Dear Freedman family,

Upon hearing of Rabbi Freedman’s passing, I felt a tremendous amount of sadness and pain. For you see, I didn’t just lose a principal, I lost a father.   Rabbi Freedman epitomized what it means to be the ultimate mechanech. A few years after I graduated from high school, I wrote him a letter and published an article (anonymously) in Horizons magazine expressing my hakaras hatov. I realized even then that my life had been changed by his approach to me.  Back then, I thought that what made Rabbi Freedman special was that he cared so much about each girl. In the early 1980s, a girl with my skills and abilities could have been considered a “dummy,” and it was Rabbi Freedman who insisted on educational testing and proper intervention to help me succeed in school, and ultimately in life.