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Mrs. Louvinia G. Pointer, Educator in Memoriam

It is our greatest honor to esteem the late Mrs. Louvinia G. Pointer, one of Words of Bonds Pioneer who has worked with the Words of Bonds project in educating, influencing and empowering our people about the importance of tolerance. In 2009 Mrs. Pointer died recently at the age of 92. Please visit www.wordsofbonds.com and view Mrs. Pointer’s performance and lecture. 
When Noel Coward heard Louvinia’s voice, he wrote a part for her to sing in his musical “Set To Music,” starring Beatrice Lillie. This was her introduction to the Broadway stage. After that she appeared with Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontaine in “The Pirate”, and broadways production of “Green Pastures”. Highly esteemed among her peers as a singer, teacher and choral conductor, her successful career includes work with some of the country’s outstanding teachers including Rosalie Miller, Samuel Margolis, and accompanist, the late Sylvia Olden Lee.

Louvinia’s exceptional work as choral director of the National Youth Administration Radio Workshop won praise from notables such as Harry T. Burleigh, Fritz Mahler, Robert Hufstadder, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. She was a great inspiration to her very own children, Olive Pointer Harney, Co-Founder and Associate Director of BAMSS Theatre Works, Reverend William Pointer Jr., Associate Pastor and Director of the Performing Arts Ministry of Christian Cultural Center and the late Noel Pointer, the award-winning, classically trained violinist, who was celebrated for his enormous contributions to the world of jazz. 

Louvinia took her love of music to the New York City school system, in 1958 where for many years she was privileged to share her love of music and teaching gifts with the children of New York City and retired from the schools in 1984.
To continue the revival and preservation of the “Negro Spiritual” in 1987 she formed the Great Day Chorale. Through Ms. Pointer’s formation and direction of the Great Day Chorale audiences across the country and abroad have come to know how through this God inspired music, Negro slaves were able to survive those dark days of slavery.
Mrs. Pointer said, one of the best ways to learn about a people is through the study of their art. It is through their art that people reveal their inner feelings without restraint. In our quest to identify those qualities the American slaves possessed, that enabled them to endure such hardships, cruelty, and dehumanization and yet emerge as rational, functional beings, we must, I believe, examine their music, the Negro Spiritual. The simple beauty of these songs makes them ageless. Although they were birthed by a people who could neither read nor write, they embody all the elements of the greatest compositions ever written. A study of the Negro Spirituals dispels many of the negative myths about the slave. Sharing our findings through the performance of the spirituals is sure to help gain the respect of others for slaves and their descendants. Just as the slaves received strength to persevere and overcome, it is my hope that the messages found in these songs will give people of all races, creeds, and stations in life the determination to rise above whatever holds them in bondage.
“Very early I realized my gift was music and as the years progressed, I felt my purpose was to share this gift with excellence, honesty and integrity. For the past 70 years I have been sharing my gift of music with all who would listen “, relayed Ms. Pointer.
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Mrs. Miriam P. Groner, 103 years old, Holocaust Survivor

Miriam Groner was from Belgium. She was born on August 1, 1906. She is now 103 years old. She was raised in an orthodox Jewish family. She was very active in the sports community of Antwerp and belonged to the Maccabbi Athletic Club where she met her husband Joseph Pressel who was the athletic director and track and field coach. They eventually had a son Philip.
Miriam learned the trade of dressmaking at an early age. That was her profession for her whole life. Her father owned a company that processed human hair for making wigs and she worked part time in that factory. She was the eldest of 5 children, 4 girls and one boy. Today she is the sole survivor.
When World War II broke out and the German army invaded Belgium in May of 1940, she and her husband and son left Antwerp with one suitcase and fled to France. They were prepared for this as they had closely followed news of the war and persecution of Jews. The family trekked all the way to Marseille by walking, hitch hiking on wagons, trucks and trains.
She supported the family throughout the war as her husband Joseph could not go out on the streets for fear of being arrested by the Germans for being an able bodied man available for labor (and eventual deportation). This is where her dressmaking skills came to be crucial. She shopped for food and carried coal on her back for the stove.
Due to the frequent bombings in 1944 their son had to be evacuated to the countryside to live with one of her customers. The separation lasted for many months and was extremely difficult on the parents and seven year old son at the time. They were finally reunited in August of 1944 when the allies liberated the area.
The family then moved to Paris where her husband was able to get a job. She continued taking care of the family. Joseph’s and especially Miriam’s courage and Chutzpah, and good luck, were the reasons that the family survived the war. They went through many narrow escapes from being arrested by the Gestapo. They were unable to get exit visas despite major efforts by family in America.
Many of the family’s relatives perished in Auschwitz including Miriam’s brother and his wife and 3 year old daughter, Joseph’s parents and his sister and her husband, one of Miriam’s sister’s husband and many uncles, and cousins on both sides.
After the war the family emigrated to New York when Joseph got a job as a translator for the United Nations. Miriam worked until retirement in her 70’s in Haute Couture, high class dress shops. Among others she made dresses for Zsa Zsa Gabor, Claire Booth Luce.
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Rev. Charles Leonard, 107 years old, slave descendant

