May 26
Jeanette Friedmanbook review, education, Holocaust, people
Anne Phyllis Pinzow
David Gold, co-author of “Why Should I Care?”
“Ethnic cleansing has been used throughout history as an excuse to preserve or create a cleaner, healthier, safer, stronger or purer way of life.
Good people must get rid of those who are not really people and using derogatory names is the first step in dehumanizing others. It’s the first step on a horrific road that makes extermination okay, because “they” are different, and the rules and rights attributed to “human beings” don’t need to apply to them.”
Jeanette Friedman and David Gold, in their new book “Why Should I Care?: Lessons From The Holocaust” (The Wordsmithy, LLC 2009) discuss how this type of thinking dehumanizes everyone and how this thought process can and often leads to the final step, because killing the “other” is not murder, it’s the right thing to do.
read more here
Apr 19
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, Holocaust, judaism
Today is April 19, the 68th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and my Uncle Yaakov Rabinowitz’s (spelling varies in our family) yahrzeit. According to witness Hillel Siedman and Jurgen Stroop’s own report, my uncle was the only person killed on First Seder Night (April 19, 1943), 24 were wounded and 580 were captured. He was the son of a distinguished Hasidic rabbi, the Parcever, Rabbi Nosson Dovid of Sedlice, and brother to a number of well-known rebbes, most famous of them the Munkacser Rov. The article below appeared in the Jewish Standard in 2008 and every year the family Seder is dedicated to him, and a yahrzeit candle is lit for him and the Six Million murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Just click on the images to read more.
Nov 15
Jeanette FriedmanHolocaust, interfaith relations
BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
SOUTH ORANGE — The auditorium at Jubillee Hall was filled November 14, 2010, as curious Seton Hall students, Jews (including Holocaust survivors and educators), Muslims and Christians came to hear Imam Abdullah Antepli describe how a trip he took to Auschwitz last August changed his life. He was one of the imams from the United States, all with large followings, who joined Reform Rabbi Jack Bemporad, of The Center for Interreligious Understanding in Carlstadt, New Jersey, on a trip to Poland and the death camp. The trip was the brainchild of an Orthodox Jew from Washington, DC, a former Republican presidential advisor and a professor of law at Catholic University, Marshall Breger.
The imam was born in Turkey, and after a few ice-breaking remarks, got very serious when he admitted that he was a recovering antisemite. He described how the myths in the forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, poison millions of children in the Islamic world. The book is given away for free in Islamic countries and has been translated into 14 Arab dialects. “It is very insidious,” he said. “It convinced us that there is something vile about the religion and something inherently wrong with Jews and Judaism, and I hated the Jews.
read more here.
Mar 18
Jeanette FriedmanHolocaust
There are hundreds of books about the Holocaust on classroom and library shelves, but my co-author, David Gold and I decided that books and videos that hit people on the head with huge numbers of dead people—and even survivor memoirs—weren’t always reaching students. All you had to do was look around to see we were failing! People didn’t seem to understand that the Holocaust’s main lessons were about the way people treated each other, how they made decisions, and what they believed when they read newspapers and listened to the radio. Rare was the course that made students understand they had to have values and take responsibility for their own actions.
So we sat down in front of our computers, clicked on Googletalk and together wrote Why Should I Care? Lessons from The Holocaust, a “living” book that is constantly revised on the Internet and in paperback; designed to grab young peoples’ attention and make them think about the world and their role in it.
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Mar 18
Jeanette FriedmanHolocaust
Holocaust educators donate library to THS
By Howard Prosnit, Teaneck Suburbanite
Thursday, March 18, 2010
On the day after Halloween in 1979, Jeanette Friedman Sieradski was dropping off her children for pre-school at B’Nai Yeshurun when she saw that the synagogue had been defaced with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti.
Friedman, whose parents survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, was appalled. But the experience changed her life, marking the beginning of three decades of Holocaust research and education.
Soon after the encounter, Friedman, an Ogden Avenue resident at the time, founded the first Second Generation Group of the children of Holocaust survivors in New Jersey. In 1980, she was appointed by Gov. Thomas Kean to the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission. Locally, she began working with former Teaneck social studies teacher Ed Reynolds to revise the Holocaust curriculum used in the schools.
At the time, Teaneck schools used the Teaneck-Vineland curriculum, which Friedman found objectionable.
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