Funeral services took place Jan. 29 for Eleonore Jonas, mother of author and Weehawken resident Gabrielle Jonas. She died peacefully Jan. 26 at her home in Audubon, Pa. For 49 years she was the wife of Hans Jonas, considered the father of the green movement In Europe. In one of his books, he paid her this tribute: “Your belief that I had something to say, made me say it.”
After his death in 1993, Mrs. Jonas worked with publishers and translators to help disseminate her husband’s work. She spoke three languages: German, Hebrew and English, and knew Greek and Latin. She avidly read and wrote poetry, attended museums, and travelled the world. Mrs. Jonas was hoping to become a physician, but her education was interrupted by wartorn Europe, and then again by war in Palestine, and she spent her life until her last days making up for this loss through voracious reading and study. She also wrote short essays, mostly about her experiences as a threetime immigrant. In one of them, she describes the assistance Arab neighbors gave her and her husband in evacuating their Palestinian village once war had broken out between the Arabs and the Jews.
Mrs. Jonas gave birth to a child in each country: Gabrielle Jonas in the U.S., now of Weehawken; John Jonas in Canada, now of Washington D.C.; Ayalah Sorkin in Palestine; now of Wayne, Pa. She is survived by five grandchildren, Nash and Natalie Jonas, students in Roosevelt School in Weehawken, Ben and David Jonas and Joseph Sorkin. She will be missed. Services arranged by Goldsteins’ Rosenberg’s Raphael Sacks, Philadelphia, Pa.