Colonie

Ed Bloch, a Marine Corps veteran of World War II, union organizer, peace activist and leader of the local interfaith movement, died in his sleep at home on Sunday. He was 90.

He combined a love of the synthesis of theology and science by the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with a homespun pragmatism that drew upon many traditions.

Bloch managed to reconcile the irreconcilable and was a self-described "Marxist Presbyterian Jew." He was comfortable with irony.

He ran for Congress in 1984 and 1986 as a Democrat against longtime Republican incumbent Gerald Solomon. Bloch will be interred with military honors in the national cemetery for veterans in Schuylerville named for his political rival.

He was born in Manhattan into a family of privilege, the son of a corporate lawyer. He spent six decades as an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and was beaten up and had his car run off the road by anti-labor thugs. He often quoted a union leader who mentored him: "Anyone who lives to collect his UE pension must not have been doing his job."

In 1948, after his military discharge, he spent two hours discussing the insanity of war with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on the porch of her Hyde Park getaway, Val-Kill.

Bloch marched in his Marine Corps uniform as a bodyguard for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the United Nations in 1967. Decades later, the Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient helped found a Veterans for Peace chapter.

"Ed was a respected elder in the local peace and social justice movement," said Dan Wilcox of Albany, a peace activist and friend of Bloch's for nearly 30 years. "He was involved in so many levels of organizing various groups."

With the aid of a wheelchair, Bloch joined Veterans for Peace contingent at Albany's Memorial Day parade this year.

"He was an extraordinary role model and an icon. He was always on the right side of an issue, whether speaking out against racism or advocating for the poor," said Deb Riitano, executive director of the Capital Area Council of Churches, who worked with Bloch on interfaith issues.

"Ed had the ability to read your heart and he was immersed in the human experience," she said.

He changed the spelling of his name to Block at Williams College for a time in the 1940s to try to mask his Jewish identity when he was shunned by fraternities. He left college to join the Marines at age 18 in 1942 to, in his words, "to prove to the world that Jews could fight."

A lifelong fitness buff, Bloch did one-arm pushups, swam laps and Rollerbladed around his Latham neighborhood well into his 80s.

His life was a quest for justice and forgiveness for a wartime atrocity he committed in 1945 as a 21-year-old platoon leader. He carried that psychic weight until he achieved redemption after 66 years and an 8,000-mile journey back to China and a tiny village along the Hai River. There, in November 1945, three months after the Japanese surrender that ended World War II, Bloch gave the order to open fire on the village of unarmed Chinese civilians. They were Communist sympathizers, believed to have derailed a train during a struggle for power with Chinese Nationalist forces.

From a raised railroad embankment, his platoon fired machine guns and rifles into a cluster of mud huts about 200 yards away. They did not bother to count the dead.

"Before they pull the sheet over me, I wanted to seek justice," Bloch told the Times Union after the China trip. "I felt I had sinned. I needed to make amends."

Despite health concerns, Bloch traveled to China in September 2011 to apologize. He was accompanied by his wife, Naomi, a psychotherapist, and their daughter, Linda Ayer, and a couple who were longtime friends. "You are forgiven," an elderly Chinese politician told him. After a lifetime devoted to making amends and serving as a peacemaker, Bloch felt he had finally atoned.

Bloch described the dark chapter with many lighter moments in a self-published memoir titled "Courage, Coward, Courage!" He also spoke the unvarnished truth at reunions of World War II Marine Corps veterans and recorded an oral history of his wartime experiences.

"My father was both tough and a softie," Ayer said. He did not need a reason for regular purchases of corsages or bouquets of flowers for his wife of 42 years.

He tempered a seriousness of purpose with a sly wit. At a crowded table for a Capital Area Council of Churches dinner a few years ago, an extra chair was being squeezed in.

"Ed, can you move a little to the right?" a fellow diner asked.

"Never," he said.

Bloch is survived by his wife and their daughter, three children from his first marriage, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Bloch was a member of Charlton Freehold Presbyterian Church in Ballston Lake. A public memorial is being planned for late next month or early October.

pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl