Mrs. Joelle Keene, Music and Journalism teacher

My father, Richard Cohen of blessed memory, was a U.S. Air Force navigator during World War II, and when the war was over he went to work for the Joint Distribution Committee helping Jewish refugees coming out of hiding in the forests and elsewhere throughout Europe. Most of the survivors went first to refugee camps called Displaced Persons camps, or DP camps, and sometimes my father took newspaper reporters from around the world to visit these camps and begin to tell the world their story. 

One camp he visited was in Czechoslovakia, and  the refugees there were making seder plates!  This is one of those seder plates, which they gave to him and which has been a treasured posession of my family for all these years — it is even stained with horseradish now.

My father was privileged to spend the rest of his life helping to rebuild the Jewish people both in the U.S. and in Israel, often by spreading their stories through newspaper articles and full-page advocacy advertisements for various organizations.  I’ve often hought of what it must have been like for him to have started at the very bottom of our history and watch it rise up, from the end of the war, through the progress and hope of the DP camps, through the establishment of Israel and the great strides the Jewish people made all over the world from then on. 

At the top of this seder plate, it says in Hebrew “Me-avdut l’cherut,” from slavery to freedom, and at the bottom it says: “B’shana hazot b’yerushalim” — This year in Jerusalem.

My father was a very happy and ebullient person.  Maybe this is why.