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Alissa Swedlow's Eulogy for Our Grandma, Rachel Freisleben

9/1/2025

Things I miss about Grandma

I miss lunches and dinners out at restaurants that were not dictated by grandmas culinary cravings, but instead by where she had a coupon for that week.

I miss her hugs. When she hugged you, she was so present, so there, as though that hug was the only thing that mattered in the world and she was loving you with every fiber of her being.

I miss her fearlessness. When I’d come to her with an anxious worry, she’d tell me “nawwwww, you’ll be fine.” It wasn’t dismissive. She meant it. She was not afraid and she didn’t want me to be either.

I miss her saying “that’s life” when something sad would happen. Sometimes she said it straightforward and calm, and sometimes she’d say it and her voice would crack, as she was holding back tears and trying not to cry. She knew from experience that life was filled with grief and hope and sadness and joy and that we couldn’t experience one of those feelings without the others and hoped to instill us with the same strength to deal with the hard times.

I miss her proud smile. She had a great smile, but at graduations, birthdays, weddings, “nachas” as she would say, her eyes would light up was a particular sparkle of pride that was beyond beautiful.

I miss her banana cakes. I preferred them without the lemon drizzle, but to each their own. I loved eating a fresh one at her house, and then being sent home with a frozen banana cake, along with a bag full of groceries. I wish I had an unlimited freezer filled with a lifetime supply of grandmas banana cake. I tried many times to recreate the recipe, and everytime I’d tell her of my failed attempt, she’d remind me that hers was made with love. Her love was unique and deep and unwavering and it made the cake delicious beyond what words can describe.

I miss our summers at the library and at Maureen Zobers pool.

I miss her house dresses and aprons and the way she hung a small plastic bag on the stove for her trash.

I miss her independence. After grandpa died, she lived alone, took out her garbage, fended off alleged burglars with a broom, managed her home, her finances, and skillfully carved the turkey at Thanksgiving, micromanaging my fathers carving abilities one year when he wasn’t doing a good enough job.

I miss Fourth of July. Sitting in her backyard watching the fireworks and eating her bbq chicken. I have always been intimidated by bbqing, but not grandma. The woman was fearless.

I miss grandma telling me I needed a sweater or Mae needed socks on, even in the height of summer when it was triple digits outside.

I miss the way I felt when I was with her. The way she made us all feel. We were special, loved, safe, brilliant (because in her words, “all her kids were smart and there were no dummies in our family.”) she asked about our friends and school and jobs and vacations because she loved us so much and our lives meant so much to her.

I miss her excitement about coupons and deals at Ralph’s. Her OG environmentalism of reusing everything and not letting one thing go to waste - cream cheese containers became doggy bags for leftovers. Plastic bags from the market for produce became freezer bags for kreplech.

I miss her exclamation to “light em all” on Hanukkah. Whatever night we celebrated Hanukkah as a whole family, we lit all 8 candles of the menorah, as she declared that was “the prettiest”.

I miss the way she pronounced “pragnent” and “soya sauce”

I miss hearing her answer the phone “yallo Bubbe” and feel an extraordinary gratitude that my mom began answering the phone like that in her honor a few years ago when grandma no longer answered the phone herself.

I miss her fun stories of Alan riding in his “vanagan” VW bus, family trips to Yosemite, and the time she and Gwen made clam chowder in paint buckets.

I miss her friends. Gwen and Idele and Harriet and Maureen and Betty.

I miss how much she loved my daughter. How she cried when she learned I was “pragnant”. The first time she met Mae at my house. All the opportunities we had to take 4 generation photos, with her, my mom, me and Mae. The way she played ball with Mae, hid figurines in the grass, rolled balls of play doh, fed her cookies. I wish she got more time with all her great grandchildren, and was able to meet the one on the way, but I know that we will all fill our children with stories of grandmas love, and love them fiercely and unconditionally, just like she did with us.

I miss it all. I feel grateful she was on this earth for so many years. I’m grateful for the incredible love she had with grandpa John. I’m grateful that she’s free from suffering and pain. But I will always miss everything about her.

