Eva Trotsky Benjamin

(born March 17, 1915, died December 31, 1998)

There are people who serve the community so well that many are hardly aware of their presence; or more accurately, accept that service almost unobserved and are aware of it only when it ceases.

One such was Eva Benjamin, whose working life was hardly dramatic (although her family was scored with tragedy) but who, as reporter to the Jewish Echo for some 40 years, faithfully and meticulously recorded the activities of the Jewish community.

She died on New Year's Eve aged 83 (she always said that she was older than you

think). Her family name was Trotsky-Ross but, although her sympathies were with the socialist left, there was nothing extreme in her outlook.

She went from school to work in a city clothing firm, but lack of higher education could not conceal her natural capacity to absorb ideas and she acquired a good knowledge of Hebrew.

She was a mover and shaker in the local socialist Zionist movement, the Poalei Zion, and maintained a life-long interest in Habonim, the Zionist youth movement. Later she was an outspoken delegate at the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council.

In 1948, she wed Albert Benjamin, an accountant, but twin children died in infancy and a later daughter, Joyce, proved to be autistic and died at the age of 19. In the late 1950s, Eva and Albert took on the (part-time) post of reporter on the Echo. There may have been two of them, but they functioned very much as a team.

They reported and wrote features on every aspect of Jewish life in Glasgow. They were tireless in pursuit of local stories and ultra-conscientious in checking out names and other details. Their reports were treated as authoritative records of what transpired at meetings. They interviewed the great and the good and Eva quickly developed a fearless, but never aggressive, approach of her own.

She contributed numerous items to the paper's Diary page. She once asked a very wealthy businessman if he was down to your last 12 million yet. And she rendered colleagues speechless at a Star Trek press show by conversing with Mr Spock himself (Leonard Nimoy) in Yiddish.

Eva Benjamin soon revealed a valuable ability to write film and theatre criticisms. Her approach was devastatingly simple: she said what the film was about and then why she thought it was good or bad. There was no pretentious analysis, but it was clear that she knew all about the film world. And I was lost in admiration how, even in her 60s, she could write quite equably about films which were blatantly pornographic or simply tasteless. Her straightforward reviews were well liked by cinema managements and, indeed, by readers who would approach Eva for opinions.

She and Albert spent a hectic few days each year at the Edinburgh Festival covering a wide variety of shows and the reviews always appeared in later Film Festival publications.

Eva and Albert Benjamin attended and spoke at a number of conferences in Israel for Jewish journalists from all over the world, and their names were better known to some New Yorkers than to people in Glasgow.

They also contributed items to the Evening Times and acted as Glasgow correspondents for the Jewish Chronicle in London. When Albert died about four years ago, the impulse also died for Eva and, although she wrote occasionally for theatrical papers, the enthusiasm had departed.

At her funeral there were present many prominent in the older generation of the Jewish community. Eva had served them faithfully and probably found in the community the family she had been denied.

• Benjamin and Golombok Dynasties