She was born into a Jewish family in Barre, Vermont. She raised five children in a house built by her first husband, the architectural engineer Marcel Beaudin. In 1968, thanks to a friend who was a doctor and had gone to Israel after the six-day war, Vera took her four young children, aged between four and eleven, and made a journey to Israel to find her Jewish roots. At the age of forty, Vera Saeedpour began studying at the University of Vermont and, proving to be a very talented student, received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She continued his studies until 1973, when she received a master's degree in philosophy. She then moved to New York City and received her doctorate in teaching from Columbia University's Teachers College. In 1976, Vera met her second husband, Homayoun Saeedpour, a Kurd from Sina, EastKurdistan. Homayoun's inadvertent question about a definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, which described the Kurds as robbers, led Vera to write a scientific paper entitled “They Kill Them Softly,” forcing Oxford and other important dictionaries to change their definition of that word. In 1981, after Homayoun died of leukemia, Dr. Saeedpour began her “Kurdish work” in a serious and loyal manner. She founded the Kurdish program under the auspices of Cultural Survival, a publication of Harvard University's Department of Anthropology. The program aimed to promote awareness of Kurdish culture and was published from a Midtown office. In 1986, Dr. Saeedpour founded the Kurdish Library, the first Kurdish library in the West, in a Brooklyn house. In 1988, she founded the Kurdish Museum. The organization’s advisors included the likes of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Senator Ted Kennedy.
Before the first Gulf War, which made the American people aware of the Kurdish issue, Dr. Saeedpour took Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to major universities to give speeches and to Washington to meet politicians and journalists.
Dr. Saeedpour's letters to the editor of the New York Times were published many times.
Dr. Saeedpour is survived by a brother, five children (Mark, Paul, Rebecca, Adam and Jeb) and two grandchildren (Jonah and Aaron).
He died on Sunday, May 30, 2010 in upstate New York.[1]