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Hesped/Eulogy for my Grandmother, Rachel Baser Freisleben

9/1/2025

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Hesped Rachel Freisleben

A few years ago we were I think getting ready for Passover, and Aster, my younger child, was helping out in the kitchen. Aster was about 8 or 9. And I said to him ‘and now I’m going to show you the secret to Grandma Ray’s chicken matzo ball soup.’ And he looked at me and said confidently ‘love.’

And I smiled, and I replied ‘soup cubes.’

Aster was right to assume that bubbie’s secret ingredient in her food was love. She was for all the members of this family the standard by which we all come to understand what love is. And not coincidentally, she very often expressed it through food. If she had picked up a particularly good basket of strawberries, she would say ‘oooh taste this markie.’ And my sister did a fantastic job of describing how her banana bread in the circular mold was just perfect - and that she never made one - she always made two and froze one for you to take home, along with a bag of groceries which she acquired with her coupons. One time she gave me a sack of groceries and on top was two cans of cat food and I said ‘bubbie I don’t have a cat’ and she said ‘yes but I had a coupon.’

But my grandmother’s relationship to food was simply an expression of her love for her family, which was a boundless and pure love, and I think taught all of us the very definition of love. Trying to explain and intellectualize Love is complicated and elusive, but for us it can be easily defined. We all understand love by the way Grandma Ray loved us - in hugs and laughs and food and the admonition of ‘put on a sweater’ even though it might be 90 degrees outside.

Her love was ever more amazing considering what a difficult and remarkable life she led. She was born September 18, 1927, in the town of Rakov Poland, which she would explain always as ‘not the big Rakov by Warsaw but the little Rakov between Czestechowa and Kielce.’ When the Nazis came through Poland, she and all the Jews of the town hid in the forest, and one day while walking to get bread from a farm with her sister Gela, the two returned to find all the other Jews of the town had been murdered. And since Gela passed a few years ago, my grandmothers death also marks a small moment in history - she was the last Jew of Rakov - the carrier of all the memories of that place. She and Gela survived by their wits and the kindness of a man none of us will ever know in a county registrars office who gave her false papers and a polish catholic name. Rachel came to America in 1946, settling in Santa Barbara by her sister, where she met John Freisleben at a USO dance. They got married, moved to Burbank, and had Marilyn, Alan, and Jerry.

There’s a longer version of this story, and I know it very well, because as a rabbi who has also taught or spoken about the Shoah, I often recount the story of my grandmothers survival, emphasizing or exploring different aspects in different years and with different audiences. And that’s always been a strange experience, because I think almost all of us know that Grandma never talked about surviving the holocaust, and never would tell that story. It was simply too painful for her. Instead, I was entrusted with that memory, and I take it as a holy responsibility to share it in a way that helps make sense of the senselessness of hate and violence for the people of today. When I teach the Holocaust class to Intro to Judaism each year, I take it as a sacred duty to do my best to reduce the inconceivable number - 6 million - down to just one family, and then impart upon folks that my grandmother is more than more than just a survivor, but a real person who as a young girl emerged from an enormous tragedy to build a life. Her parents and siblings are not just five more names on massive list of victims. There was once aplace called Rakov and a family called the Basers. So much was lost in their deaths, but in remembering them, I bring them to life again for a brief moment, and my students now understand that the loss of Rakov is a profound tragedy amidst a vast sea of tragedy.

But also, we, the Freislebens transcended that tragedy by rebuilding an odd new Rakov at 1824 Hilton Dr in Burbank California. In starting over and celebrating simchas and Jewish holidays together, John and Rachel created new memories to replace the old. We celebrated so many Rosh Hashanahs and Passovers in the back den at bubbie and johns - towels on the couches, grandma yelling at marilyn during the seder ‘hurry up! The brisket will get cold!’ She made such a great life for herself and for her family - and there have been so many joys and celebrations. One of the most remarkable things about her was, of course, her immense pride in the success of her children and grandchildren. It is something both incredible and incredibly American that a woman who came to this country with nothing, speaking no English and holding nothing beyond a middle school education would eventually see all of her children go to college, and then see all six of her grandchildren go to college, all the while beaming with pride every time any of us did well on a test or were given an award by saying, matter-of-factly ‘All my kids are smart!’

