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Roeper seniors Leora Bernard and Ellie Moskowitz with honoree Rudy Simons.
Lifelong Activist
Roeper School to
honor Rudy Simons.
SHARI S. COHEN
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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W
hat does it mean to be a
peace and human rights
activist? For Rudy Simons,
88, it means more than five decades of
speaking out, standing up to oppres-
sion, and working to inspire others to
promote peace and fight persecution.
Roeper School, an independent
school for gifted students in grades
preK-12 in Bloomfield Hills, will honor
Simons at its annual Gala & Golden
Apples Award Ceremony on Friday,
Feb. 17, at the Royal Music Theater.
Roeper’s awards tradition began in
1990 to commemorate the school’s
50th anniversary and to honor indi-
viduals who embody the school’s goal
of empowering students to contribute
to the world.
Simons is linked to Roeper in sev-
eral other ways as well. His son, Eli,
is a Roeper graduate and his wife,
Roseanne, is a substitute teacher at
the school.
Being a peace and human rights
advocate is not a mission for some-
one seeking quick or even tangible
success.
“You never really know what effects
you’re having singly, but when you’re
with tens of thousands, you can point
to the outcome,” Simons says, refer-
ring to the 1965 civil rights march in
Montgomery, Ala. This historic event
led to President Johnson’s advance-
ment of federal civil rights legislation.
Simons went to Montgomery on
his own after obtaining the name
of an Alabama lawyer, who directed
Simons to a local center for civil rights
volunteers where he helped during a
chaotic period of protests, arrests and
police brutality.
Simons says his interest in peace
and human rights evolved over time.
“As a boy, I saw news reels of the
bombing of Poland, which was part
of my anti-war orientation,” he says.
He served as a soldier during the
Korean War. “We were told we were
fighting for peace,” he says. “We were
told to go and kill [the enemy], and I
couldn’t see that was the way it was.”
He later was deeply involved in anti-
Vietnam war efforts.
While serving overseas, he learned
some books by such authors as John
Steinbeck had been removed from
the U.S. Information Library for being
subversive. Simons saw graffiti in
Europe that said “Yankees Go Home”
and “Save the Rosenbergs.” This was
during the McCarthy hearings, and all
those things started to churn in his
head, he says.
Back in Detroit, Simons opened an
advertising agency where he worked
for 15 years. He was a music pub-
lisher and lyricist for the stage and
radio commercials. Then he took a
long, solo trip around the world and
observed the effects of American for-
eign policy.
Back in Detroit, he got involved
with the ACLU and began traveling “to
build bridges with other countries and
look into human rights situations.”
Simons traveled with delegations to
China, Columbia, Iran, Iraq, Central
American and Israel.
His most recent Israel trip was in
2011 with a group of Jews and non-
Jews led by the Resource Center for
Nonviolence. They brought Jewish
Israelis and Palestinians together, gen-
erally with a cordial response, Simons
says.
He served on the board of Wayne
State University’s Center for Peaceful
Conflict Resolution and was a vice
continued on page 22
20
February 9 • 2017
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