Mary-Ella in her customary seat for opening
Women's Reading Group meetings at All Souls

The Women's Reading Group was discussing Resurrection by Tucker Malarkey. Comments about Gnosticism, Mithraeism, Manichaeism, Zorastrianism, Egyptian goddesses, Judaism, early Christian churches, and the early Christian church flew thick and fast. It was a knowledgeable crowd. Some of the women present, sitting in a circle of comfortable chairs in a room at All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan, New York City, had been among those who founded the group in 1979 to read books by women. They had been coming to the group's meetings ever since.

Mary-Ella serves as coordinator for the group, which has no “leader,” on principle, and, like the Women's Alliance of which it is a part, is not limited to members of All Souls. She opened the meeting with various announcements, but the discussion was led by the woman who had suggested the book for inclusion on the reading list. The list is chosen at an annual meeting at which books are nominated and voted on. Mary-Ella fills in on occasion to lead the discussion and was one of the group’s co-founders. More often than not, Mary-Ella is a founding member of a group she is a member of.

Or “founding volunteer.” This is how Mary-Ella describes her role in the Booker T. Washington Learning Center, an organization founded by the late Reverend Leroy Ricksy, minister at the Church of the Resurrection, U.C.C., in East Harlem. Mary-Ella was at meeting of an East Harlem organization in the mid-1980’s where the Rev. Ricksy asked for volunteers for an after-school program he was starting at his church. When Mary-Ella showed up as a volunteer in the church’s basement, she found about a dozen young people doing their homework, and a stunned Rev. Ricksy, who had not, apparently, expected a response to his request.

In front of the cheerful bulletin board in the Mary-
Ella Holst Room in the All Souls Children's School

Mary-Ella spoke about this in a tribute to the Rev. Ricksy at a Special Benefit Concert for the Learning Center at All Souls shortly after his death in 2006. As she tells it, as more children appeared at the after-school center in the months following her first appearance there and its programs expanded, it became apparent that more money was needed. When she asked the Rev. Ricksy about his plans for fund-raising, he replied, “The Lord will provide.” And Mary-Ella responded, “ Leroy, the Lord does not sign checks.”

She also told him that she would be glad to assist at fund-raising, but that the center needed a name, since it would be difficult to raise money for something called the “center in the basement.” A week later, he came up with the name, the Booker T. Washington Learning Center.

Now the Learning Center has a tribute to Mary-Ella on its Web site. (Internet research is a good way to find out about Mary-Ella's myriad activities and accomplishments, because Mary-Ella herself is somewhat reticent about listing them.)

Mary-Ella’s activities in raising funds for nonprofits (call it one of her careers) began with the 50th Anniversary Capital Campaign in 1989-1991 for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (USSC), a nonsectarian human rights organization. As part of this campaign, Mary-Ella organized a benefit dinner honoring Martha Sharp, a founder of the USSC, who, with her former husband, the late Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, had led a mission to Prague in 1939 to rescue people from Nazi persecution.

Hitler had annexed a portion of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. The Sharps were in Prague when the Nazis took over the entire country, and remained there for five months to carry out a rescue and relief operation. Their rescue list included intellectuals, students, and anti-Nazi political leaders, and included many Jews and Jewish children.

Mary-Ella in the Children's Chapel, where she
led services as Director of Religious Education

In the course of organizing the benefit, Mary-Ella worked with Martha Sharp to locate people who had been children when the Sharps rescued them, and was able to re-unite her at the dinner with 11 of these people out of a group of 27. The Sharps had created an escape route for the children over the Pyrenees, and they had traveled from France to the United States in 1941.

The reunion was the source of the “living testimony” required for the posthumous recognition of the Sharps as “Righteous Among Nations” at the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, in June 2006. The Sharps were two of only three Americans to be so honored. The Sharps were also honored posthumously in September 2006 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by the dedication of a plaque honoring the Sharps on its “Rescuers Wall.” Martha Sharp is the only woman whose name is on that Wall.

Mary-Ella says that the honoring of Martha Sharp at Yad Vashem and at the Holocaust Memorial Museum is the most satisfying result of her “persistent and independent pursuit of history.” For Mary-Ella is indeed an historian, as well as a feminist. She is the author of the history of All Souls on its Web site and she contributed to the writing of the history of the USSC on its Web site. Her books include An Exploration of the Friendship of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Mary-Ella says it is really a "booklet"), published by the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society (Wind Rose Press, New York, New York).

Although Mary-Ella works independently as an historian, she says that history has taught her that ideas need institutional support, and the focus of her social activism has been on institution building. She is Director Emerita of Religious Education at All Souls (she was Director from 1976 to 1987), and a classroom in the school is named for her. In 2005 she was president of the congregation and chairperson of the Board of Trustees.