The last few years since Rachel’s stroke were hard - both for her and on our family. The stroke struck at her memory, which meant that she didn’t really remember where or when she was in time, or who people were – and it’s hard to see a grandmother who treated each and every one of her grandchildren as special be unable to make out who we were. And that was hard at first. But, for me, I moved past it with a simple understanding - and that is that Gramma Ray was not so much the sum total of her memories, good and bad, but rather, especially in her final years, existed in love. She was grateful to see us, and she knew she was loved, and as long as she was able to speak, she would say ‘I love you’ to us.

The central most prayer in Judaism is the Shema, and the second most important prayer follows right after it - the Ve’Ahavata - the prayer that tells us ‘and you shall love the lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.’ And the traditional commentators of the Talmud and Middle Ages struggle with this idea. How are we to express our love for an infinite and immortal creator? The paragraph before helps with that understanding - the preliminary prayer to VeAhavta begins with the words ‘Ahava Rabbah ahavtanu, adonai eloheinu, chemla gedolah v’teira chamalta aleinu’ - with a boundless love you have loved us, oh God, with great mercy you have been compassionate’. And the prayer goes to mention the ways God loves us three times, and the way we love God three times? What is a deep and boundless Divine Love? I would never have known, if it were not for my grandmother, who loved others so deeply and so boundlessly that only God could be her equal. In her love I have an understanding of Gods love. In being blessed with someone as amazing and loving, I will be forever grateful. In commending her life and soul back to God, her love returns to the One that created her with an infinite capacity for loving others. The secret of God’s love is matzo balls. And soup cubes. And Gramma Ray.
…

In the words of our tradition, she is gathered to her people - returned at last to her parents, Malka and Asher, and her siblings, Simcha, Itzik, Gela, and Faigel, and to Johnny, who I imagine has been waiting in the beyond with his hearing aids making noise for Rachel to arrive and tell him ‘Johnny, you’re ringing.’

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Parshat Pinchas 5785 - Immigration Policy, Divorced from Morality

7/21/2025

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One of the reasons that America has always been an idea that fit neatly with the moral worldview of the Jewish people is this country’s origin and essential quality of being a destination for people who came from somewhere else. There were the indigenous peoples of this land first of course, but then many waves of migrants came to this place. There were many types of wanderers who came and stayed in North America over many generations: religious pilgrims and tobacco sharecroppers, African slaves and Spanish conquistadors, German and Dutch men seeking fame and fortune, and then the great mass of humanity that came at the end of the 19th century: the Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Russian, and Slavic settlers whose descendants make up a huge proportion of the population of this country today. Most Americans came here from somewhere else, usually because wherever they came from, life was a struggle too great to endure. “Surely” they said “it must be better someplace else,” and that someplace else is America.

Judaism is the religion of the wanderer. In our morning prayers each day, we praise God for creation and the dawn and for our souls. But the first significant mention of the human condition and our origins as a people comes in Pesukei DeZimra, in a verse that I’ve been thinking about a lot the past few weeks. Quoting the book of Nehemiah, our daily prayerbook has us recite each morning: Atah hu Adonai haElohim, Asher bacharta beAvram, vehotzeito me’Ur Kasdim - “You are Adonai our God, the One that chose Abraham, and took him out of Ur Kasdim” - the city of Ur of Chaldea, which would later be called Babylonia or Mesopotamia.

Think about that for a moment. An omnipotent, infinite God could have started the Jewish people with anyone, and anywhere. It would make sense, then, to select a person of good moral character that rises to lead her or his nation in the place they were born - to form the first monotheistic religion with Avram in Ur, and to start it in Ur. Or to pick the king of the Philistines or the Hittites or the Moabites and raise them up to reject the panoply of gods of the ancient world and to choose the one God to obey. But no - God chose a wanderer. More than that - our text says ‘ve’hotzeito’ - God took him out - meaning it was specifically a Divine choice to have Avram go on a journey, as if the journey was an essential part of making Avram the person that he comes to be.