Rev. Charles Leonard is 107 years old, and is the Senior Pastor for the Mount Zion Church of Christ in New York for more than 52 years. Rev. Charles was born on December 25, 1902 in Philadelphia and grew up in the segregated South of North Carolina and Georgia before moving to New York in 1933.
Throughout the years Rev. Charles said that he has preached the good news of Jesus Christ, which he said that we should love and respect each other because everything else will fail, but God’s love will never fail. Rev. Charles said that he has experienced the struggle of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robinson, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. He further stated that a few of his greatest experiences are having the right to vote, seeing a free South Africa, and witness an African American President in the White House. Please join us in honoring Rev. Charles Leonard.
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Letitia James, New York City Councilwoman

Letitia A. “Tish” James is an American lawyer, activist, and an elected Council Member in Brooklyn New York. She serves on the committees for Economic Development, Parks & Recreation, Small Business, and Technology in Government, Veteran Affairs, and Women’s Issues.
James is a life-long resident of Brooklyn, aside from her law school education at Howard University. She established the Urban Network, a coalition of African American professional organizations aimed at providing scholarships for young people. She is frequently in New York City schools speaking to young people about acceptance, tolerance, nonviolence, and human rights issues.
As Counsel and Chief of Staff to state assembly members, she saw, up close, that government could be made to work in the public’s interest.
During her law career, James served as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society and represented countless young individuals in the criminal justice system.

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Sydney Schwimmer, Holocaust Survivor & Historian

Sydney Schwimmer, a Holocaust survivor and historian, was born in Dolha, Ukraine, formerly Czechoslovakia. He graduated from the Gymnasium School in Berehovo, and attended the Brunn(Brno) Medical University in Ukraine from 1936 -1939, the period in which Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Sydney’s eyewitness and first hand experienced of persecution of the Jewish people is vast. One of his worst memories is the burning of the Great Synagogue of Brunn by the Nazis, the liquidation of all Jewish activities and the murderous and sadistic atrocities inflicted upon Jewish labor campers by the Hungarian military guards. On May 15, 1944, along with members of his family and other ghetto members, he was deported to Auschwitz where he remained until February 15, 1945. As the Soviets advanced, the camp was evacuated, and after a two week death march, he arrived in Bergen Belsen, where he was eventually liberated on April 15, 1945.
Sydney immigrated to the United States in 1948 where he is actively engaged in extensive Holocaust research. His work is archived and presented at various Holocaust centers and educational institution throughout the United States and Israel. He currently resides in Miami Beach, Florida with his wife Agnes, who is also a Holocaust survivor.
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Martin Spett, Holocaust survivor, Author & Historian Manhattan College

Martin Spett is a Holocaust survivor, the author of the book, Reflection of the Soul: Martin Spett’s Holocaust Experience (2002), and the director of the Survivor Speakers Bureau of the Manhattan College Holocaust Resource Center. In 1943, Martin was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and freed by American soldiers in 1945. As a Holocaust survivor, Martin believes that it is his duty to educate people about what happened to him during World War II. He enlists survivors to tell student audiences about their experiences during of the Holocaust. Survivors engage with the students to teach them that they must prevent genocide from happening again. Martin has spoken well over a hundred times to students of all ages and religious backgrounds in the tri-state area.
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Sally Frishberg, Holocaust Survivor & Educator

