Sara Freedland
THE ONE thing that would surprise Sara Freedland about the dozens of tributes that have come in the wake of her death is that they were made at all. Of course we, herfamily,knewshewas an exceptional wife, mother and grandmother. Most people who knew her would agree. But she would n e v e r h a v e believed she was so admired and loved, or that her 75 years of life had made such an impression.
It wasn’t false modesty from the woman who, in a two-year spell as editor of the JC’s then Junior Chronicle page in the 1970s, gave a completely new look to the idea of journalism for children. She simply didn’t believe the plaudits she received for revitalising a section that then JC editor Geoffrey Paul said had slid into “stagnation”, anymorethanshewouldhave anticipated the letters that followed her passing. or the hundreds of people who came to her funeral, or attended the family shiva. If she had heard them recall h e r e l e g a n c e and beauty, she wo u l d h a v e said they were talking about someone else. As one friend put it, had Sara been among the mourners, she would have told them: “Oh, you shouldn’t have come!” P e r haps that diffidence was enshrined by a childhood and later life that in a novel would have seemed too much, too unbelievable. She was born in Petach Tikva, then a small town in Mandatory Palestine in 1936, to Rabbi Abraham Hocherman and his Britishborn wife, Feige. Hocherman was one of those scholars who believed that everything, including providing for his family, was of little importance compared with Torah.
His wife and children were close to starvation, but he himself went home to his mother to eat. Eventually, when Sara was a year old, Feige’s East End family clubbed together to bring mother and the two surviving children – a sister had died in infancy – back to Britain. Before long the children were wartime evacuees: Sara to Shefford in Bedfordshire, where she was the youngest pupil in the relocated Avigdor school. She never forgot her sweet ration being routinely snatched by older children.
Tragedy came in 1945, on the eve of Pesach and a month before VE Day. The penultimate V2 rocket of the war destroyed Hughes Mansions in Whitechapel. Feige and her younger sister were among the 134 people killed. An uncle came to Shefford to tell Sara the news. She was eight years old and couldn’t understand how people could be so happy at the war’s end when she was in mourning for the mother she loved.
In 1949 her father demanded his children return to what was now Israel. It would prove no easier then than when she was a baby. She was so malnourished that she was taken away from home by social workers and placed in a Tel Aviv boarding school. There she thrived, leaving school at 15 to work in that city for the British Olim Society.
She returned to London in 1955 and worked at the Israeli Embassy; unusually she could speak, write and type in Hebrew and English. Two years later we met, and married in 1960 – the beginning of 52 happy years which produced three children and six grandchildren.
In 1977, Sara had taken over the Junior Chronicle, staying with the paper until she was struck in 1979 by another tragedy, the onslaught of encephalitis. Doctors predicted the worst but after ten years of suffering, with the strength and determination that had led her to survive every other ordeal, she defied their predictions. There were to be more than 20 of what she regarded as “bonus” years, producing a much-admired children’s book on Chanucah and enjoying her expanding family - whom she now leaves behind after another devastating illness which, this time, she could not defy. She is survived by her husband Michael; children Fiona, Dani and Jonathan and grandchildren Beth, Ellie, Ben, Jamie, Jacob and Sam.