- The Dayton Jewish Observer

October 30, 2025

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It is with great pleasure that Susan and David Joffe announce the engagement of their daughter Becky to Josh Friedberg. The couple resides in Scottsdale, Ariz. Becky started her own business in fashion consulting, Be Styled By Becky, and Josh works as a senior sales engineer for a large commercial HVAC company. Josh’s mother, Cyndi Dallas, also lives in the Phoenix area. The wedding will take place Aug. 30, 2026 at the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colo.

The play Anschel by Michael London, based on the book Anschel’s Story by Renate Frydman, had its premiere at the JCC of Greater Columbus on Oct. 21. The Dayton Holocaust Resource Center’s founder and director, Renate published the book in 2017. It’s her late husband’s story of survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. Told in the first person, it relates how Anschel “Charlie” Frydman stayed alive as a slave laborer and then as a partisan fighter, when he was only a youth, after his parents and two sisters were murdered.

London, a member of the Ohio Playwrights Circle, adapted the book into a one-person play with grants from the Leon Norman and Mildred Miriam Nizny Memorial Fund and the Eleanor and John Kautz Fund of The Dayton Foundation. The Dayton Holocaust Resource Center partnered with the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton on a series of three readings here last year. Funding for the Columbus production came from the Frydman family, the Ticho Fund, and the Ohio Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission.

Students attended the 90-minute play for free — Renate’s goal for all future productions. “I realize more and more as the years pass how strong he was as a young man,” Renate told The Columbus Jewish News. “Young people today can feel like they have no power. But I hope after they see this story, they can see that even a young person can have resilience. They can find it in themselves. There is so much resilience in the human spirit.” She plans to bring Anshel to Dayton in March 2026.

Attorney David Pierce, shareholder and chair of the litigation/labor and employment departments at Coolidge Wall, has been selected as Lawyer of the Year for Dayton by his peers in The Best Lawyers in America 2026. The honor is awarded to the lawyer with the highest overall peer feedback in a specific region each year.

Danielle Zeisloft, senior program coordinator in the Division of Prevention & Early Intervention Services at the Montgomery County Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health Services Board, co-led the presentation, The PROTECT Initiative: A Collaborative Approach to Addressing Adverse Childhood Experiences, at the Ohio Society for Public Health Education 2025 Health Educator’s Institute. PROTECT is a program of Montgomery County ADAMHS and the county’s Childhood Trauma Advisory Council.