Hadassah Wagman Heins Obituary (1918 - 2020)

Hadassah W. Heins, age 102, died on Tuesday, August 5, 2020 in Minneapolis. Her husband of 75 years, Professor Maurice H. Heins, a mathematician, predeceased her in 2015. She is survived by her daughter, Sulamith H. Potter of Olympia, WA, an anthropologist, her son, Samuel D. Heins of Minneapolis, a lawyer and former U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway, and daughter-in-law, Stacey Mills of Minneapolis. Also, by grandchildren Elizabeth Potter Scully of Los Angeles, Madeleine S. H. Israelson of St. Michael, Noah Potter of Chicago and Nora Heins Murray of Portland, Oregon, their spouses, nine great grandchildren, and friend Maria Megas. She was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts and grew up in Boston. She attended Girls Latin School and Radcliffe College. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1939 Magna Cum Laude. She went on to graduate study in child psychology at Smith College. She married Maurice H. Heins in 1940. He had received his AB Summa Cum Laude from Harvard College in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. They lived in Boston, Princeton, Chicago, Washington DC, Providence, RI, Paris, Urbana, IL, Berkeley and Chevy Chase, MD. They also traveled widely in Europe. She knew Latin, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, German and Italian. She was a lifetime member of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization of America, for which her mother, Libbie, had worked as secretary to its founder, Henrietta Szold. She was also a lifetime member of and volunteer at Planned Parenthood. She was a passionate Democrat and generous donor to Democratic candidates. She was active from the late 1950s, in the antinuclear arms movement and demonstrated for adoption of various treaties, including the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. She continued her antinuclear activism throughout her life and was a member of the Ploughshares Fund. She was a passionate organic gardener since the early 1950s who always sought organic produce and meat and rejected refined sugar and refined flour. An English major, she was widely read, aided by unbelievable reading speed and comprehension. She was asked to suggest poems for inclusion in Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac radio program, which she did for a decade. She declined to be paid or publicly recognized. She was acknowledged in the Introduction to Garrison Keillor’s “Good Poems”, an anthology published in 2002. A private burial took place on Friday, August 7, with a celebration of life to be held at a later date. The family thanks her caregivers at Meridian Manor and Jones-Harrison, with special gratitude to Peter Moore, and Maria Megas. In lieu of flowers, Hadassah would best be remembered with a donation to whenweallvote.org, whose mission is to increase voter participation in all elections