And then he sojourns down to Egypt and back. And Isaac, too, sojourns in the land of the Philistines in Genesis 26. And Jacob wanders after his clash with Esau, and down to Egypt during famine. And Joseph and his brothers wander because of famine, settling in a land not their own. And Moses wanders with the people for 40 years in a land not his own. In fact, the bulk of the Torah - at least 4 and ⅓ of the 5 books, takes place outside of the land of Israel. Many scholars have noted that the Torah ends with the people on the precipice of the land of Israel at the end of Deuteronomy, but outside of the land. The people enter Israel and conquer it in the sixth biblical book of Joshua, which for the shul-going reader, we effectively never get to. Every year we read the story of our wandering migration, and then, right at the moment we arrive at the land, we roll the scroll all the way back to creation. The reader of the Chumash is forever a wanderer.

Add to all that the additional layer of the entire concept for the Jewish people of galut, or gulus - best translated as ‘Diaspora’. After the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, our people relocated to Babylonia, with small populations taking up residence in Alexandria Egypt and Rome before a large number of Jews returned in 546. In 70 CE and 135 CE, Jews again left their land en masse and took up residence elsewhere - in Mesopotamia until the 900s, and then Europe in 1100s, and then north and south america in the 1800s. What do you think the rules were for these Jewish migrants? Anybody want to a guess as to when the first passports and visas were created? - let people guess -

1921. The passport was invented by the United States because of anti-immigrant sentiment related to the waves of mostly impoverished newcomers from what was seen by some as undesirable countries - Italy, Poland, Russia, etc. Quotas were set on immigrants from these and other countries to limit the number of immigrants that could come in. But how could the US determine where people were born? The passport was invented.

Before the passport, travel and residency for Jews, and for all humans, was basically unrestricted. Afterwards? Tightly controlled.

Now, let me not make it sound like Jews and humans had unfettered freedom of movement in the good old days. In last weeks parsha and the week before - Chukkat and Balak - the Israelites are on their way to Israel, and they have to pass through the lands of Bashan, and Ammor, and Moab. And the three kings of these lands were not thrilled with the idea of maybe a million people traipsing through their fields, livestock in tow, just passing through. The Israelites fight their way through Bashan and Ammor, and only because of Divine intervention with the prophet Bilaam are they able to cross Moab. But the core idea is still that lands didn’t have barriers and boundaries until very recently. Peoplehood was ethnic or tribal, not geographical, until about 100 years ago. And even in our lifetimes, this is on display. If you asked my grandmother where she was from, she’d say the town of Rakov, between Kielce and Schies-takov, in Poland. If you asked her if she was Polish, she’d say ‘absolutely not’.

What I am saying is that restrictions on the freedom of migration of any kind, and restrictions on who can work in a country or reside in a country, is not an idea that exists at all in Judaism. If a non-Jew wanted to live among Jews, and work among Jews, they even had a name in the bible - the ger toshav - the non-resident stranger that dwells amongst you. And of course, most of you know the often repeated idea in Torah that we are not to oppress the ger - and that the Torah tells us to care for the ger or not oppress the ger no less than 36 times. But I want to back up even a step before that and say that the very idea of restrictions on human movement is not a Jewish idea. It is an invention of the modern era, a fabrication of non-Jewish society that was at least partially invented to oppress, reject, restrict, and exclude Jews, among other undesirables.

By this I question and criticize the legitimacy and moral of the entire system of global migration restrictions, and certainly the American system. What purpose does it serve? One could say ‘well we need these rules so that foreigners don’t take jobs from Americans.’ There’s two problems with that idea.