Sally is one of the “Words of Bonds” leading spoke person. Together with the with other Words of Bonds members have visited many schools, spoken to thousands of children that we must do whatever we can to prevent the Holocaust and Slavery from ever happening again.
For all her bubbly warmth and enthusiasm, Sally Frishberg was once very quiet. As a child in Poland during World War II, she and her family hid from the Nazis in the attic of a Catholic man’s barn. Fifteen people crowded into the small space, surviving on what little food the man brought. They never spoke lest someone find them; her father mouthed stories from the newspaper and the family read his lips.
Sally said that she refused to reveal the name of the man who hid them, keeping a promise she had made to him, until his widow granted her permission to do so in 1987. His name was Stanislaw Grocholski and my God bless his soul, Sally said
Three years after the Soviets liberated them in 1944, the family traveled by boat to the United States. Sally recalled, when she was on the traveling to America, a European woman chided a 13-year-old Ms. Frishberg for jumping into a bunk she wanted for herself.
“You dirty little Jew,” Ms. Frishberg remembers her saying. “If I had my way, you would have been dead.” Seeing the anguish on the young girl’s face, an African American matron lady of the ship,” as Ms. Frishberg called her, rocked her in her arms and comforter her.
“I suddenly realized that somebody cares,” she said, her voice surging with emotion. “She was a Black American, I was a European Jew, but there is, I think, this understanding of human need.”
“I learned that good people can do extraordinary things but we don’t know who you good people are, so you’re going to have to show signs of these extraordinary things,” she told the students.
Arriving in the United States she couldn’t speak a word of English. Sally learned English, became educated and earned her teaching degree. In 1958 Sally became a teacher and taught for years at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn New York and retired in 1991. Frishberg believes she was saved from the holocaust so she could help teach today’s generation about the world’s mistakes from the past.
When asked if she thought the Holocaust could happen again, she said, “Tragedy could happen. Yes, it could. I want our young people to be alert, aware, eyes wide open, willing to act when necessary and do what is good for all of us.“ That’s why we have the “Words of Bonds” project Sally says.
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Eleanor Holmes Norton, U.S. Congresswoman

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton is now in her tenth term as Congresswoman for the District of Columbia. She is chair of the House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Emergency Management, and Public Buildings. Named by President Jimmy Carter as the first woman to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she came to Congress as a national figure who had been a civil rights and feminist leader, tenured law professor of law, and board member of three Fortune 500 companies. Ms. Norton also had been named one of the 100 most important American women in one survey and one of the most powerful women in Washington in another.

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Rabbi Alysa Stanton, 1st African American Female Rabbi

Alysa Stanton was ordain as America’s first African American female Jewish Rabbi. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado. When she was 24, Stanton converted to Judaism after considering several Eastern religions.
In her first career, Stanton was a psychotherapist. She specialized in grief counseling, and was asked to speak to people in Columbine after the 1999 high school massacre. Before preparing for the rabbinate, she sought to become a cantor, but heard that Jewish leadership positions were not available to women. When she finally saw a female cantor, she decided to pursue the studies necessary to become a rabbi.
Stanton attended Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She says she is not concerned with being the first Black woman to become a rabbi, “I try not to focus on being the first. I focus on being the best—the best human being, the best rabbi I can be.”
Stanton is the Rabbi of Congregation Bayt Shalom, a predominantly white synagogue in Greenville, North Carolina.
“Two decades ago, an African-American leader in a synagogue might have been about as likely as an African American in the White House. But Stanton’s ascendancy reflects the slowly changing face of America’s Jews.
Thanks to other high-profile rabbis, such as Capers Funnye, the African-American leader of Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’Nei Zaken synagogue — and First Lady Michelle Obama’s second cousin — mainstream American Jewry appears ready to embrace leaders like Stanton.
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Rabbi Jacob Jungreis, Prinicpal & Educator

