PREMIER EVENT: ANITA FRIEDMAN

Credit: Jewish Family and Children Services of San Francisco

 

 

In Partnership with the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center

 

PREMIER EVENT: Anita Friedman

Wednesday, September 30, 7:30 p.m.

Rywka's Diary: The Writings of a Jewish Girl from the Lodz Ghetto

Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, Cultural Hall, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto

 

A Red Army doctor found a diary of a teenage girl in the ruins of Auschwitz after its liberation in 1945 and took it back with her to the Soviet Union. It has been in her private possession for more than seventy years until it was discovered after her death by her granddaughter.  Rywka's Diary is an astonishing historical document and a moving tribute to the many ordinary people whose lives were forever altered by the Holocaust. 
 
Handwritten in a school notebook between October 1943 and April 1944, Rwyka Lipszyc detailed the brutal conditions that Jews in the Lodz ghetto, the second largest in Poland, endured under the Nazis: poverty, hunger and malnutrition, religious oppression, and, in Rywka’s case, the death of her parents and siblings. The diary is also a coming-of-age story, in which a young woman expresses her curiosity about the world and her place in it and reflects on her relationship with God—a remarkable affirmation of her commitment to Judaism and her faith in humanity. The diary ends literally in mid-sentence.  What became of Rywka is a mystery. 
 
Dr. Anita Friedman has served as the president of the Koret Foundation and has also been a Mayor’s appointee as Commissioner of the San Francisco Human Services Commission, overseeing all service programs. She also serves as a Trustee on the Boards of the USC Shoah Foundation, Taube Foundation, AIPAC, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and the Koret Israel Economic Development Fund based in Tel Aviv. She completed a Wexner Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and has received numerous awards, including the State of California’s Family Service Council Distinguished Leadership Award, The International Louis Kraft Award, the National Myrtle Wreath Award, Jewish Community Federation’s Professional of the Year, and the Raoul Wallenberg Club Public Service Award.
Event date: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - 7:30pm
Event address: 
Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, Cultural Hall
3921 Fabian Way
Palo Alto, CA 94303