Obituaries - June 28, 1999

Gaynor Jacobson; Head of Immigrant Aid Agency

Gaynor Jacobson, 87, former director of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Jacobson was the son of a Russian Jew who escaped from a czarist jail for political prisoners and immigrated to Buffalo, N.Y., where Jacobson was born. Helping to resettle refugees like his father later became his life’s work. With a master’s degree in social work from State University of New York at Buffalo, he went to work for various Jewish organizations in New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s. From 1944 to 1950, he helped resettle survivors of the Holocaust in Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia and Hungary for the American Joint Distribution Committee. In Hungary he was briefly jailed for helping Jews leave the country. His work persuading various governments to take in the survivors was featured in the 1992 book “The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews Since World War II,” by former New York Times reporter Tad Szulc. In 1953, Jacobson joined the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, where over the next three decades he helped Jews immigrate to Israel, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. He retired as world director in 1981. On June 6 at a hospital in Sun City West, Ariz.

Harry Eckstein; Social Scientist, UC Irvine Professor

Harry Eckstein, 74, a prominent and respected social scientist who was also a distinguished research professor in the political science department at UC Irvine. Eckstein was also an internationally known authority on the Norwegian political system and democratization in post-Soviet Russia. Born in Schotten, Germany, Eckstein came to the United States in 1936 as part of a group of 500 German youths selected for immigration on the basis of intelligence tests administered by American officials. He was later joined by his sister, who escaped Nazi terror, but the rest of his family would perish in concentration camps. A brilliant student, Eckstein studied at Harvard, where he received his bachelor’s degree, master’s and finally his doctoral degree in political science. Eckstein’s early forte was the comparative analysis of political systems, a subject he taught at Harvard from 1956 to 1961 and then at Princeton from 1961 to 1969. He joined UC Irvine in 1980 as its first distinguished professor. Eckstein continued to be an active scholar up until his death. In 1998, he edited and contributed chapters to the book “Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia.” On June 22 in Newport Coast of heart failure.

Jiri Pelikan; Figure in Czechoslovakia’s ‘Prague Spring’

Jiri Pelikan, 76, who ran a temporarily censor-free Czechoslovak state television during the 1968 “Prague Spring” reform movement. Born in Moravia in 1923, Pelikan grew up in a family of intellectuals and artists. In 1939, he joined the Czech Communist Party, took part in the resistance against the Nazis and was imprisoned by the Gestapo. After the war, he became head of the Communist Party youth commission, which screened students for admission to college, barring many non-Communists from attending. He later called that episode the “greatest shame” of his life. In 1963, he was appointed head of Czech state television, where he later gave the green light to ideas promoted by Prague Spring Communist reformers in August 1968. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the era of liberalization, Pelikan was dismissed from his position and made ambassador to Italy. He emigrated to the West from that position and eventually became an Italian citizen. He also published the magazine Listy from 1970 to 1990, first in Rome and then in Prague after the fall of communism. In Rome on June 26 after a long illness.