Born in Clapham, London, Deech is the daughter of a historian and journalist, Josef Fraenkel who was born in 1903 in Ustrzyki Dolne in south-east Poland. She states that she comes from a "very culturally Jewish family". Her father "was born in Poland and fled, first to Vienna and then Prague, from the Nazis". He arrived in Britain on 3 September 1939, the day the Allies declared war on Germany. Documents show that he traveled first from Poland to Nazi Germany and arrived in Great Britain on 3 September 1939. Several other members of their family were murdered in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Her first cousin is Maurice Frankel, Director of the UKCampaign for Freedom of Information. She was educated at Christ's Hospital school, then located in Hertford. She graduated from St Anne's College, Oxford with a first in Law in 1965.
Career
Deech returned to St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1970 to be a tutorial fellow in Law, a post she retained until 1991 when she was elected principal of the college. She retired in 2004, and was succeeded by Tim Gardam. The college named the Ruth Deech Building, which was completed in 2005, after her. Deech held many other positions during her career; she served as Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford between 1985 and 1986, as a member of the University's Hebdomadal Council of the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority from 1994 until 2002, and was appointed to a four-year term as a Governor of the BBC in 2002, the same year that she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in recognition of her work at the HFEA. After leaving St. Anne's, Deech was appointed the first Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education from 2004 to 2008, dealing with the resolution of student complaints at all UK universities. On 22 July 2005, it was announced by the House of Lords Appointments Commission that she would be made a life peer, sitting as a Crossbencher. On 5 October 2005, she was created Baroness Deech, of Cumnor in the County of Oxfordshire, and introduced in the House of Lords on 25 October 2005. She delivered her maiden speech on 24 November 2005. In 1999, The Observer newspaper named her as the 107th most powerful person in Britain, and in 2001, Deech was placed at no.26 in Channel 4's "The God List", which ranked "the fifty people of faith in Britain who exercise the most power and influence over our lives". In November 2007, Deech published IVF to Immortality: Controversy in the Era of Reproductive Technology, with co-author Anna Smajdor. Between 2004 and 2008, Deech was Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education and a Professor of Law at Gresham College in London, where she gave a series of public lectures on family relationships and the law. In December 2016 Deech argued that Jewish students at UK universities were subject to increasing anti-Semitism. She is a Patron of the activist group UK Lawyers for Israel.
Returned family property
In 2008, it emerged that Eugeniusz Waniek, a 101-year-old Polish artist and art professor living in Kraków, had in his possession a set of silver cutlery which had once belonged to Deech's father's family, the Fraenkels. Waniek had been a Polish Christian neighbour and friend of the Fraenkels in pre-war Ustrzyki Dolne, a small town near the Polish/Ukrainian border. Deech's grandfather, Moses Fraenkel, owned an oil refinery there had been a long-serving mayor of the town. Nazi German troops raided Ustrzyki Dolne in September 1942, rounding up the town's large Jewish population. Deech's aunt, Helena Fraenkel, managed to pass a bundle of the silverware to Waniek for safekeeping, risking her life in doing so. Other Jews in the town were shot for refusing to hand over valuables to Nazis. Helena was sent to her death in the Belzec concentration camp. Waniek looked after the silver, at one stage burying it in his garden to hide it from the Nazis, which would have also been punishable by death. He never saw the Fraenkels again. The story was uncovered by a neighbour of Waniek's, Marek Marko, and historian Professor Norman Davies in 2008. When Deech and her British family visited Waniek, he presented to them the silverware that he had kept in a drawer for 67 years. He died 8 months later, aged 102. Deech has criticized Poland regarding its policy for compensation of goods stolen during German occupation. Deech has claimed that Poland is “squatting on property of 3 million Shoah victims” and that it was the "most egregious offender” when it came to returning Nazi loot”.
