When I started to work at ADL 55 years ago, with no intention to be there more than two or three years, it was the luckiest thing for me that there was a young lawyer at the organization, a few years older than me, by the name of Abe Foxman.

Early on we became friends simply because we had things in common. We both grew up in Orthodox families. We both went to Jewish day schools for elementary and high schools. We both were passionate Zionists.

What I came to learn quite soon, however, was how different was Abe’s background, which played such a huge role in who he became. Abe was born at the worst time for a Jewish child, on May 1, 1940, in Poland. It didn’t take long for his parents to recognize that they and their son would be in jeopardy as the Nazis took over the area. They made the decision to flee and turn the child over to his Catholic nanny.

And so, because of the courage and kindness of that nanny, portraying the child as her own, he survived the war and the Holocaust. Miraculously, his parents both survived the war as well and sought........

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