Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, was first jolted by his Jewish origins when he was six years old. It was a Shabbat in the afternoon when his father, Jacob, went out for a walk on the streets of Vienna, wearing a new fur hat. A Christian boy suddenly approached him and yelled, “Jew, […]

Rabbi Chanoch Heinich HaCohen, once told a story about a fool who didn’t want to go to sleep because he was afraid to take his clothes for fear of not finding them the next morning. So, what did he do? He took a pencil and paper and wrote down where he had placed each and […]

The “Demon of the Archipelago” is how the historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, described Naftaly Frenkel, the man who started out as a common prisoner in the gulag and became the big boss of the Soviet forced labor camps.  He also conceived the idea of the “nourishment scale” – the barbaric labor system that was in place in […]