Louis Frieberg (1917-2009)
Born on December 4, 1917 in the town of Mielec, Poland, Louis Frieberg was the oldest of four children.
Educated at the heder, he was raised in a conservative family and was expected to be a role model for his brothers, Elimelech, Shmuel, and Bernard-Dov.
In 1939, he was drafted into the Polish Army and was stationed in the town of Silesia on the Polish-German border. His regiment was captured in September of that year, and Louis was taken to a camp at Luckenwalde, near Berlin, as a prisoner of war.
A year later Germany sent Jewish prisoners home where they would later be rounded up by the SS. Louis was sent to a Heinkelwerke airplane factory and remained there until 1943 when, with the success of the Russian offensive, the SS and Gestapo liquidated the camp. The men were transferred to Flosenburg, a camp in southern Germany, and again put to work.
After the war, Louis spent time in displaced persons camp in Landsberg where he met Gerda Steinitz (1925-2023), a seamstress from the Polish village of Bielschowitz, in Upper Silesia. The couple moved to Israel in 1949 where they married, but left three years later for Canada. Gerda worked as a seamstress and Lou found work as a carpenter.
After a few years, they formed their own construction company and property management, prospering as Ottawa grew and developed. Louis Frieberg first became involved with the Hebrew University in 1968 and in 1989 established the Louis Frieberg Chair in East Asian Studies, the result of an interest in East Asia. Thanks to his generous support, the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies was founded seventeen years later.