# @nyrr on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DFVp4WxJfwC
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/26273677-nyrr-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/e421d52156.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-01-27T18:01:43.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** New York Road Runners (@nyrr) — https://gondola.cc/nyrr

## Caption

As we recognize International Holocaust Remembrance Day the day after the running of the #FredLebowHalf, we acknowledge our longtime president of New York Road Runners and holocaust survivor, Fred Lebow. His story ⬇️.
 
Lebow was born Fishel Lebowitz in Romania in 1932. During World War II, members of his family heard increasingly disturbing reports of mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis. Eventually the situation became dire as authorities prohibited Lebow’s father from running the family business and detained some family members. 
When orders came for the town’s Jews to wear the yellow Star of David and report to a nearby military barracks, the family split up and went into hiding. They later learned that their extended family in Hungary and Czechoslovakia—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—had all been murdered by the Nazis. 
 
Lebow’s immediate family briefly reunited after the Nazi surrender, then splintered again, with Lebow and a brother joining a convoy of Jewish orphans headed to Czechoslovakia. For several years the brothers, both teenagers, traveled around post-war Europe as refugees. Lebow later became a smuggler, moved to Ireland, and eventually came to the United States to study at a yeshiva. 

Lebow didn’t reunite with his family until many years later when some of them moved to Brooklyn. By then he’d changed his name, given up his scholarly pursuits, and worked in comedy theater and the garment business. He took up running in 1969 to improve his tennis game and loved it so much he joined NYRR and within a year was co-directing the first New York City Marathon. 
 
January 27 is designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD). Since 2005, the UN and its member states have held commemoration ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.

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## Tags

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