Fourth in a series LUBLIN, Poland — A group of about 20 survivors and 2Gs (Second Generation) took a trip out of Warsaw and into the countryside. It was 8 a.m., and Agneishka S. was our guide. We didn’t know what to expect and so we girded our loins for what we knew was going [...]
Second in a series By Jeanette Friedman Jeanette Friedman WARSAW, Poland –When I went to look for my grandmother’s house and her grave, I sought one friend, Isaac Kot from Boston, to help me. Isaac and I have known each other since 2002, when we both attended our first World Federation of Jewish Child [...]
By Jeanette Friedman Jeanette Friedman NEW YORK — On the Friday night, immediately after Rosh Hashanna, my son Dan called for Shabbat dinner at Occupy Wall Street. There were about 25-30 of us who made kiddush, ate cholent (translates these days into vegetarian chili), had tuna fish instead of gefilte fish and drank lots of [...]
-First in a Series- By Jeanette Friedman WARSAW–My first glimpse of Poland came through an airplane window. The thick turbulent clouds had just thinned, and from my aisle seat I could see a lush checkerboard of fields punctuated by small forests, and realized that these were the fields and forests where the Jewish Partisans I [...]
By Jeanette Friedman BROOKLYN, N.Y. — More than 400 folks turned up at Prospect Park Sunday morning, got their little digital chips attached to their sneakers and in separate races for men and women, took off on 5K (3.5 mile) race organized by JRunners. The goal was to raise money for an Orthodox drop-in center [...]
By Jeanette Friedman ENGLEWOOD, N.J.–Thirty-seven years ago, this very week, there was a snowstorm swirling outside my kitchen window, but my sixth floor apartment was so hot and dry I cracked the window facing the fire escape before I went to bed. It was about 3 a.m., and I had just fallen asleep when I [...]
By Jeanette Friedman NEW YORK — It seems that there isn’t a spin doctor, media pundit, columnist, politician or Jew who hasn’t offered an opinion about the Park51 Cordoba Community Center under development two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. In 2009, when the proposal was put forth, there was little or no objection to what [...]
By Jeanette Friedman PHILADELPHIA–They came in early spring, like migrating birds from every corner of the world—more than 200 professors and clergymen, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and even atheists and agnostics—to discuss and study the Holocaust and to celebrate and honor the work of the late Rev. Franklin Littell at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia. [...]
By Jeanette Friedman NEW YORK–The e-mail came from a news source in Europe, who got it from a guy in New York, who got it from a couple in Los Angeles, who got it from a guy who “just received this from my friend in Israel, who moves in high circles, who heard it from [...]
Father Patrick Desbois ___________________________________________________ By Jeanette Friedman NY Bureau Chief, San Diego Jewish World NEW YORK–Father Patrick Desbois is an unusual Catholic priest, who, at the behest of two French clerics (the Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, and Cardinal Jean Pierre Ricard), officially took it upon himself to obey the commandment, Zachor, to remember. [...]