Mary Brown: " I spent many hours listening to my parents' generation speak in Yiddish of what they had endured during the Holocaust". Dr. Siegel met Mary at a Southeast Florida Holocaust Coalition Group meeting at Jewish Family Services. Mary is second generation and is a leader of the Kings Point Holocaust Group of Tamarac. Mary had a successful recruiting business in New Jersey but had to move to Florida to help her mother care for her father who has Alzheimer's. I grew up in the shadows of the Holocaust and was deeply impacted by it. Ever since I was a little girl. my parents shared with me their personal stories of the war. With few surviving relatives, our holiday meals were frequented with other Holocaust survivors, creating our own family unit. My brother Ronny and I, the only children who knew Yiddish, often sat with the adults around the table for hours mesmerized by their vivid and painful stories. Although my father, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, had turned his back on his Chassidic background at age 16, it deeply influenced him. Throughout my life, without us realizing it, he carried out the role of the centuries-old Chassidic master storyteller in which Ronny and I received informal, spontaneous lessons from the Torah, Mishna. and Talmud as well as countless Jewish parables and Chassidic tales. After the war. my father returned to Warsaw to discover that all his family and friends had been murdered. He felt the Polish streets were steeped in Jewish blood. During this time, my mother, who had endured the war in Germany pretending to be a Christian, found her way to a DP camp and eventually met my father, an ardent Zionist and leader of a group making their way illegally to Palestine. They were captured in Cyprus, then lived in Israel for ten years before moving to Belgium, where I was born. Eventually they moved to the United States. Hearing firsthand survivor stories during my childhood shaped me profoundly, especially in terms of understanding good and evil. love and betrayal, respect and humiliation. survival and death, and the value of human life. Based upon these influences, I have been passionate throughout my life about making a difference, especially by helping those in need. The best way to sum up my driving force is Tikkun Olam: to perfect the world.