Elaine Troy z"l

Elaine Troy, wife of Dov Troy (Troyanksy)*, has died.

From her son's recollection:

...My mother’s tastes were eclectic. She read about Jews and about women, about psychology and society. She read Elie Wiesel and Betty Friedan, Yitz Greenberg and Blu Greenberg, and yes, she loved junk novels as much as she loved junk food. But she wasn’t a distracted mother escaping the family via literature, she squeezed her reading time into her crazy-busy days by indulging late into the night.

Elaine Troy was a natural-born feminist, living the equal rights revolution before it began. A star volleyballer at the Workman’s Circle Camp Kinder Ring, she had the moxie to defy her Bundist camp director by spending a year in Israel with the left-wing Habonim youth movement in 1951. He never spoke to her again for allying with “those Zionists.”

She had the grit to endure jaundice and that legendary night when a kind Israeli policeman threw her and a friend in jail “so they would have a safe place to sleep.” She had the intellectual ambition to fight her father when he blocked her from reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the only book he banned. She had the drive to become a Hebrew School teacher, during which she met her life-partner for 65 years in a wonderful “mixed marriage” with a right-wing Betari: Bernard Dov Troy.

Her philosophy boiled down to three words “Be a mensch!” – a good person, always translated in gender-neutral terms, instinctively, not ostentatiously. She wanted us to be good, to do good, to feel good and to have good relationships. She took pride in our accomplishments and drove us hard with her subtle touch, looking for that missing point when we came home with 99s.

*The American Jewish Year Book Vol. 54 (1953)

Nachman Eckstein adds:

Dov Troy and his late wife Elaine were the directors at Camp Betar in the summer of 1961, the year prior to the movement's running of the camp. An unforgettable summer of 1961 Camp Betar summer experience. I was a counselor and the late Chuck Hornstein was an eleven year old camper there. I recall Chuck Waxman and Ellen Zwick there too.

^