by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

August 27, 2009

In the weeks following his death on Aug. 6, 89-year-old Harold Freedman was being remembered by friends and family as a man who went to extraordinary lengths to help the needy, in and outside the Jewish community.

To members of Congregation Beth Torah in Florham Park, he was the man instrumental in preserving the synagogue’s ark and sacred scrolls when the congregation moved from its previous home in Orange in 1982.

To others in Orange, he was a local businessman who “did everything for anybody who needed it,” according to his older brother, Joel.

That included offering donations to those in need, sending local teenagers to a basketball camp, and, perhaps most memorably, helping to finance the education of an African-American boy who went on to become a municipal court judge in Orange.

“He had no color line and no religion line,” said Joel Freedman as he sat behind a desk in his Verona apartment poring over a stack of yellowed letters and newspaper clippings.

Many of those Harold helped were young people in Orange — the town where Muriel’s Dress Shop has been his family’s business since 1939. It is now being run by Bob Shankman, Joel’s son-in-law.

“If people in Orange needed a dollar, he gave it to them,” said Joel, who was 18 months older than his brother.

He held up a faded photo from a local newspaper of uncertain date showing Harold beside seven teenagers from Orange High School. He had just presented them with scholarships to a girls’ basketball camp.

One beneficiary was LaToya Thompson. A letter she wrote him, written in longhand, thanked him for being “a man with a big heart and a kind soul” who taught her a valuable lesson.

“Helping out in any way will surely give someone a better day, a day in which to realize that life is about giving and receiving,” she wrote.

Another to benefit from Harold’s generosity was Freddie Polhill, a youngster who lived on Pearl Street in the poorest section of Orange.

As a boy, Polhill shined shoes for money, then worked at the dress shop.

“Harold took him in, fed him, and helped him out,” said Joel.

Harold paid for Polhill’s expenses at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, then at the University of North Carolina Law School, and loaned the young lawyer $7,500 for a down payment on a house.

Polhill went on to become a prosecutor, then for 15 years a municipal court judge in Orange, the first African-American to hold the seat in the city. He died of acute leukemia in 1997 at the age of 53, having been nominated for a Superior Court post in Essex County.

The Polhill Law and Justice Complex in Orange is named in his honor.

Steve Newmark of Florham Park, the current board chair of NJ Jewish News, met Harold Freedman in 1969.

“I was saying Kaddish for my father at Congregation Beth Torah in Orange,” Newmark said. “In subsequent years, when there were plans to close it down, Harold was instrumental in getting the ark and a Torah scroll and many books and siddurim to the shul in Florham Park.”

Rabbi Arthur Vernon, a former rabbi at Beth Torah who is now religious leader of the Jewish Community Center in West Hempstead, Long Island, remembers Harold as “instrumental” in retrieving the holy objects. But there was a catch: He insisted that the Florham Park congregation keep the name Beth Torah in exchange for the ark and the books.

Harold was not a regular at the synagogue; nevertheless, both Freedman brothers “wanted to help the temple in Florham Park because we felt it would be an asset to the community,” said Joel.

“Harold wasn’t someone who sat back.” said Newmark. “He really worked hard.”

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Jersey City, Harold attended New York University until the outbreak of World War II, when he joined the United States Army and rose to the rank of technical sergeant.

He was a member of the Jewish War Veterans, B’nai B’rith, and two synagogues — Beth Torah and Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange.

He and his late wife, Flora, had no children.

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