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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, get off the sidewalk” – and knocked his hat into the mud. When Jacob returned home, he told his family about the incident. “And what did you do?’ young Sigmund asked him. “I got off the sidewalk and picked up my hat,” his father answered.[�]

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 every item of his clothing: the streimel is on the right side, the trousers are on the left side, the shoes are over there, and so on. When he woke up in the morning and wanted to find his clothes, he read what he had[�]

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 the gulags. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Laureate in Literature who was exiled from the Soviet Union, knew all too well what he was talking about. He played a pivotal role in exposing what was going on in the Soviet labor camps (gulags) to the Western world.[�]