Bram Freedman, the grandson of the late co-founder of Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital (JGH), A.O. Freedman, and the current head of its hospital foundation, had noticed the photo album in his family’s basement before, but never paid it much attention.
It wasn’t until his older brother, David Freedman—a retired doctor living in the U.S. who had recently thrown himself into family history—was rummaging through the family basement that they realized what they had on their hands.
During a visit to Montreal, David had been in the house where they grew up—their grandfather had lived there since 1939, and their parents still live there—when he “struck gold.“
Captured by their grandfather in the early 1920s, the images include historical figures like Zionist leader and first Israeli president Chaim Weizmann, and a young Winston Churchill, decades before he became British prime minister. The collection of A.O. Freedman’s photos document everyday life in British Mandate Palestine. There are photos of men and women praying together at the Western Wall without gender separation, as well as the Tower of David citadel itself. A watermelon vendor at the Jaffa Gate appears in the photos, as does Anna Ticho, the famed artist known for drawing Jerusalem’s hills.
“I probably even flipped through the pages years ago and thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice, old pictures of Israel’—it wasn’t even Israel then,“ Bram recalled in an interview with The CJN.
“The pictures are almost flawless after 100 years in this album, and all labelled with dates, places in Palestine as it then was, and who was in the photos, but it just didn’t click for me and I was probably looking for something else at the time. But when my brother, who was in that mode of researching family history, came across it, he got very excited,” Bram said.
Dr. A.O. Freedman (centre-left) in Jerusalem, circa 1921. (Courtesy of Tower of David Jerusalem Museum)
The 100-page album, along with a second one found subsequently, now reside with the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum.
Inspired by the Freedman family’s discovery, the museum recently issued a global public call for old photos, encouraging people to search their closets, basements, and drawers for images documenting the Western Wall from the late 19th century until 1968.
The submitted photos could be included in “Eyes on the Wall,” a visual exhibition planned for 2027, marking 60 years since the reunification of Jerusalem following the Six-Day War.
Historic photos’ importance slowly dawned on family
At first, the significance of the albums didn’t register with Bram, his parents, and their two other siblings, he said.
After the visit, David Freedman, now an emeritus professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama, took the album back to North Carolina, his current home base.
“It’s only when he dug into it and started saying, ‘Did you know there’s a picture of A.O. with Winston Churchill in this album that was in the basement?’“ said Bram.
The family soon grasped the importance of the photos. “Over the course of the next few days, it became clear that there was something special there. To be perfectly frank, I’m not sure that we, even then, realized that it was something that might be of historical significance.”
David then asked an Israeli colleague who was in the U.S. to bring the albums to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum to gauge their interest. Delayed, at first, by the 12-day exchange of missiles between Israel and Iran in June 2025, the album made its way to the repository last year, with the second photo album joining it in the museum archive earlier in June.
“I think we thought it was kind of a lark. I don’t think we thought that it was going to turn into something, but the museum staff were very, very excited when they saw it,” Bram said.
Family history, connections: Montreal, Israel, hospitals
The discovery has illuminated a forgotten chapter of the Freedman family history. In the early 1920s, unable to find work as a Jewish doctor in Montreal due to pervasive quotas, A.O. Freedman spent two years in British Mandate Palestine helping to establish early medical care standards with the American Zionist Medical Unit.
In 1920, the Canadian Jewish Chronicle published his letter titled “Impressions of a Canadian Zionist in Palestine.” In one passage, he wrote: “I like Jerusalem very much, and if the Jews will have enough faith in it we can make it the most beautiful, the most picturesque, and the most interesting city on earth.”
By 1921, the same publication described him as “the Managing Director of the [Rothschild-Hadassah University Hospital], a practical, well-known and beloved Canadian Jew,” and ran another letter in 1922 that he wrote upon his return, titled “Palestine Jews Fear No Pogroms.”
Back in Montreal, Dr. A.O. Freedman went on to co-found the JGH in the 1930s, even admitting the hospital’s very first patient as an ENT specialist in 1934.
Dr. A.O. Freedman admitted the first patient in 1934 to the then-new Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. (supplied)
His son, and Bram and David’s father, 98-year-old Dr. Samuel O. Freedman, is a respected former president and medical research director of the JGH and former dean of McGill University’s medical school, from which he had graduated in 1953. He later became known for discovering a blood test for cancer called CEA.
