Mary Jayne Gold; Helped Artists and Others Escape Nazis

Mary Jayne Gold, 88, an American socialite who helped painters Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and about 2,000 other Jews and Nazi opponents escape from France during World War II. The Chicago heiress, who joined Parisian cultural life in the 1930s with a large trust fund, fled to southern France when the Nazis invaded in 1940. There she met an American journalist, Varian Fry, who helped her organize the “Emergency Rescue Committee” in Marseilles. The group arranged fake passports, sheltered refugees and organized escape routes to Spain and Portugal in the early 1940s. Others aided in their flight from the Nazis were sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, authors Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt and Hans Habe, and Nobel Prize biochemist Otto Meyerhof. In Paris on Sunday of pancreatic cancer.