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A Unipal trustee and former volunteer, Peter Williams, wrote: ‘Eleanor was always both a teacher and a rebel, critical
of glib answers, suspicious of the conventional wisdom, precise and well-researched Her own attitude of righteous indignation towards the Israeli state was often reminiscent of the biblical prophets. Her campaigning
generated hate-mail, accusations of anti-Semitism and even death threats. But she always welcomed and valued Jewish contributions to her work, recognising that Judaism’s concerns for social justice would always
provide plenty of allies in the fight for Palestinian rights.’
Eleanor Reilly was born in 1917, the fourth of six children, in Kodaikanal in south India. Her father was in the Indian
Civil Service. Eleanor attended University College, London to read languages. She trained as a teacher and started to teach French and also to learn Russian, which was to become of major importance later in her
life. Eleanor became more and more closely involved with the Society of Friends (Quakers), attracted by the belief that there is ‘that of God’ in everyone. She obtained a place on a training course for Quaker
volunteer overseas relief workers, and the warden of the Friends’ Relief Service training centre was Michael Aitken. They were engaged after three weeks and married after three months.
The young couple were sent out to Le Havre in 1945 to take part in relief work after the allied bombing there. This was
to be the beginning, for Eleanor, of a lifetime of work towards peace and international goodwill through personal relations.
A legacy of £100 from a family friend gave Eleanor the chance of a first visit to Russia in 1955. In Cambridge along
with David Balmires, a PhD student, she was involved in setting up Anglo-Russian Contacts, which aimed to work against the Cold War and towards mutual peace and understanding through personal contacts with Russians.
Eleanor taught Russian at St. Christopher’s School in Letchworth from 1959 to 1963, then at St. Mary’s Convent in Cambridge.
Eleanor and Michael were also increasingly drawn into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its campaign of civil
disobedience, earning her a week in Holloway Prison. She subsequently contributed to a pamphlet highlighting some of the worst features of prison conditions at the time. She also became an active member of the
recently founded Amnesty International. Taking up the cause of Greek prisoners jailed following the Colonels’ coup in 1967, she succeeded in having them taken on by the Quakers as a national priority. She followed
this with work supporting Soviet political prisoners, translating smuggled out case histories and writing a pamphlet on the internment of political dissidents in mental hospitals.
Needing a break but not keen to revisit Russia, Eleanor took up her husband’s suggestion that she should visit Soviet
Jews who had been allowed to emigrate to Israel. Aware to a limited extent of the issue of Palestinian refugees, Eleanor decided to extend her trip. She visited Quaker schools and welfare projects as well as those
run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and saw the full tragedy of the Palestinian situation unfold in front of her. She saw at first hand the miserable living conditions and the habitual humiliations
visited on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and heard the harrowing personal testimonies of families who had been displaced. Russian immigrants could ‘return’ home to Israel while Palestinian refugees
languished twenty miles further down the valley.
Back in Britain Eleanor started to talk and write about what she had seen; in the early 1970s there was much less public
awareness than now that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 had been paid for by the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. Fired by a desire to do something effective but non-violent,
she conceived the idea of an educational charity with a twin purpose; its first aim was to raise awareness in the UK about the Palestinian situation. The second was that as a linguist she also saw the importance of
enabling Palestinians to communicate more easily with the rest of the world through the development of spoken English skills. She enlisted support from a group of prominent academics, politicians and religious
figures to sponsor her charity. In 1973 Unipal, the Universities’ Educational Fund for Palestinian Refugees was formed (now A Universities’ Trust for Educational Exchange with Palestinians).
Eleanor saw that education was a lifeline for Palestinians trapped in the overcrowded and wretched conditions of the
refugee camps. Unipal sent groups of students to work on programmes including spoken English tuition in refugee camps in the Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. Volunteers returned with first hand experience of
the Palestinian situation and spread awareness amongst fellow students and colleagues. The charity also brought Palestinian teachers over to Britain to develop their own language teaching skills. These two
programmes continue to be a small scale but worthwhile expression
of Eleanor’s belief in human contact as a first step to peace and co-operation.
When she finally retired in 1996 from running the charity herself, she handed over to an organising committee consisting
largely of former volunteers, who carry on the work she pioneered. Eleanor paid one last visit to the West Bank and Gaza in 2001, profoundly saddened by the wanton destruction of homes, roads, schools, clinics and
human lives, and the harrowing stories of old friends, still waiting for the world to wake up and take action to secure justice and peace.
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