Susan Burke, Managing Director of The Laura B. Friedman Memorial Library, which houses over 3,000 books and other media, all on topics of Jewish interest for all ages, is assisted by Myla Stokes-Kelly. The Library strives to serve the spiritual, intellectual and recreational information needs of the Ner Tamid community, and its collection includes such subjects as Bible, holidays, Jewish philosophy, customs, Hebrew language, fiction, humor, cooking, history, biographies, the Holocaust, Jews in the Diaspora, and the Middle East, as well as a rich and growing children's book section.

Planned by Naomi Gabai-Fisher and Susan Burke, monthly library sessions have been initiated for the pupils in Grades K/1, 2/3 and 4/5. The children listen to a story related to their curriculum, after which they check out age appropriate books. A few  of the books read to the children over the years have been Honi and the Carob Tree, A Costume for Noah, The Wedding That Saved a Town, The Runaway Dreidle, A Mountain of Blintzes and The Hardest Word. Kol ha-kavod to children and to their parents who have been mindful of returning borrowed library books.

Ner Tamid Book Group TBA - for further information, contact Marion Yurow

The Library is accessible to patrons during the week when Ner Tamid's office is open, and after Shabbat services, and most material can be checked out for three weeks. The arrangement of the collection is easy to follow, and check-out is self-serve.

Ner Tamid Book Club meets the 4th Thursday of each month, at 10:00 a.m. inside the library.

Laura B. Friedman Library – Recent Donations

The long awaited third novel in Maggie Anton's trilogy about "love and the Talmud in medieval France" has been donated to the Library by Diana Lerner.

Rashi's Daughters - Book 3, Rachel, follows the marriage and adventures of Rashi's youngest daughter, who works to build a successful textile business in Troyes, France in the 1090's while the First Crusade rages against the Jews in Germany. This novel sits next to the first two books in the series, and its call number is FIC/Ant/ras/bk.3.  Bet you can't read just one!  Thank you Diana.

Sarah Dennis, daughter of our Religious School's faculty member Morah Shoshanna Dennis, has donated a book to the Library in honor of her recent bat mitzvah.  The Thinking Jewish Teenager's Guide to Life by Akiva Tatz includes chapters on free will, happiness, sex, individuality, identity, drugs, faith, and intermarriage.  The book's call number is 397.23/Tat.  Thank you Sarah both for the book and for being a thinking Jewish teen.




Shoshana Dennis, faculty member of our Sam S. Bloom Religious School, in honor of a special upcoming birthday, donated a number of books to the Library. Included are three titles dealing with spirituality: Opening the Doors of Wonder, Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage by Arthur Magida - call no. 290.5/Mag;  Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice, by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi - call no. 175.01/Sch;  and The Art of Amazement, Judaism's Forgotten Spirituality, by Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld - call no. 175.01/Sei.  Our thanks to Shoshana for remembering the Library when marking personal passages, and for teaching her pupils in Class 2/3 to love books and learning.

If Pesach is about freedom, Molly Cohen's recently donated book to the Laura B. Friedman Library is an especially good read  at this season. Enemies of the People, My Family's Journey to America by journalist Kati Marton (at one time married to Peter Jennings) is a memoir of how her parents, Hungarian Jews who had survived the Nazi terror of W.W. II, afterwards battled for their lives and sanity in the '50's during the Cold War 's Communist terror. Marton, as an adult pieced together from recently released secret police records in Hungary as well as from the F.B.I. file on her family in this country, an account of what her Hungarian journalist parents who worked for the west's Associated Press and United Press endured. Marton, at the time of this story was a child of 6, and she blends what she remembers with what she learned later. For those wanting a charming and readable glimpse of the complexity of post war Communist European life, this is a page turner that takes a reader into the Marton family and helps a born American feel in the gut a bit of what totalitarian terror can do to people. The book's call number is 762.1/MAR/Mar.


Ner Tamid's own Rae Harvey has obtained for the Laura B. Friedman Library a second copy of Kiss Every Step, by Doris Martin, the book which tells the true story of how Rae and her family, against all odds, survived the war years in Europe. They are the only Jewish family in Poland, to our knowledge, whose members lived to build new lives after the war. This second copy of the book is a revised edition with photographs not included in the earlier printing. The book is a page turner. The call number is 736.5/SZP/Mar/2009.


“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges