission.
Camden Town resident Andrew Motion, who has been knighted. said: “I’m delighted and deeply honoured by this, which sheds its light on poetry itself, and on all the others who work alongside me to make it a part of life without dispelling its magic.”
Writer and Green Party activist Beatrix Campbell, who lives in Camden Mews, Cantelowes, was awarded an OBE.
Belsize Park-based actor Jonathan Pryce, known for his theatre work as well as appearances in blockbusters such as James Bond, joins fellow thespian Lindsay Duncan, who lives in Kentish Town, in receiving a CBE.
Anne Mullins, an expert on internet safety issues with children, was made an OBE. She also lives in Kentish Town.
The Camden Arts Centre in Hampstead has been celebrating new that their director Jennifer Lomax has been given an OBE while Highgate-based doctor Phillipa Russell has also received an OBE.
She has spent a 40-year career working to improve services and the rights for disabled people. |
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