Obituary: Dr. Richard A. Freund z”l

We are saddened to learn of the death of Dr. Richard A. Freund, a pioneer in the use of non-invasive tools such a ground penetrating radar to research and identify Holocaust sites and other Jewish heritage, in Israel and Europe.

Freund, 67, died on in Charlottesville, Virginia on July 14. According to an obituary written by a longtime friend, Prof. Lawrence (Laurie) Baron, in the San Diego Jewish World, the cause was “complications arising from the rejection of a bone marrow transplant he had received 18 years ago.”

Freund, who had rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, taught Jewish history and archaeology at a number of institutions over the past 40 years. At his death he held the Bertram and Gladys Aaron Endowed Professorship in Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.

Prior to that he held the Maurice Greenberg Professorship of Jewish History and directed the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, from 1999 to 2019. 

“Although he began his career as a specialist on Jewish ethics and Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity,” Baron wrote, “he broadened his field first to biblical archaeology utilizing non-invasive ground penetrating sonar to reconstruct the history of biblical sites and then applied this technology to explore possible locations where the legendary city of Atlantis might have been located and to uncover Jewish sites from before and during the Holocaust in Rhodes, Sobibor, Vilna, and Warsaw.”

In recent years Freund was involved in or led a number of Holocaust-related non-invasive archaeology projects, including the ongoing work at the site of the destroyed Great Synagogue in Vilnius and the discovery of an escape tunnel at the Ponary death camp outside of Vilnius. In 2017, he led a project using sonar and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to discover and document a one-time Jewish shtetl in Lithuania that today lies at the bottom of a man-made lake.

In July 2021, he led a team carrying out non-invasive research  via geoscientific tools such as ground-penetrating radar and metal detectors at the site of the WW2 Warsaw Ghetto. These non-invasive surveys indicated an “anomaly” that led to physical excavation in October 2021 in Krasiński Park, which stands in the former Ghetto area. 

Freund is survived by family members including his wife Eliane,  his three children, Eli, Ethan, and Yoni, and his siblings and their spouses.

May his soul be bound up in the bond of life!

Read the full obituary by Prof. Baron

Read the obituary on Legacy.com