Born London, March 29, 1914.
Died Kfar Maimon, March 9, 2008, aged 93.
Co-founder of the Jewish Marriage Education Council, Betty Boxer combined strong religious life with expertise in sex and marriage.
The oldest child and only daughter of the eight children of Sol and Raie Sklan — two brothers survive her — she grew up in Stamford Hill, North London, in a home committed to Mizrachi, the religious Zionist movement.
In 1933 she married Sam Boxer, a long-serving United Synagogue honorary officer and president of the Shechitah Board. Betty was active in the US in its welfare committee.
After the Second World War she qualified as a marriage counsellor with the National Marriage Guidance Council. In 1962 she became joint chairman with Rabbi Raymond Apple of its counterpart, the Jewish Marriage Education Council, which acquired its own premises.
The work of the council (today the JMC) was enthusiastically endorsed by the new Chief Rabbi, Dr (later Lord) Immanuel Jakobovits and his wife, Amelie, from 1966. Betty was a skilled professional and a formidable personality.
Others spheres of communal activity included joint chairmanship of Mizrachi Women of Great Britain and especially her work for Youth Aliyah, where she continued her mother’s support for Hodayot Youth Village in the Galilee. She also raised funds to build the first synagogue on Kibbutz Lavi, consecrated as the Raie Sklan Synagogue in 1962 and still in regular use.
The couple’s sons, Malcolm (Malachi) and Adrian, settled in the early 1960s in Israel, where they married.
In 1975 Betty and Sam fulfilled their own dream of settling in Jerusalem, where they continued their lives of quiet dignity, unfailing courtesy and commitment to the ideals of religious Zionism.
Betty nursed her husband through his final illness and, after his death in 2003, spent her final years in her younger son’s home on Kfar Maimon, a religious moshav near the Gaza border.
She is survived by her two sons, eight grandchildren and 36 great-grandchildren.