Avraham Abba Frieder collection

Rabbi Armin Frieder (born Armin Abraham-Abba Frieder, 1911-1946) was born June 30 1911 in Prievidza, Slovakia to Filip Frieder and Ružena Messinger. He had one brother, Emanuel, and one sister, Gittel. Armin studied to be a rabbi, and was ordained by 1932. He was a rabbi in Zvolen, Czechoslovakia (now Zvolen, Slovakia), from 1933-1937, and in 1938 moved to Nové Mesto nad Váhom. Armin married Ružena Berl (b. 1913). Their son, Gideon was born on 30 September 1937 in Zvolen, and their daughter Gita was born on 8 August 1940 in Nové Mesto.

From 1942-1944, Armin was part of the Working Group, an activist group organized to stop deportations of Slovak Jews. The group bribed German officials, established work-camps as a means of stopping deportations, and provided hiding spots and false papers to Jews in Slovakia.

In 1944, Gideon, his sister, and his mother fled to Nové Mesto to Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. Armin would go there separately. In October, the Germans attacked the village of Staré Hory, where the three of them were. Both Gideon’s mother and sister were killed, and he was wounded. A Partisan named Henry Herzog took Gideon and placed him with a family in Bully. The couple that took him in, Paulina and Jozef Striharzsik, cared for Gideon until the end of the war.

After the war, Armin and Gideon lived in Bratislava, Slovakia. Armin died in 1946, and Gideon went to Palestine in 1947. He met Dalia Bogler while in high school. They married in 1960, and immigrated to the United States in 1975. He is currently the A. James Clark Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the George Washington University and a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.