Rabbi Jacob Jungreis is a Words of Bonds spokesperson. He was born in Derecske, Hungary, and his father was the Rabbi of Szeged. He and his family were deported in June of 1944 to Bergen Belsen. In Bergen Belsen, he and his family became part of the Kasztner group which was ransomed by the American Jewish community and sent to Switzerland. Kasztner, a Zionist leader in Hungary during World War II, headed the Relief and Rescue Committee, a small Jewish group that negotiated with Nazi officials to rescue Hungarian Jews in exchange for money, goods, and military equipment. Rabbi Jungreis arrived in the United States in March of 1947. He is currently Rabbi of the Israel Center of Canarsie, Director of Yeshiva Ateres Yisroel Day School, and a member of the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s Speakers Bureau.
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Dr. Frederick M. Schweitzer, Author & Historian Manhattan College

Frederick M. Schweitzer is an active Professor of History at Manhattan College in New York City. He is the co-author, with Marvin Perry, of the book “Jewish-Christian Encounters Over the Centuries Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue” (Publish in 1994) and author of “A History of the Jews since the First Century A.D.” (Publish in 1971)
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Tal Brody, Former Captain, Maccabi Tel Aviv & Israel Prize Winner

Tal Brody is Israel’s first modern-day sports hero.  As a University of Illinois All-American in basketball and 13th in the NBA Draft of 1965, he was selected to play for the United States Maccabiah team.  In 1965, he led his team to a gold medal at the Maccabiah games in Israel.  A year later, he accepted an offer to join the Maccabi-Tel Aviv basketball team; and in 1967, Tal was named Israel’s Sportsman of the Year. From 1968 to 1970, Tal served in the United States Army and after finishing his service in 1970, he returned to Israel and “made aliyah” – he became a citizen of Israel.  
In what was then the State of Israel’s greatest international sporting achievement, Tal captained the 1977 Maccabi-Tel Aviv team to its first European Cup championship.  At the height of the cold war and a Soviet boycott of Israel, the team was scheduled to play CSKA Moscow (the Red Army team), champions of the Soviet Union and winners of the four previous European Cup championships.  The Soviets refused to play their semi-final match in Israel and would not allow the Israelis to play in Moscow.  In the end, the game was played in Belgium.  The game was of enormous symbolic value for Macabbi-Tel Aviv fans and for many Israelis who were not ordinarily interested in basketball.  Maccabi-Tel Aviv won 91–79 and the feeling was not only had CSKA Moscow been defeated, but that a victory had been achieved against the mighty Soviet Union. “We are on the map,” proclaimed Tal after the game, “and we are staying on the map, not only in sports but in everything.”   In 1979, he was awarded the Israel Prize, the country’s highest civilian honor.  In the New York Times supplement celebrating Israel’s 60th Birthday, Tal was named one of the ten most influential Americans who impacted Israel.
Today, Tal is retired from the Agency for Life Insurance and Pension Funds which he founded in 1979.  He serves as Chairman of the Spirit of Israel Organization which raises money to support Children at Risk programs in Israel.  Tal also is a member of the International Maccabiah Committee, President of Bnei Herzelia Sports Organization, Sports Ambassador for Migdal Ohr & AIFL (American Israel Friendship League), and is a member of the Board of Directors of Maccabi Electra Tel-Aviv basketball team.  He is married to Tirtza, and they have three children and five grandchildren.
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Lusia Knoll, Holocaust Survivor & Educator

Lusia Goldapper Knoll, a Words of Bonds spokesperson, was born in Buchach (Buczacz), Poland, that until World War I had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was raised in a loving and close-knit family. At the onset of World War II, the Soviet Union invaded, and set up a ghetto, where Lusia, her mother, and sisters, along with the Jews of the city were sent.  When the Germans invaded in 1941, they murdered what remained of the city’s Jewish community. Lusia and her family managed to escape the Buchach ghetto. For weeks at a time, they would hide in the woods or in attics, finding food and shelter wherever they could.  When the war ended, she and her family lived in several DP (displaced persons) camps in Germany for almost five years, until they were finally able to immigrate to America.