First, it’s not moral. And second, it’s not true. There’s no logical connection between the happenstance of the place you were born in corresponding to the place you are allowed to work. I can move from Denver to Pittsburgh and get a job, but I can’t move to Toronto and get the same job. We can argue about the need to create an orderly system or the rules of taxation or the government’s system of social welfare, but those are all bureaucratic or economic reasons. None of those is a moral answer to why a person can be denied the opportunity to work or live someplace, because there is no morality to restricting human employment based on location. And our society kind of knows that. When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, millions of refugees streamed into Turkey and Jordan. And of course those countries accepted them because their plight was so desperate. But the refugees overwhelmingly were not allowed to work, and their migration to other countries was severely restricted. Morally, nations of the world accepting refugees and giving them work rights is the right thing to do, without any doubt. Economically, though, each country behaves in protection of their own interests.

And there’s the second part about work restrictions protecting our jobs not being true. In the United States, there are millions of people working at jobs that folks born in this country simply won’t take. Farmworkers, nursing home employees, food service workers, gardeners, housekeepers, hotel workers – all of these industries are made up of a huge percentage of non-citizen visa holders, or undocumented individuals. If all of them were to be deported, there’s no way we’d have enough laborers to fill all of their positions. This country would grind to a halt. They’re not taking our jobs. They are caring for our mothers and grandmothers, and bringing us our tomatoes, and cooking our hamburgers. To quote one of my favorite authors and chefs, Anthony Bourdain, may his memory be a blessing, QUOTE ‘The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board. Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable. Illegal labor is the backbone of the service and hospitality industry.’

Even though I questions the origins of our global immigration system, and even though I question whether such a system that originates in racism and immorality can ultimately be fair, just, or even benign, I concede that the global immigration system we have right now is the system we have, and it is not going away. Within that system, however, it is a Jewish act to expect that the system behave in a moral way. I think you all know that it is not.

Since February of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has aggressively moved to incarcerate and deport folks who were undocumented residents of the United States - including people in the asylum process, student visa holders, and green card holders that the United States had suddenly revoked status from. Additionally, another category of people that came to the US without documentation as children who have grown up here have also been swept up for imprisonment and deportation. And just recently the Supreme Court ruled that ICE and the US government have no obligation to return a migrant to their country of origin, even a country where a person might be tortured or killed as a political dissident.

The case in question was one in which the Department of Homeland Security deported eight men to South Sudan. The men were Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Laos, Cuba, and Myanmar. Only one was from South Sudan. They were not given the chance to plead their cases in court. Writing for the minority in dissent, Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.”

This issue of migration and human rights has always been and must continue to be a critical issue of importance to American Jews, for so many reasons. It is important because our grandparents and great grandparents came to this country from somewhere else searching for a better life, and thus to pay that debt of freedom back to this country, we must stand up for the rights of the next generation of immigrants. It is important because we are a people who wandered for millenia without passports or citizenship rules.

And yes, we must also highlight and remain vigilant regarding this issue because it does directly affect our community. Jews, and particularly Israelis, are also being caught up in the ICE raids and sweeps taking place, and being deposited in ICE detentions centers across the country; including two local privately operated detention centers, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center and the Northeast Ohio Detention Center. But all these people in these places and others, Jewish or not, Israeli or Burmese or Mexican or Afghani, are all somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s parent, imprisoned for no crime and held without trial and in moral and legal limbo, effectively punished for the crime of having been born in the wrong place.

Our parsha this week is a long litany of sacrifices that pilgrims were obligated to bring to the temple at festival times - at each new moon, at Passover, at Shavuot, at Rosh Hashanah, at Yom Kippur, and at Sukkot. These were all pilgrimage holidays - holidays in which individuals travelled a long way, across other lands and over rivers and mountains and even across the sea. And they were asked to present not a passport at the temple, but an offering to God of appreciation and love and gratitude - a bull, a lamb, a ram, a cake of fine flour. We yearn for a return to the time when the free movement of peoples was the norm, and when it was done in its most ideal state as an act of love and community and gratitude. Shabbat Shalom.

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Alissa Swedlow's Eulogy for Our Grandma, Rachel Freisleben

Hesped/Eulogy for my Grandmother, Rachel Baser Freisleben

Parshat Pinchas 5785 - Immigration Policy, Divorced from Morality

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