Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day!

The USA is celebrating a holiday today. Although there are some fears that, with the Presidential Inauguration only two days away, there may be some violent protesting, we can only hope that the memory of Dr Martin Luther King Jr may be an inspiration for work towards healing and civic unity. To this end, I was interested to read on CNN yesterday about the Martin Luther King Day of Service (see here). Americans are encouraged to look at today as an opportunity to engage in volunteer service, rather than binging on Bridgerton.

Meanwhile, here is the annual presentation of the famous photo including my father. This is the more recently discovered version, in which you may see his entire head (+ yarmulke). It is good to have an excuse to share this once again. Hopefully I will continue to make his memory a blessing by developing what he taught us about tolerance and understanding.

From Selma to Montgomery with Dr M L King

Tonight I had a thrilling surprise. A friend texted me a copy of this photo:

I consulted the Google and discovered that this photograph had been used to illustrate an article about why Dr King wore a Hawaiian lei at Selma. Here's the article if you're interested.

The thing is, well, look on the right-hand side of the photo. There is a man in a pale hat wearing dark glasses and a lei. Just above the hat is a face, well two-thirds of a face. The glasses and the shape of the head are quite familiar to me. Literally. This is the face of Rabbi Albert H Friedlander z"l. It is the face of my father.

WOW.

I immediately forwarded the picture to my mother, who had also never seen it before. Having expressed her excitement, she and I had the same thought at the same moment: do you remember the photo in the US Holocaust museum?

A Jewish Sports Day in Berlin in 1937. Part of a face in the bottom-right corner, wearing glasses. It's Albert! It all seemed a bit Zelig to me, except that Albert was really there.

Anyway, a bit late for MLK Day in the USA, but I wanted to share this with you all.

19.1.18 Update

I did not see the movie "Selma", mostly because I was put off by advance notice via clips and photographs that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had been edited out of the story. I grew up with the notion that R. Heschel and Dr King were friends and the photo of them marching together at Selma symbolised that the black and Jewish communities worked together for civil rights. Here is a HuffPost article by Peter Dreier that examines this situation: "Selma's Missing Rabbi"