Deborah Steiner van Rooyen

Born to Jean and Alfred Steiner on March 3, 1951, Deborah grew up with her two sisters in Millburn, New Jersey. When she turned eighteen, she fled suburban culture for a less conventional life. She travelled to Israel, where she discovered a host of extended family relations, including Nava and Adi Shavit, who gave her a home in Tel Aviv. Deborah taught herself Hebrew, studied for her BA at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, worked on Kibbutz Ginosar, and served in the Israeli Defense Force in the Sinai Peninsula at the start of the Yom Kippur War. The relative with whom she developed the closest kinship was her paternal grandfather Solomon Steiner’s nephew, Yonah Steiner, who had escaped the Nazi camps before making his harrowing way to Palestine. Deborah adored Yonah for his resilience and courage, and warmly embraced Rivka, his wife.

This proved the most indelible of Deborah’s many forays to the Middle East, South and North Africa, and Europe. She traveled not as a tourist but as an adventurer, picking up a smattering of languages, finding new projects to accomplish, and collecting new friends and colleagues as she went along.

After obtaining a Master of Fine Arts Degree at the Massachusetts College of Art, Deborah worked at top Boston advertising firms as creative designer and award-winning art director. She filled her mews house in Brookline Village with dazzling color. Taking a self-proclaimed sabbatical from the Mad Men scene, she went to Amman, Jordan as a volunteer for the Jordan River Foundation, where she helped Palestinian seamstresses develop new fabric designs for a Western market. Thereupon she became something of a Levantine textile trader. Back in the States, Deborah set up her own freelance design consulting business. On the side, she plunged into detecting, doggedly solving some cross-border missing person cases that even Interpol hadn’t been able to crack. She wrote two books, one an acerbic break-up memoir and the other Yonah Steiner’s somber tale of persecution and release. In retirement, she turned her full attention to genealogy, declaring, “I love the archives!” Only this past November, she was in Amsterdam, tracking down lost descendants of a Spanish Sephardic rabbi. (She found them, of course.)

Deborah’s intimate life was no less exuberant. She had four significant romances. The first was with her South African husband Michael Van Rooyen, the father of her daughter, Kierie, born in 1982. Her second was with John van-S, a dashing Boston photographer. Her third romance, in later life, was with a gentle architect, Edd Vitagliano. Deborah saw Edd, whom she married, as her true soulmate and was inconsolable after he predeceased her. Finally, she jumped out of bed, announcing, “I have one more adventure in me!” She volunteered her design services to the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Marrakesh, where she bought a riad and mingled with native Moroccans and expats until Covid hit.

The paramount love of Deborah’s life was Kierie, whom she raised to be at least as big a risk-taker as she was. She looked the other way when her toddler swung wildly from the jungle gym and then fell off. As her daughter grew older, they took their own daring trips. Deborah cheered Kierie on when she studied for her veterinarian degree, when she married Francois Baudin and moved to France, when she gave birth to two irrepressible children, Camille and Tibere, and when she turned her house into a menagerie for animals that no one returned to her clinic to claim.

Temperamentally, Deborah could be a handful. She was headstrong, mercurial, unfiltered, without a diplomatic bone in her body. As a recent case in point, when a doctor’s young assistant told her that “Harry and me will take you to the examination room,” a 72-year-old Deborah snapped back, “No one who uses ‘Harry and me’ as the subject of a sentence is taking me anywhere.”

Not only for grammatical reasons, Deborah was jaundiced about the human race yet deeply caring about any sentient being who suffered an injustice. A fabulist by nature, she embellished every story if the real details were too dull for her tastes. Still, her vivid imagination, combined with her extraordinary actual experiences, meant that there was no one who had more fascinating – and often hilarious – stories to spin. Those of us who led less exciting lives will miss the ping of those DVR texts that read, “Call me! I have something unbelievable to tell you.”

Deborah leaves behind her beloved daughter, Kierie, her unflappable son-in law, Francois, and her grandchildren, Cami and Tibere, on whom she doted. Fortunately, she spent her last, and joyous, weeks with all of them in France. Deborah also leaves bereft her older sister Joan Cocks, her younger sister, Barbara Steiner, and her brother-in-law, Peter Cocks. Out of their love for Deborah, her cousins Efrat and Ami Shavit, her aunt Sylvia Steiner, and Sylvia’s daughter, Ellen Steiner Dolgin, dedicated themselves to sorting out her funeral arrangements. Ami was heroic in doing everything that needs to be done in the aftermath of an unexpected death. Among the many other members of her extended family reeling from Deborah’s loss is Yonah’s son, Avi Steiner, with whom Deborah had strong ties of affection. Her friends and acquaintances in America and around the world will miss her dearly, too.

The funeral will take place on Sunday, January 7, at the Congregation B’nai Israel Cemetery at 245 Mt. Olivet Ave., Newark, NJ, second gate. Mourners are invited to arrive at 11:30-11:45 a. m. The ceremony begins at noon. Deborah will be buried next to her mother in the row of plots under the name of her grandmother, Mary Gordon. Shiva will take place immediately following interment at a location in New Jersey to be announced at the service, and will also take place on Wednesday, January 10, from 4:00 – 7:00 PM at Deborah’s late residence in Massachusetts.

For information about a Zoom link for the graveside service, please contact Stanetsky Memorial Chapel at 617-232-9300.

In lieu of flowers (although Deborah requested tulips at every birthday), donations in her memory can be made Friends of Yad Vashem (www.yadvashem.org/friends) or to MSPCA (www.mspca.org).

Arrangements under the direction of Stanetsky Memorial Chapels, www.stanetskybrookline.com