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August 11, 2000/10 Av 5760, Vol. 52, No.48
Hadassah Lieberman known for hard work
JULIE WIENER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Minutes after the official announcement that her husband would be the vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket, Hadassah Lieberman stepped on the national stage.
"Here I am the daughter of survivors from the Holocaust, the most horrendous thing that happened," she said Tuesday, Aug. 8, standing with Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and wife, Tipper, and her husband, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, at a World War II memorial in Nashville.
"And here I am in the place that commemorates the American heroes, the soldiers who actually liberated my mother in Dachau and Auschwitz. ... Whether you and your family immigrated from Europe, Africa, Mexico, Latin America or Asia, I am standing here for you. This country is our country."
Born Hadassah Freilich in post-war Czechoslovakia, Lieberman is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her mother, Ella, survived Auschwitz and Dachau and her father, Samuel, survived a Nazi labor camp. The family came to the United States in the early 1950s, when she was 3 years old.
Lieberman, 52, grew up in Gardner, Mass., where her father served as a congregational rabbi.
A graduate of Boston University, she has done primarily public relations work on health-related issues. Until recently, she worked for the National Research Council, linking American corporations to mathematics and science education reform. She has also worked with the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, Conn., and for Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company.
The Liebermans met in 1982, a meeting Joseph Lieberman described in his book, "In Praise of Public Life," as "chemistry at first conversation and later that day love at first sight."
Lieberman's first husband, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, was a dean at the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary and is now a congregational rabbi in suburban New York. Her son from that marriage, Ethan, is a third-year rabbinical student and doctoral candidate at JTS.
Lieberman has been a board member in the non-denominational Jewish day school from which the Liebermans' 12-year-old daughter, Hana, recently graduated. Susan Koss, head of the Jewish Primary Day School, said the Liebermans "truly are wonderful people, non-pretentious and honest. ... She doesn't just sit and have her name on stationery, but puts forth effort. She doesn't undertake jobs she won't fulfill."
Lieberman has also volunteered with the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, organizing a delegation to Israel for a U.S.-Israel conference on women's health issues and creating an advisory network on women's health.
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