Mary Appelman Obituary

Mary Goold Appelman

Born: Feb. 8, 1926

Died: Feb. 25, 2016

Mary Goold Appelman, a longtime Downers Grove resident who devoted much of her life to working for peace and social justice, died on February 25, in State College, Pennsylvania. She was 90.

Mrs. Appelman was an early supporter of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. She was a tireless advocate for dialogue between the two peoples at a time when official U.S. policy was not to negotiate with the Palestinians directly.

Mrs. Appelman and her husband lived in Downers Grove from 1960 to 1996 before retiring to Kensington, California.

She was born Mary Frances Goold on February 8, 1926, in London, the third child of Herbert Stewart Goold, an American diplomat, and Cora Smith Goold, both of San Francisco.

Mrs. Appelman spent her early childhood in Greece and Costa Rica. In 1931, her family moved to Beirut, where her father was appointed consul-general, and she attended the American Community School at Beirut. From 1934-36 she lived in Helsinki, where she attended a German school. She first set foot in the United States at age 10, living with her mother, two sisters and the family dogs in Diablo, California from 1936-37 while her father served as consul-general in Toronto.

In 1937 her father was named consul-general in Casablanca, in French-controlled Morocco, and she was enrolled in the Lyc e de Jeunes Filles there. As a result of her education abroad, she was fluent to the end of her life in both German and French.

After Germany invaded France in 1940, Mrs. Appelman and her older sister Louise were evacuated from Casablanca aboard an American destroyer. The destroyer took them to Portugal, where they joined other refugees on the SS Washington bound for New York. Shortly into their voyage on June 11, the ship was stopped by a German U-boat that signaled "10 minutes to abandon ship." Passengers climbed into lifeboats and were lowered alongside the ship, while the captain repeatedly signaled "American ship." An hour later, the submarine finally signaled, "Thought you were another ship; please go on, go on!" and the Washington resumed its journey. France surrendered while the ship was still at sea, on June 17, and the girls learned the news via the ship's radio

In the United States, Mrs. Appelman attended the Holmquist School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Vassar College, graduating with a degree in history in 1945 at age 19. After graduation she worked at the National Science Foundation in Washington. She later attended graduate school - first in social work, then switching to political science after her field work supervisors said she empathized too much with her clients - at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Evan H. Appelman, a PhD candidate in chemistry. The two were married in September 1960 at Congregation Beth El in Berkeley and moved to the Chicago area, where Mr. Appelman was employed as a research chemist at Argonne National Laboratory.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Appelmans raised two children in Downers Grove, a Chicago suburb, where they lived until 1996. She was active in the Fair Housing movement, as well as anti-Vietnam war protests and Democratic Party politics, both local and national. She served as an alternate delegate for George McGovern at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami. While generally preferring to stay out of the limelight, Mrs. Appelman was tenacious in her pursuit of truth and justice.

After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1975 civil war in Lebanon, she began working on Middle East peace issues as a volunteer for the World Without War Council in Chicago. In 1982 she founded the America-Israel Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, or AICIPP, sister group of the Israel Council for Israeli- Palestinian Peace, founded by Israelis who supported dialogue with the PLO and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As chairman of AICIPP, Mrs. Appelman worked indefatigably to encourage the United States to end its ban on direct talks with the PLO, which it eventually did in 1988. She organized speaking tours for Israeli and Palestinian speakers and published a newsletter from home with the help of her husband. Visitors to the Appelman home on Cornell Avenue were used to seeing stacks of newspapers and other papers that sometimes threatened to take over the house.

In 1987, Mrs. Appelman led a group of American Jews who traveled to Tunis to meet with Yasir Arafat and other PLO leaders, returning with the message that the PLO was interested in negotiating a peace settlement.

In 1996, Mrs. Appelman and her husband retired to California, returning to the Berkeley Hills she loved. In the last years of her life Mrs. Appelman, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, lived near her daughter in State College, Pennsylvania.

Mrs. Appelman was a voracious reader, intellectually insatiable and ethically exacting, and an unflagging advocate for justice for the oppressed. She loved traveling, especially on ships and trains, and the mountains, passions she shared with her family on numerous Sierra Club trips and with her husband on excursions around the world. Yosemite National Park's Tuolumne Meadows was a particularly cherished destination.

She is survived by her beloved husband of 56 years, Evan Appelman; her sister, Louise Green of St. Louis; her son, Harry Appelman, a jazz pianist in Silver Spring, Maryland, and his wife, Mimi Brody; her daughter, Hilary Appelman, a writer in State College, and her husband, Will Yurman; and four grandchildren, Kira and Talia Appelman and Eli and Auden Yurman. Another sister, Cora Goold, died as a teenager in Casablanca.

Contributions in Mrs. Appelman's memory may be made to American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), the Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel, Alzheimer's Association, or the Yosemite Conservancy.