Calmly and quietly, with great personal charm and unquenchable good humour, Lira Winston made an unrivalled contribution to Jewish education. Her lifelong impact on the Jewish community was as much due to her winning smile as her relaxed, almost unnoticed ability to influence and assuage even the most strident voices and make things happen as they should.
London-born Lira Winston, who has died aged 72, was the eldest of the four children of Joe and Dr Marjorie Feigenbaum (née Golomb). Her mother was a dermatologist and her father had a wholesale grocery business. They were members of Hendon Adath Synagogue. Lira went to Henrietta Barnet School, studied history at LSE during its fiercely revolutionary period and received an MA from Sussex University. She had not been involved in the LSE riots but they showed her how to be vocal and articulate when she joined the Campaign for Soviet Jewry.
As a young woman Lira’s life was marred by tragedy. Her father died in April, 1971, followed in December that year by her younger brother David. Six months later, on 18th June, 1972, her mother was travelling to a medical conference in Belgium. The plane crashed immediately after take-off, killing everyone on board. At the age of 22, Lira was left alone with her two 18-year old twin sisters Naomi and Ruthie.
At her mother’s funeral, Lira’s friends remarked on a young man they had never seen before, a doctor named Robert Winston whom she had first met three weeks earlier. They announced their engagement in December, 1972 and were married at Norrice Lea Synagogue in March 1973.
In her early career Lira freelanced for the BBC as a history researcher and for the campaigning author, journalist and staunch pro-Israel advocate, Terence Prittie. When her daughter Tanya was born in 1975, she stopped working and became a full- time mum, giving birth to Joel in 1978 and Ben in 1981.
She resumed her career working on communal projects for the Michael Sinclair Charitable Trust. Sinclair noticed that in addition to her organisational skills, the soft power of her personality allowed her quietly and effortlessly to neutralise egos in meetings. When Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asked Sinclair to chair a new organisation, Jewish Continuity, he brought Lira in to help run it.
Lira joined UJIA when it merged with Jewish Continuity in 1997 and ran the Ashdown Fellowships, a new UJIA programme to train future Jewish leaders of the future. She never sought a public leadership role herself, but used her gentle charisma and highly effective way with people to help train those who did.
In 2007 Lira was recruited to project manage the Jewish Leadership Council’s Commission on the future of Jewish schools. She co-ordinated the response to the report and when it was decided to establish PaJeS, the Partnership for Jewish Schools, she was appointed Deputy Director. Her colleagues described her as the lynchpin of PaJeS, involved at every stage in its establishment, putting her heart and soul into the organisation.
Lira believed that education is critical for Jewish continuity. She recognised that a school’s success depends heavily upon its leaders, and on the delicate balance between professional heads and governors. She created and delivered support groups, professional development programmes and conferences for headteachers.
She worked similarly with governors, running training programmes and organising expert-led discussions. In 2020, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks presented her with a Lifetime Achievement award on behalf of PaJeS. Had she known before the event that they planned to honour her, she would have refused. But afterwards, she was rightly delighted.
She became Lady Winston when Robert was made a life peer in November, 1995. Unfailingly proud of his achievements, she wore her title lightly, eschewing the airs and graces that are presumed to go with it. A friend said that she’d only heard her use her title once, when she had to order a taxi urgently.
She was a governor of North West London Jewish Day School and a trustee of many charities including, at different times, the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust, Sage nursing home and the Sam & Bella Sebba Trust.
For all her passion for Jewish education and the Jewish community, it was the second-most important thing in her life. Her family mattered more than anything. She was never happier than when she was with her grandchildren, collecting them from school, having them to stay or visiting her son Ben and family in California.
During lockdown, she kept in touch with her family by delivering food to their homes. Whether organising large family events, hosting some of her many friends for Shabbat meals or running educational conferences, Lira was the consummate hostess, making each one of her guests feel they were the most interesting person in the room. She took a genuine interest in everyone she met and saw the best in everybody. Far too young to be a matriarch, she was the one person in her large, extended family to whom everybody automatically deferred.
Lira Winston died suddenly and unexpectedly at home. Five hundred people attended her funeral and even more tuned in every evening to hear tributes at the Zoom shiva. She is survived by her husband Robert, children and in-laws Tanya and James, Joel and Joanne, Ben and Meredith, sisters Naomi Landy, Ruthie Pollak and eight grandchildren.
Lady Lira Winston: born August 8, 1949. Died December 9, 2021
