Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Miriam Monczyk-Laczkowska Ferber - December 7, 1999

You would go to shul on Shabbos.

Oh yeah, shul and the whole thing, I loved it. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. Um, and then uh, you know, Fred, eh, came one day New--to New York and he said that, you know, he wanted to marry me. Well, it was not so [laughs] easy to marry me.

Right.

Look, if the rabbis would have objected to him, I mean, I was not that stupid to, you know, to let go. But they didn't objected to him. They objected to him that he was not religious. But, when the business people found out who Fred Ferber was and he was in Dun and Bradstreet listed as a, in the first column as a good payer and they knew him because they did business with him, they spoke to the rabbis. And they uh, you know, gave him a very good reputation. And he's a wonderful man and then. And then and this Mrs. Friley who I told you, she was a woman of substance, flew in with her husband from Belgium to look him over and her husband wouldn't come out of the, of the room because he didn't want to talk to the goy who--there was, who didn't...

Fred.

Yeah, yes. But she did. And she found out that she knew his whole family. And, you know, it's like Jewish people become right away intertwined. And then they didn't want to take the responsibility of giving me permission so they went to the Skverer rebbe.

Who?

This Skverer rabbi has got his own little city in Muncie, New York, you know.

No, I didn't know about that.

Well, they went to the rabbi for a blessing--for advice. What to do. The rabbi said, "She can marry him." And they came in the middle of the night, mazel tov and simentov, you know and the...Then I went to the brucha to the Lubavitcher rabbi. When I went to the brucha for the Lubavitcher rabbi it was a beautiful time of my life because first of all it was not a audience with him like it was lately that he was giving away the dollars. It was--I sat with him for half an hour. And he spoke to me in Russian and I talked to him and. You know, it was a much more personable.

Yeah.

So.