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Dr. Jay Sommers, Holocaust Survivor

Dr. Jay Sommers, a Holocaust Survivor, is one of “Words of Bonds” leading spokes person and pioneer. Jay is an educator, who has been sharing the importance of tolerance to our nation’s youth for several decades, and that we must do whatever it takes to prevent the atrocities of Slavery and the Holocaust from ever happening again. Mr. Sommers, who speaks 10 languages fluently, was born in Germany in 1927 and raised in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis murdered 7 of Jay’s brothers, 1 sister, and literally all other family members. At age 12, Jay was incarcerated in a Nazi labor camp where he escaped and went to several other countries before immigrating to the United States.
Today Jay is the Author of many books; he is a lecturatur, a Professor at Fairfield University and teaches at New Rochelle High School. Jay speaks 10 languages and teaches four – Spanish, Russian, French and Hebrew – at New Rochelle High School, was the 1981 National Teacher of the Year. Voted as the National Teacher of the Year – ”puts a crown on the whole thing,” Jay says.
”I started in America with nothing. I didn’t even have a winter coat, and virtually no formal education. My first step was to enroll in night school to learn English, while washing dishes during the day. An Irish Teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn New York who spoke Yiddish became his mentor Jay recalls. After grate struggle in high school, my Thomas Jefferson Mentor encouraged me to enroll in Brooklyn College.
Jay a graduate from Thomas Jefferson High school earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College, Master of Arts degrees in Spanish Language, a degree in Literature from Hunter College, a degree in Russian from Fordham University and a PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University.
Jay is most appreciative too the heroic Christians, who opposed the evil of the Holocaust and did what they could to save Jews from the Nazi assault. These Christian rescuers, many of whom Israel honors as “The Righteous among the Nations,” were to be found in varying numbers in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. They were from all walks of life. The rescuers ranged from individuals, to religious groups, to virtually entire villages or countries. It is to these men and a woman that I dedicate the last pages of my books to Jay says.
Please join us in honoring Jay Sommers. Please visit Jay’s story at our Words of Bonds videos.
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Anthony Brooks, Educator, Yonkers School District

Anthony M. Brooks has embarked on an amazing educational journey working to motivate and inspire students to explore the dynamics of relationships that exist within one’s own cultural group but also to help provide bridges that unite and transcend the unique characteristics of others. This journey began at Brandeis University where Mr. Brooks, a product of the inner-city education system of Washington, DC matriculated to explore career paths and professional opportunities. As the President of the Brandeis Black Student Organization, Coordinator of the 1991 Orientation Program and Intercultural Center Push Committee Member, Mr. Brooks helped to improve understanding and working relationships among various groups while at the same time deepening the comprehension of his own.
Immediately after leaving Brandeis, Mr. Brooks matriculated into Brown University’s MAT program to begin fulfilling his desire to become a motivational teacher and workshop developer. It was at Brown that Mr. Brooks developed his teaching and philosophic achievement strategies through the Coalition of Essential Schools under the direction of Theodore Sizer. Mr. Brooks further honed these strategies at Hunter College High School in New York City while continuing his education at Columbia University. This love for bringing groups to the table to discuss commonalities and differences continued during his tenure as a Social Studies Teacher at Weber Middle School in Port Washington, NY. There, Mr. Brooks fashioned teaching strategies to inspire students who felt disenfranchised and provided lessons which fostered critical and analytical thought. Most importantly, Mr. Brooks understood that teaching must be synonymous with meaning; that there was relevance in every page of course texts and complimentary resources that applied to even the most resistant students. He worked to create a constructivist approach to education where students could apply their understanding of various readings to their individual circumstances and lives. Such methods earned him numerous honors including the Harvard Teaching Club of Long Island’s Distinguished Teacher Award and consecutive inductions in the 8th and 9th editions of Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.
As Assistant Director of Social Studies for Yonkers Public Schools, Mr. Brooks currently works to include the perspectives of exploration, understanding and relevance to the teaching of social studies through his motivational workshops and prescriptive pedagogy. This pedagogy continues to inspire him and the work he does with students throughout the fourth largest school district in the state of New York and through consultation with organizations like The Rheedlen Center and The Education Project. The goals of his efforts are to over-expose and excite students via the study of human dynamics while using these relationships to challenge their assumptions of what is and stretch their notions of what could be.
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