In Memoriam - Bunny Horowitz

I knew Bunny, met with her several times and worked with her on some projects through AFSI.

Here's AFSI's appreciation:

IN MEMORIAM

BERNICE "BUNNY" HOROWITZ: AFSI deeply mourns the passing of the chairman of our Florida chapter for many years. Bunny was both participant and donor in the society of artists, dancers, musicians and museums both in America and Israel. Yet Israel was her top priority. With her flair for clothes and wearable art, Bunny cut a fashionable figure, but her heart was with the unfashionable but grand cause of Jewish rights to all the land of Israel from the River Jordan to the sea, from the Golan to Eilat. Even when her health declined, she continued to visit every corner of Israel including remote Jewish settlements throughout Golan, Judea and Samaria and Gaza. She was tireless, brave, noble and irreplaceable.

And more details:

...She and husband Arthur Horowitz, who died in 2003, founded the five-restaurant Junior's chain -- South Florida culinary landmarks of the 1950s and '60s -- and Arthur's Eating House in Miami, which operated in the 1980s.

Bunny Horowitz lived six decades in Miami Beach and Coconut Grove, and died Dec. 10 at 84. Her children moved her to New York City two years ago after she developed the fibrotic lung disease that led to her death.

As Miami chairwoman of the right-leaning Americans for a Safe Israel, Horowitz supported controversial settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2004, after Yasser Arafat died, she told The Miami Herald that it wouldn't matter who replaced him because no one in the Palestinian Authority could be trusted.

...The main administration building of the Alexander Muss High School at Hod Ha'Sharon, in Israel, is named for her. [our cousins work here]

Her hard-line perspective made her controversial among her liberal friends.

''My parents believed you could not make peace with the Palestinians,'' son Jeffrey said...``The price she paid was that people were upset when she confronted them. . . .She wouldn't stop at some high-end parties. She didn't disengage. She felt these were life and death issues and they had to be discussed.''

Herb Zweibon, the organization's chairman in New York, called Horowitz ``bright and passionate. She and Arthur were part of the Jewish elite, and she recognized early on that she would not give up her beliefs in order to maintain her position in that society. . . . She was every bit the lady but a fierce proponent of what she believed in.''

...A prize-winning ballroom dancer, Horowitz generously supported ballet companies. The legendary Jacques D'Amboise choreographed and dedicated a piece called Sinfonietta -- to music by Paul Hindemith -- to the Horowitzes. It premiered in 1975 at the New York City Ballet.

Born Bernice Schwamm in New York, Bunny Horowitz had a difficult childhood. After her father died when she was 3, she went to live uptown with a wealthy but severe relative: her father's son from a first marriage.