Arrivals: 91 is the new 41

Freda Leavey may be 91, but she is no less active now than when she was younger.

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
Freda Leavey (photo credit: Courtesy: Douglas Guthrie)
Freda Leavey
(photo credit: Courtesy: Douglas Guthrie)
As a teen in London in the 1930s, Freda Leavey was an ardent member of Habonim, a Jewish Zionist youth movement. Her experiences in Habonim – the dancing, the singing, the stories of Palestine – lit the spark for her eventual move to Israel, but it was not until 1960, at age 38, that she first visited the Holy Land. And it took another 15 years before she was able to leave England behind permanently.
Now 91 years young, Leavey still vividly remembers borrowing £50 to cover air fare and accommodation for her first month-long visit to Israel through Scopus, the British Friends of the Hebrew University. She fell in love with the country during those weeks of touring, and was heartbroken to leave.
She visited seven more times in the coming years, but family circumstances prevented the aliya she longed for.
First, in 1964, her mother died and Leavey felt she could not leave her father. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She vowed that if she survived, she would make aliya as an act of thanksgiving.
However, two more tragedies followed: In 1967, her father died and eight months later so did her musically gifted 39-year-old sister.
“My beautiful sister left two young children, and I didn’t feel I could leave my nephews, though I wanted to go,” Leavey says. “Anyhow, I had no money, job or place to live, and no immediate family in Israel; just one cousin.”
Six months before the 1967 Six Day War, she secured a position as secretary to the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London, the research arm of the World Jewish Congress.
“We became the nerve center for world Jewry during the war and one had the feeling one was actually working in Israel,” she recalls. “I met many people who later became VIPs, such as [British historian] Martin Gilbert.”
When she felt her nephews no longer needed her to live nearby, she made good on her pledge to make aliya, sending ahead 14 boxes of possessions. For the first five days after her arrival on October 15, 1975, Leavey stayed with her cousin in Jerusalem and then rented a series of rooms until moving into an East Talpiot flat a year later.
Contacts from the IJA had provided her with employment at the Jewish Agency, which paid a meager wage of 300 old shekels per month. To supplement her salary, she advertised her services as an English-speaking, trained secretary. Though her skills were in great demand, her clients did not have English typewriters available, so Leavey lugged her own portable typewriter around on buses – not an easy way to make a living.
At the Jewish Agency, she eventually got assigned to assist a newly arrived senior researcher, also from the IJA, in preparing The Documentary History of Zionism, where she remained until the budget ran out.
She then worked for Prof. Moshe Davis, director of the Hebrew University- based International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, until his death in 1996. At that point, she decided to retire.
But her golden years have been far from idle. On the contrary, retirement gave Leavey the opportunity to devote more time to her passion for theater.
A THEATRICAL BENT After graduating from high school, Leavey studied dance and theater in her spare time, and later was accepted into the drama department of the Regent Street Polytechnic (now Westminster University). On the practical side, she spent two years learning secretarial skills at Pitman’s College.
“I began working at 18, which was later than most of my friends,” she relates.
During World War II, she worked for the Air Raid Precautions Department of the Hendon local authority and enlisted as an officer in a pre-service training unit for young women going into the army.
After the war, she joined a Jewish London theater group, Cameo Players.
In 1985, Leavey became a founding member of the Jerusalem English- Speaking Theatre (JEST) and still serves as its secretary. She played the lead in its opening production, Separate Tables, and has acted in many other JEST plays.
She was also a founding member of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society in Jerusalem. “If you wanted theater in those days, you had to go to Tel Aviv, so when I saw an ad about this I joined,” she says.
Leavey’s acting CV includes a professional production of The Fantasticks, appearances on the silver screen in Diamond with Shelley Winters and Golda with Ingrid Bergman, as well as the made-for-TV movie A Barn in Manhattan and a Yoplait yogurt commercial filmed in a retirement home in 2003.
She herself now lives in a retirement facility in Talpiot and regularly attends services at the neighborhood’s Masorti congregation, Moreshet Avraham. She hopes to live long enough to see her 21- and 24-year-old great-nephews get married. As for her great-nieces, who are just 10 and 11 years old, “that’s a bit much to hope for,” she chuckles.
Every other week, Leavey gets together with friends for play readings and discussions, and she volunteers at the reception desk at the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel in addition to holding the chairmanship of Hitachdut Olei Britannia, the British equivalent of AACI. At one time she recorded programs for visually handicapped and homebound members of AACI.
“I like to feel I’ve made a contribution.
Whatever I’ve done, I’ve tried to make my life here worthwhile. I never went to full-time ulpan because I had to go to work. As a result, I don’t read the newspapers or Hebrew books. But I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I could spend another 90 years here.”
Asked why she never married, a teasing twinkle appears in Freda’s eyes. “I am still looking!” she replies. ■