From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:
Marty Rosenthal, 79, died August 31 at her home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
The daughter of Lutheran missionaries who served in Africa, Rosenthal was born at Au,
Switzerland, in 1914, a few hundred yards from the Austrian border and the outbreak of
World War I. She met her husband of 55 years, Fritz Rosenthal, then a German chemistry
student, while hiking near Wengen, Switzerland. Escaping the Nazis, they emigrated to
the U.S. in 1938. Marty Rosenthal became involved in animal rights circa 1975, according
to daughter Esther Mechler, after reading Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation. She
became an active member of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance, the Animal Welfare
Association, and, having become a Unitarian, encouraged the Unitarian church to adopt
positions favorable to animals. She also encouraged a neighborhood teenager, Bernard Unti,
to become involved in the cause. Unti subsequently served several years on staff at the
American Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1981, Rosenthal and Mechler formed the Marian
Rosenthal Koch Fund in memory of Rosenthal’s youngest daughter, who died in 1971 at age
26. Projects of the Koch Fund include the video production company Focus on Animals and
Spay U.S.A., now sponsored by the North Shore Animal League.
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