By Maxine Dovere/JNS.org in Features, U.S.

Joseph (Yossel) Friedenson z”l

Joseph (Yossel) Friedenson, longtime editor of the monthly Yiddish-language Dos Yiddishe Vort (The Jewish Word) journal published by Agudath Israel of America, died Feb. 23 in New York at the age of 93.
For close to 60 years, his writing gave voice to the thinking and concerns of the post-Holocaust Eastern European Orthodox Jewish community. He was married to his wife Gitele, who died in 2006, for 64 years. They were married in Nov. 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto.
A survivor of six concentration camps during the Holocaust, Friedenson was finally liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, 1945. He was not a proponent of “Holocaust remembrance” memorials or museums. Writing in the Jewish World Review in August 1998, he complained that remembering has become “the new Jewish religion.”
Together with Volvie Friedman and Moshe Sherer, Friedenson was one of the founders of the post-war Agudath Israel movement. In addition to his position as editor of Dos Yiddishe Vort, he served as the movement’s secretary general.
Dos Yiddishe Vort, a 64-page Yiddish journal, is “dedicated to the problems of Torah Judaism… the mouthpiece for the dwindling Yiddish-speaking contingent” of the Agudath Israel movement. The journal began in the post-Holocaust displaced persons (DP) camps, and its first two issues were printed in transliteration in Latin letters because Yiddish type was not available.
When Friedenson immigrated to the U.S., he continued to promote the objectives and goals of the Agudath Israel movement. He re-established Dos Yiddishe Vort in the U.S. as a monthly publication.
At its height during the 1970s and ’80s, Dos Yiddishe Vort had a readership of 7,000-8,000. In recent editions, Dos Yiddishe Vort had become more of a commemorative journal dedicated to single topics and special editions. The magazine maintained a fervently Orthodox position, commenting on current issues and their impact on Orthodox Jewry, and frequently criticizing the Conservative and Reform movements.