"They Saved The Honor Of Humanity" -The Righteous as role models

    On that fateful day in 1940 my mother and I held hands tightly as we approached the iron barred doors of Mundelein College. A nun answered the bell dressed in her black habit. I half expected sounds other than human to emerge from under her coif. As a young, Jewish, fresh woman, I had very few Catholic friends and had never spoken to a nun. If the truth be told, I had a mediocre IQ and preferred to study at the University of Chicago. But we lived across the street from Mundelein and those blessed BVM's gave me a job waiting tables and doing dishes in the cafeteria that paid for my total tuition. In time, those wonderful women became role models of grace, intelligence, self-sacrifice, and love. They were to change my life forever.

     The second world war and my future husband's being drafted into the army shortened my time of two year at Mundelein (The class of 1944). I learned while at Mundelein, that women could attain leadership positions in the business world as serving very effectively as volunteers focused on preferential treatment for the poor and disadvantaged.

     Perhaps, I heard the voice of my beloved Sister Mary Esther when in 1983 my friend, Rabbi Harold Kudan,  asked me to co-chair with him the creation of an avenue of the righteous, patterned after Yad Veschem in Jerusalem (the memorial of the six million Jews murdered during the Hitler Holocaust). The following articles regarding the roles of the righteous during that satanic horror was to save terrorized Jews. And  it was also to help me regain my faith in God.