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Survivor, Brith Shalom
Executive Sid Bari Dies at 98
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Est.1988 6
OCTOBER 21, 2021
O B I T UARY
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
SID BARI, HOLOCAUST
survivor, former Brith Sholom
Foundation executive director
and 50-year-plus member of
Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley
died on Oct. 2. He was 98.

Following a fall and lacer-
ation to his face, Bari suffered
complications from necrotizing
fasciitis, a bacterial infection.

Through an extended hospital
stay and four surgeries from
Aug. 18 until his death, Bari
was a fighter, according to his
son Jon Bari.

“As painful as the last
two months have been, we’ve
chosen to focus on celebrating
his amazing and remarkably
long and healthy life,” Jon Bari
said. “That speaks to the grit
and resilience that he imparted
to us by example over the years.”
Sid Bari was no stranger
to grit or resilience. He fled
Nazi-occupied Hamburg,
Germany in 1939 and was
one of the first recipients of
open-heart surgery, completed
by Dr. Robert Gross, consid-
ered the father of open-heart
surgery, in the early 1940s.

Born Siegfried Bari in
Hamburg, Germany, on Nov.

20, 1922 to Leon Bari and
Frances Belzinger, Sid Bari
and his brothers Fred and
William loved to play with their
next-door neighbors until their
neighbors joined the Hitler
Youth and were no longer
permitted to play with them.

Leon Bari, a traveling
haberdashery salesman, was
“a canary in the coal mine,”
according to Jon Bari, and
through his travels, was able
to sense the changing tide in
Europe and plan his family’s
escape to the United States.

With only enough money to
send half of his family overseas,
Leon Bari fled with eldest son
JEWISH EXPONENT
Sid Bari was described by Har
Zion Temple Cantor Eliot Vogel as
having an evident joie de vivre.

Courtesy of Jon Bari
Fred Bari in 1938, leaving Sid
and William Bari behind with
their mother.

“The family was split up,
never knowing that they would
see each other again,” Jon Bari
said. Over the next year, Leon
Bari saved enough money for
a $10,000 bond to reunite his
family in New York. Sid Bari
and his brother and mother
came to America on the S.S.

Washington in June 1939,
narrowly escaping the begin-
ning of World War II.

Upon his arrival in New
York, Sid Bari was diagnosed
with a heart murmur, which
prompted his eventual surgery.

Later in life, Sid Bari
returned to Europe multiple
times, including to Hamburg
with his family in 2005. He
took them to his childhood
Bornplatz Synagogue, where he
became a bar mitzvah and read
the entire parsha of Toldot.

He traveled to Spain and
Germany through the American
Cantors Assembly, where he
heard performances of Western
European melodies of psalms
that reminded him of his youth.

Har Zion Temple Cantor
Eliot Vogel described Sid
Bari as having an evident
joie de vivre, even despite his
challenging childhood.

“I don’t exactly know how
he made peace with it, if you
ever did entirely,” Vogel said.

“His answer to the Shoah was
devoting his life to building the
Jewish community.”
Sid Bari was not only the
executive director of the Brith
Sholom Foundation retirement
community from 1965 to 1995,
but also worked for B’nai B’rith
International in New York
from 1962 to 1965 and helped
develop a Beit Halochem center
for wounded and disabled
Israeli war veterans in Haifa.

A lover of culture and arts,
Sid Bari and his wife of 62 years
Joan Bari frequented the Temple
University Association for
Retired Persons, now the Osher
Lifelong Learning Institute.

“He was the big man on
campus there,” Jon Bari said.

The couple loved to attend
museums and theater, including
trips to see the Metropolitan
Opera in New York.

Sid Bari also was a deeply
committed grandfather. While
in the hospital, he insisted upon
traveling with his family to
Harrisburg, where his grandson
Jax, 8, was being featured on
a segment about celiac disease
awareness on “World News
Tonight with David Muir.”
Though Sid Bari was unable
to make it to the event, Jon
Bari was touched by his father’s
effort. As a child, Jon Bari loved
to watch the news with his
father, asking him questions
about politics and economics
during airings of “CBS News
with Walter Cronkite,” a tradi-
tion that continues with Jon
Bari and Jax.

