Flora M. Singer, Educator And Author, 78, Washington Post
DGH
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030503327_2.html
Flora M. Singer Educator, Author
Flora M. Singer, 78, who helped create a curriculum for training Montgomery
County, Maryland, public school teachers on the Holocaust and wrote a memoir
about her childhood in Nazi-occupied Belgium, died February 25, 2009, at her
home in Potomac, Maryland, of complications from a stroke.
In 1985, Mrs. Singer and two other Montgomery County educators devised a
course on how to teach sensitive material about the Holocaust. The course is
still used today in county schools. She also spoke to teachers and students
about her experiences during the Holocaust and how she survived.
In 2007, Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs Project published
her memoir, "Flora: I was but a Child," which recounts her experiences as a
Jewish girl hiding in Belgium during the Holocaust.
Flora Mendelowitz was born in Antwerp, Belgium. She was 11 when her family
was forced into hiding in 1942. She spent the next two years hiding in
convents with her two younger sisters until Belgium was liberated.
In 1946, she moved to New York with her sisters and mother and was reunited
with her father, who had left Belgium in 1938.
She worked as a stenographer during the late 1940s and later as a dressmaker
at her home in Westbury, New York.
In the late 1960s, she moved to the Washington DC area and helped her
husband and brother-in-law open Bagel Master, one of the first bagel
bakeries in the region. Later, she received a bachelor's degree in French
and a master's degree in French literature, both from the University of
Maryland.
From the late 1970s until her retirement in 1993, she taught foreign
language classes at Cabin John Middle School and Albert Einstein and Walt
Whitman high schools.
She volunteered with the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington DC
and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She served as co-president of the
Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington for the past
eight years.
In 2007, the Potomac Chamber of Commerce named her Potomac citizen of the
year.
Survivors include her husband of 59 years, Jack Singer of Potomac; two
children, Mark Singer of Baltimore, Maryland, and Sandra Landsman of
Potomac; two sisters; and three grandchildren.
--
Lauren Wiseman