God's faith in us. Professor Rovin Foyerstein, who died age 92 in April 2014, was one of the great

child psychologists of the world, a man who transformed lives and led severely brain-damaged

children to achievements no one else thought possible. I knew him and admired him,

and I was recording a tribute to him when his son told me an amazing story. Foyerstein had been

working with a group of Native American Indians, and they wanted to show their gratitude. So they

invited him and his wife to their reservation. They were

brought into the Indian chief's wigwam where the leaders of the tribe were sitting in a circle

in full headdress. As the traditional welcome ceremony began, the professor who was an Orthodox Jew

from Jerusalem, was overwhelmed by the incongruity. He turned to his wife and said to

her in Yiddish, what would my mother say if she could see me now? To his amazement, the Indian chief

turned to him and replied in Yiddish for vos and said, what would she say if she knew that I

understood what you would just say? The Yiddish-speaking Indian

chief told Foyerstein his story. He had grown up in Europe as a religious Jew. But having

survived the horrors of the Holocaust, he decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life

as far away as he could from Western civilization.

So he joined the Indians and became their doctor.

Foistin was the first Jew he had met in his self-imposed exile.

Well, there are certain people around whom strange things happened to.

Erwin Foistine was one. Born in Romania, he studied

psychology in Bucharest, but was forced to flee by the Nazi invasion. He settled in Israel after the war

and began by treating traumatized child survivors of the Holocaust, returning to Europe. He completed

his education at Geneva and the Sorbonne,

...