For Bram, the uncanny discovery highlights the deep connections between the Montreal family and the Israeli medical system.
“To me, this is really about connections and linkages of the Jewish world,” Bram said. “Even to this day, if I walk into the conference room in the JGH ENT department, there’s a picture of my grandfather because he was the first chief of ENT. That juxtaposition of his leadership role here at the Jewish General Hospital, and the fact that he had spent two years in Palestine running the Hadassah Hospital as the medical system was being created, it’s a very meaningful connection.”
The photo albums now reside in the museum’s climate-controlled special archive in Jerusalem’s Old City, with future plans to conserve and fully digitize the images, pending funding, so they can eventually be viewed by the public.
At least two of A.O. Freedman’s photos are set to be featured in the exhibition in 2027, and Bram says the plan is for at least one family member to attend the opening in Israel next year.
In Montreal, Bram plans to invite JGH staff, its heritage committee, and the Quebec Association of Jewish Physicians for an event in September, linking with museum staff in Jerusalem via Zoom.
“I think people will get a kick out of a connection between the Jewish General Hospital and early Palestine,” he said.
Of the 100-year-old photos, and the articles by or about his grandfather in Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Bram Freedman says there’s one line that stays with him the most, from the article published in 1921.
During a tour of the Rothschild-Hadassah hospital he was running, his grandfather had explained to the reporter why there were no private wards.
“We consider such arrangements in hospitals with such limited accommodation-space, an immorality. We have classes in payments of fees, but in manner of treatment all are equal, Jews and non-Jews alike!” A.O. Freedman said in the article.
That quote reveals much about A.O.’s character, his grandson Bram says.
“That was clearly his motto, and I think the approach of the early medical establishment. We have to remember what Palestine was like in 1920. It was a pretty rough and tumble place, and when you look at the photos, there’s photos of him with fancy people, and then there’s photos of him in the streets and with everyday people. I think that gave me a little bit of insight,” into the grandfather he never met who’d travelled from Montreal to pre-state Israel.
“It was a pretty adventurous thing to do to travel to Palestine in 1920, to participate in the creation and the founding of the medical community in Palestine,” said Bram.
“I got a little bit of insight into him, and you know, he didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to go. He clearly believed in the emerging state and that he had something to contribute and he actually did something about it. It’s not like hopping on a plane today, not an easy trip to get to Palestine.”
The album’s journey from a box in the basement to a major Jerusalem archive still amazes him. It also brought to light a habit Bram hadn’t realized he shared with his grandfather.
“I’m known in my family as the person who prints and labels photos, and my kids always used to make fun of me,” Bram laughed. “I would tell them, ‘If somebody’s looking at these 30 years from now, how are they going to know when it was from and where it was?’ So maybe I get that propensity from my grandfather.”
Meticulously labelled photos taken by Dr. A.O. Freedman in Jerusalem in the early 1920s were found in a photo album in the family basement in Montreal. (Courtesy of Tower of David Jerusalem Museum)
For the museum’s curators, the Freedman collection amounts to a historical gift they couldn’t have predicted, and one that’s priceless.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,“ wrote Dr. Shimon Lev, curator of the “Eyes on the Wall“ exhibition.
Eilat Lieber, the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum’s director and chief curator, echoed the sentiment, thanking the Freedman family for bridging private memory and public history.
“The album now ceases to be only personal but becomes part of the shared story of Jerusalem,“ Lieber said. “It ensures that future generations can see not only how Jerusalem looked, but how it lived—through the eyes of someone who truly saw it.“
Jonathan Rothman is a reporter for The CJN based in Toronto, covering municipal politics, arts and culture, and security, among other areas impacting the Jewish community locally and around Canada. He has worked in Canadian online newsrooms and on multimedia creative teams at the CBC, Yahoo Canada, and The Walrus. Jonathan’s writing has appeared in Spacing, NOW Toronto (the former weekly), and Exclaim! magazines, and The Globe and Mail. He has also contributed arts, music, and culture stories to CBC Radio, including an audio mini-documentary report from Brazil.