In a letter to Muir, Jax wrote,
“I watch you every night on
‘World News’ with my dad, just
like my dad grew up watching
Walter Cronkite with his father.”
See Bari, Page 22
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



H EADLINES
NEWSBRIEFS Death Row Inmate Who Argued Judge Was
Antisemitic Wins New Trial
A JEWISH MAN who argued that the judge who
sentenced him to death was antisemitic will receive a
new trial, JTA reported.

Randy Halprin, 44, was set to be executed on Oct.

10, 2019, but won a stay from the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals aft er alleging that the judge who
presided over his 2003 murder trial was biased against
Jews and referred to him using antisemitic slurs.

Th e stay sent Halprin’s case back to Dallas County.

Th ere, Judge Lela Lawrence Mays granted a new trial.

Halprin was serving a 30-year sentence for harming
a child when he and six other inmates attempted to
escape. A police offi cer was killed during the attempt;
each inmate in the group — known as the “Texas 7”
— was sentenced to die. Halprin claimed that he never
fi red his gun.

Holocaust Denier’s Remains Buried in
Jewish Grave in Germany
Th e remains of a notorious Holocaust denier and
neo-Nazi were interred in the burial plot of a German-
Jewish music scholar who died before the Holocaust,
and the church that oversees the cemetery is looking
to rectify its “terrible mistake,” JTA reported.

Henry Hafenmayer died earlier this month and
was buried Oct. 8 at the Stahnsdorf South-Western
Cemetery in Brandenburg, southwest of Berlin.

Hafenmayer’s ashes were buried in a plot that had
belonged to Max Friedländer, a Jewish singer and
musical scholar who died in 1934.

Cemetery management said Hafenmayer was
originally denied a more central burial plot to prevent
his grave from becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site.

But aft er denying Hafenmayer the more central plot,
it accepted a request to bury him in Friedländer’s plot,
which was deemed available for a new burial because
its lease wasn’t renewed.

Friedländer’s remains were moved elsewhere, but
the headstone remained in its place because it was
designated a historical monument.

Texas Offi cial: State Law Requires Teaching
‘Opposing’ Views on Holocaust
Teachers in a Texas school district were told that a
new state law requiring them to present multiple
perspectives about controversial issues meant they
needed to make “opposing” views on the Holocaust
available to students, JTA reported.

NBC News obtained an audio recording of Gina
Peddy, the Carroll Independent School District’s
executive director of curriculum and instruction,
telling teachers about how to work under the new
law’s constraints. House Bill 3979 was passed amid
a wave of eff orts in Republican-led statehouses to
prevent “critical race theory,” “divisive” topics and
concepts related to race and bias from being taught
to children.

“Make sure that if, if you have a book on the
Holocaust that you have one that has...other
perspectives,” Peddy said on the recording.

German Talmud Translation from 1935
Now Accessible Online
When Lazarus Goldschmidt completed his translation
of the Talmud into German, it was 1935, two years aft er
Adolf Hitler rose to power, and Goldschmidt himself
had already fl ed to London, JTA reported.

Today, German-speaking Jews are getting another
chance to engage with Goldschmidt’s work — he was
the fi rst to complete a full translation of the Talmud
into any European language.

Sefaria, the website that makes Jewish texts avail-
able and interactive online, added Goldschmidt’s
translation to its library.

“Th e original publication of this document was
a milestone event in German Jewish life,” said Igor
Itkin, a German rabbinical student whose team
adapted Goldschmidt’s translation for online use. ●
— Compiled by Andy Gotlieb
Drama Club!
Presented by Eleni Delopoulos, who has been professionally performing musical theater for
over 20 years. She has also been teaching theater to all ages and performing and teaching in
senior centers for over a decade, and it’s been the most meaningful part of her career.

It’s amazing how quickly folks
are brought back to recalling the
music of years past and the joy
that brings. Proven to improve
memory and be emotionally
beneficial, singing together is not to be
missed. Please join us for this interactive
virtual drama club and enjoy an hour full
of playful screenplay while reading scenes
from some of your favorite musicals and
singing along with a live pianist. It will be
entertaining ... you can count on that!
Join us for a FREE
Interactive Webinar
Friday, October 29 th
1:30 - 3:00 p.m.

To Register
267-277-2307 TheArtisWay.com/JewishExponent
Please Register by Thursday, October 28 th
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JEWISHEXPONENT.COM JEWISH EXPONENT
OCTOBER 21, 2021
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