The Heschel School

Regina Akerman was born in Wengrow, Poland on May 16, 1928. Her mother Leah Fraiman Akerman came from Warsaw and moved to Wengrow after marrying Regina’s father, Mendl Akerman. While Mendl, a baker, came from a Hassidic family, he was a free thinker and not religious at all. The family spoke Polish at home, not Yiddish. Mendl was sympathetic to Communist politics. He taught Regina how to play chess. Regina was an only child and went to public school where there were only a few other Jewish girls in her class.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, Regina and her mother escaped from a truck convoy headed to the Treblinka extermination camp. Regina jumped off the truck. Soldiers fired guns at her but missed. Her mother ran away at night and they met up. Mendl Akerman and their many relatives were killed in Treblinka. Regina and her mother survived by working as maids in Warsaw under falsified documents. Very shortly before the war ended, Leah Akerman died of typhoid.

After the liberation of Warsaw in January 1945, Regina hitchhiked back to her town to see if anyone in her family was alive. She was the sole survivor of her whole extended family in Poland. She connected with a nice family she knew and traveled with them to Munich to the American zone to make plans for her future. She wanted desperately to get out of Europe. She decided to go to Israel and moved to an aliya preparation camp in Germany. There she received a letter from an uncle in New York who found her through the Red Cross. So Regina changed her plans and came by boat to New York in 1947.

Regina had two aunts, an uncle, and two cousins in New York who she had never met. She knew that they were quite poor and that she would not be able to go to college if she lived with them. She had a choice to live with family she never met before or be adopted. There was a program where American Jews took in refugee children. The families tended to be well off but were scattered all over the country. She could be sent to Wisconsin or California, far from her only living relatives. Regina could not decide what to do. She arrived in New York and spent a few weeks in an immigrant-processing center debating with herself. She decided to join her family and moved to their small apartment in the Bronx.

Regina spent a few weeks learning basic English and then went to work in an office. She reconnected with Arnold Friedman, who she knew a little bit from Wengrow, and they got married. They moved to a poultry farm in the Catskills where they had three children. Laurie, the oldest, now lives in Israel and has seven children. Jacob, the youngest, lives in Seattle, and Michelle lives in New York City. Michelle is married to Ben Belfer (also a child of survivors) and they have three children who all went to Heschel through 8^th grade Emily, Sarah and Rachel Belfer.