The following obituary was first posted by Menorah Chapels at Millburn:
Edith Oxfeld, née Brodsky, died on July 8, 2024, having recently celebrated her 104th birthday. She was born on July 4, 1920, in the city of Brest Litovsk, which at the time was in Poland. Her parents Eli and Rose Brodsky, emigrated to the United States with Edith when she was five years old, following some of Eli’s other family members who had previously emigrated.
Edith and her younger sister Selma grew up and attended schools in Newark and Irvington, New Jersey and Edith went on to graduate from Montclair State College. After college Edith taught English and Business at South Side High School in Newark. In the 1940s, she was a member and officer of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and took part in one of the first successful organizing drives for teachers in the country. During WWII she volunteered as a Red Cross nurse’s aide, helping at local hospitals.
She married Emil Oxfeld, a labor and civil liberties lawyer in 1947, and they soon moved to a house they built in South Orange, New Jersey where they raised their two daughters Nancy and Ellen.
Edith was a lifelong peace activist. She developed this interest early when she became horrified at the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the late 1950s she joined a nascent anti-nuclear movement to end testing and development of nuclear weapons.
After moving to South Orange, Edith stopped teaching, but remained involved in many activities. She was President of her local League of Women Voters in the late 1960s, and a member of Women Strike for Peace as well as her local committee for a SANE nuclear policy (which later became Peace Action). As a member of Maplewood/South Orange Peace and Community Action she also worked on many petition drives and helped organize many speaker events (including an event at her home where civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a key organizer of the 1963 march on Washington, spoke).
Some of the issues they advocated for at the time were nuclear test bans, and later protests against the United States war in Vietnam. In May 1987, Edith traveled to Nevada to protest underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. She was arrested and handcuffed with several hundred other activists (charges were never brought). In later years, she also walked in protest marches against the United States war in Iraq.
Emil died in 2003, but Edith was able to reside in her home for the rest of her life where she was surrounded by the many works of mainly contemporary art that she loved so much, and which she and Emil had acquired over the course of their long marriage together. She was also able until she was almost 100 years old to attend and enjoy cultural events, especially opera in New York and chamber music in Maplewood, NJ.
Edith is survived by daughters Nancy (West Orange, NJ) and Ellen (Middlebury, Vermont), and niece Susan Zupnik (The Villages, Florida). The family will be forever grateful to her loving caretaker for the last four years, Casimira Paulo, as well as to her daughters Elisabete and Patricia. Thanks to their miraculous help, Edith was able to rebound from a serious medical event in 2020, and to enjoy life for another four years, especially visits from family and friends.
There will be no service, but a gathering is planned in the future. Donations in Edith’s memory may be made to New Jersey Peace Action or to ACLU of New Jersey Foundation.
