14 Facts About Maurice Levitas

Maurice Levitas was an Ireland-born academic and communist.

Maurice Levitas was involved in military activity; first becoming involved with Comintern's International Brigades against the Nationalist insurgency during the Spanish Civil War and then during the Second World War, as a British citizen, he joined the British Army's Royal Army Medical Corps.

Maurice Levitas was known to his family and friends as "Morry".

Harry Maurice Levitas was a member of the Tailors and Pressers Union, known in Dublin as the Jewish Union.

In 1927, when Morry was 10 years old, the family emigrated to Britain, first to Glasgow then to London where Maurice Levitas later joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933.

Maurice Levitas was an active trade unionist and he and his brothers Max and Sol, were involved in the 1936 "Battle of Cable Street" against the British Union of Fascists.

Maurice Levitas was captured in 1938 and released in February 1939.

In 1942, Maurice Levitas enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served in India and Burma.

In 1964, Maurice Levitas graduated with an honours degree in sociology from the University of London and became a senior lecturer in the sociology of education at Durham University.

Maurice Levitas emigrated to East Germany in 1985 to work as an English teacher.

Maurice Levitas attended the commemoration of the Connolly Column in 1991 in Liberty Hall, Dublin, where he was chosen to read out the list of members.

Maurice Levitas attended, in 1997, a ceremony in the Mansion House, Dublin by the Lord Mayor of Dublin of the surviving Irish members of the International Brigade.

Maurice Levitas returned to England in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Maurice Levitas's daughter is the sociologist Ruth Levitas and his son is the theatre historian Ben Levitas.