Profile in Courage

My reading for the Three Weeks this year is Faith Amid the Flames, a memoir of Reb Yosef Friedenson ztz”l by his son-in-law Yosef Chaim Golding, skillfully woven together from Reb Yossele’s vast output over nearly seventy years as editor of Dos Yiddishe Vort.

My overwhelming reaction to the work is a feeling of privilege to be a member of the eternal Jewish People and a resolve to try to be a better Jew. And that is precisely what Reb Yossele intended. He devoted his postwar life to celebrating the gevurah, emunah, and chesed (courage, faith, and deeds of loving-kindness) of even the simplest Jews in the ghettos and camps.

Rabbi Avraham Birnbaum worked often with Mr. Friedenson on translations of his Yiddish writing to English. Generally, Reb Yossele did not spend too much time going over the translations. But one time, he insisted on five rewrites until he was satisfied.

Bruno Pape, the manager of the Starachowitz steel factory, and the most decent German whom Reb Yossele encountered in his years in the “universities of Nazi atrocities,” had supplied the Jewish slave laborers with flour to bake matzos for Pesach.