Via Rabbi Arthur Waskow:

Dear Friends,
A few hours ago I received a phone call from Susannah Heschel to say that her mother Sylvia, who has been sick, had died.
The funeral will be held 10 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday) at Riverside Chapel, 76th and Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side in New York City.
Sylvia (nee Straus) was the widow of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who died in 1972. They met in Cincinnati, where she had become a skilled and serious pianist. (He was teaching at Hebrew Union College.) They were married shortly after he began teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1945.
Susannah has said that her mother “was a wonderful partner for him…. She brought music to him, which clearly influenced him deeply. He suddenly began to use musical metaphors for the religious life; they are to be found everywhere in “God in Search of Man.’
It has also been apparent to those who knew both Sylvia and Susannah that Susannah’s staunch feminism was encouraged not only by her father’s spiritually rooted ethics but also by her mother’s strength and example.
May the memory of Sylvia’s own life-melody and her steadfast devotion to both husband and daughter serve as a consolation to her friends and as a blessing to the world.
Shalom, Arthur