She has served on the board of the USSC and is a voice for the organization’s human rights work as a member of its “Ambassadors Council.” The USSC has named an annual award for her. It is the Mary-Ella Holst Youth Activist Award, established in 2000 to honor young people for leadership and demonstrated commitment to social justice and human rights.

As a USSC “Ambassador,” Mary-Ella traveled in 1996 to Japan and Czechoslovakia for 50th anniversary celebrations of the humanitarian work of United States organizations after World War II. Events in Prague honored the establishment of the USSC Medical Mission program in postwar Czechoslovakia, and some of the people at the events remembered the Sharps from their rescue mission to Prague in 1939.

The events in Japan commemorated the humanitarian relief provided by many United States organizations to people in Japan at the close of World War II. At many of the gatherings, Mary-Ella and the representatives of the other organizations spoke briefly. Mary-Ella chose to make her remarks in the form of the following haiku, ably translated by a friend:

Her haiku was received with an outburst of applause, marking another high point in Mary-Ella’s life. Or not. The speakers at these gatherings were presented alphabetically by organization, so that Mary-Ella, representing the USSC, invariably spoke last. She could never be sure, she says, whether the applause was in appreciation of her effort in creating the haiku or because the speeches had ended.

Mary-Ella had chosen to cast her remarks in the form of a haiku because she is, in addition to her other occupations and preoccupations, a poet. A book of her poems, Beyond Dreams of Rescue, with a cover photograph by Mary-Ella – add “photographer” to the list – was published in 1992 (Wind Rose Press, New York, New York).

Her literary, historical and educational pursuits also include planning and leading Adult Education sessions at All Souls. Last summer she offered a four-session series on Virginia Woolf. In January of this year, she led three sessions on Unitarian and Universalist women. The third session was especially timely. It was on Susan B. Anthony, and was titled, “Can a Woman Be a Political Leader?”

Mary-Ella’s most recent fund-raising activities have been on behalf of the Heart & Soul Charitable Fund. A biographical note about Mary-Ella, as a board member, on the Fund’s Web site refers to her work over three decades as a volunteer fundraiser for community and national organizations, organizing jazz concerts, auctions, fairs, theater parties, and other events. It also notes that Mary-Ella has put her writing experience to use for these organizations for foundation grant proposals, newsletters, brochures, press releases and the like.

Mary-Ella became a Unitarian as an indirect result of winning a contest at her high school in Toledo, Ohio, for a speech she had written. She went on to the citywide contest (which she won), and in connection with that contest she went to several meetings at a Unitarian church. There she met some people from her high school, and decided to join that church. In 1960, she became associated with All Souls in Manhattan and taught Sunday school. She signed up officially as a member in 1964.

Until high school, Mary-Ella had lived in Detroit, Michigan, where she was born in 1934. She comes by her writing skills naturally. Her father was a sports writer and her mother wrote for a community newspaper. Her grandmother on her father’s side won an award for being the longest practicing newspaperperson in Ohio. She worked until her death in her late 80’s.

Mary-Ella’s parents separated when she was six. She lived with her mother in Detroit until high school. Detroit was a pretty chaotic place at the time, and Mary-Ella went to live with her father in Toledo. She is a graduate of the University of Toledo. Her brother, the late Spencer Holst, an award-winning author of several collections of short stories, had been living with their father, so he and Mary-Ella had not grown up together. In the 1970’s, however, when Mary-Ella and her brother were both in New York City, they would give readings together, he of his stories and Mary-Ella of her poems, in cafés in Greenwich Village.

Mary-Ella had moved to New York in 1960 with her first husband, from whom she was divorced in 1969. They had two daughters. In her early days in New York, Mary-Ella worked for a New York State employment service and a state anti-poverty program in Brooklyn with an office in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an impoverished section of that borough of New York City. At the same time, she was studying at New York University for a Master’s degree in vocational guidance counseling, and received her degree in 1970.

After years of working and studying, all the time teaching Sunday School at All Souls, Mary-Ella took a break when her daughters were in their early years in high school, to “get focused.” She got married, to the late Bert Zippel, who taught at Hunter College. In 1987 she married Guy C. Quinlan, and they live in Manhattan. Mary-Ella has four grandchildren.

At the University of Toledo, Mary-Ella was an “interdepartmental major,” in English language and literature, and history. She has been an “interdepartmental major” ever since.

For the tribute to Mary-Ella on the Web site of the Booker T. Washington Learning Center and to get more information about the Learning Center, click on bookert.org/about=us/volunteers/bio.aspx?ID=1257. For more about the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, click on www.uusc.org. For the Web site of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan, go to www.allsoulsnyc.org. For information about the Heart & Soul Charitable Fund, click on www.heartandsoulfund.org