Profiles in Activism: ‘Suzie’s Salon’

You can sense the momentum of Suzie Frankel’s perpetual motion even on a Zoom call. Suzie is theoretically retired after a successful career in business in New York, having made aliyah 20 years ago. For most of us watching her work, though, we are thinking, “If that’s retirement, I better enjoy the rest of the relaxation of my current job. I don’t think I have the energy for retirement.”

In between hosting platoons of IDF soldiers at her beachfront apartment in Netanya and treating them to therapy, massage, and more, she organizes a respected intellectual “salon” that has featured such speakers as Daniel Chertoff, Shai Davidai, and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.

Like others I have profiled here, Suzie’s motivation for leaping into action was the October 7 war. She’d been in New York at the time, spending the weeks after the attack glued to the news. “I felt an uncomfortable and strange dislocation from watching my country under attack from thousands of miles away. By the time I got back, the war was raging, and I’d reached a breaking point.”

“One morning I woke up, and I said to myself, it’s ridiculous, I’ve got to do something,” she recalled.

Suzie reached out to a friend connected to One Family, the organization founded by Marc and Chantal Belzberg that has supported victims of terror in Israel for two decades. “I said, Mark, put me to work. Let me do something. I have to help.” That call led her to Nava Formansky, who runs One Family’s office in Ra’anana, and within days, to a house full of young widows.

“I come to this house, and I see about ten young girls, their twenties, early thirties, with baby carriages by the pool,” Suzie said. “I’m going, oh my God, these girls have just lost their husbands in Gaza. It was horrible for me. And for them, it was wonderful to be together, to meet each other, to understand that everybody else there understood what they were going through.”

That morning became the template for what followed. Suzie invited the widows to her apartment for breakfast. Ilana Harkavi, a friend visiting from New York who had helped build one of Israel’s best-known cosmetics brands, gave the group a makeup lesson. Another friend made shakshuka. There were croissants, cheese, coffee, and a swim in the pool.

“They were so touched that somebody remembered them,” Suzie said.

From there, the events multiplied. Suzie began organizing gatherings for bereaved mothers who had lost children at the Nova festival, for bereaved parents and grandparents, and for young widows navigating a life nobody had prepared them for. She arranged horse therapy, art classes, flower arranging, cooking and baking workshops with some of the country’s top pastry chefs, and even a mentalist to entertain the group.

She talked a cosmetics company into donating free products and a makeup demonstration for 25 bereaved mothers, negotiating up from two products to three. She recruited a hairdresser to give free cuts and color to grieving mothers. She persuaded the owner of the Maree Sky Lounge restaurant to host two bereaved couples to an amazing evening and free meals.

“I had no shame. I had total chutzpah,” she said. “I think to date we must have done about fifteen of these events.”

In parallel, Suzie pursued her longtime dream of recreating the old European tradition of the literary and artistic salon, where writers, journalists, and thinkers gathered in someone’s living room to talk. She started with about twenty-five friends in her own apartment.

It grew quickly, moving from her living room to her building’s tenants’ lounge, drawing crowds that eventually approached seventy people for a single evening. In addition to Chertoff, Davidai, and Hassan-Nahoum, speakers have included the filmmaker Nancy Spielberg and Shalev Bitton, a Nova survivor who escaped the festival grounds with five friends and was sheltered by Youness, a Bedouin farm manager who stood up to Hamas gunmen and saved them all.

“Suzie’s Salon,” as it’s known, eventually began charging admission, and Suzie uses the proceeds to fund an entirely different kind of hospitality: pampering IDF units in her own building. She has brought in soldiers for massages, ice baths, and full days of food and therapy, treating them, in her words, “like kings.”

She recently hosted eighty soldiers from an intelligence unit, split between her building and its twin tower next door. She brought in thirty therapists offering everything from Watsu water therapy to reflexology, chiropractic work, and sound therapy.

“I had the most amazing thank you from them,” she said. One officer, a veteran of more than two decades of service, told her he had never been treated the way her volunteers treated his unit that day.

Suzie has recruited speakers the same way she recruits everything else: by asking. At a recent JNS media summit, for instance, she spotted Jonathan Conricus, the former international spokesman for the IDF, and introduced herself on the spot. “He said, ‘I have to go on stage.’ I said, ‘Go on stage, and then I need to speak with you,'” she recalled. Conricus agreed to speak at her next salon evening, scheduled for September 6.

Before her “retirement” in Israel, Suzie ran a business in New York fitting women for prostheses after mastectomies. After making Aliyah, she spent thirteen years volunteering in the emergency room at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, followed by more volunteer work at a hospital in Netanya.

Her family has embraced the same instinct. Suzie’s daughter, Lara Szlamkowicz, from Englewood, New Jersey, and her daughter, Lisa Salamonov, from Tel Mond, are deeply involved in Boots For Israel, which has delivered more than 120,000 pairs to IDF soldiers. Their commitment to this effort went back to the very beginning of the war, when Lisa’s nephew—who was fighting in Gaza—called and asked her if she could get him a pair of boots. That led to a phone call to Lara, who went on Amazon and bought them herself to send to Israel.

Suzie’s cousin, Julie, who owns Delmar Jewelry in Montreal, has donated more than two hundred pieces of jewelry for Suzie to hand out to bereaved mothers at her events.

“To live is to give,” Suzie said. “A lot of people are stepping into their best selves since the war.” She credits her natural tendency to give to others because that is what she saw at home growing up almost on a daily basis from both of her parents, who were Holocaust survivors. She added that when people act from a good place, doors seem to open on their own. Suzie calls it an ongoing miracle. She believes only one thing is still missing in Israel: greater unity among Jews.

Further to the idea of perpetual motion, Suzie is about to leave her beautiful home, where she is surrounded by a wonderful community, and relocate to the SeaOne Private Club Rishon LeZion because she has decided she no longer wants to be alone so much. “Most of my friends are married or partnered off, and as a result I find that I have too much time spent on my own,” Suzie added. “So, I’m taking the plunge to create a new possible reality for myself. Alone but with faith that Hashem loves me and is guiding my way.” She intends to keep Suzie’s Salon running from her new home, however.

For now, she keeps doing what she does: volunteering at the Meir Hospital ER, cooking up breakfasts, filling her home with speakers, and finding new ways to make sure that widows, bereaved parents, and exhausted soldiers know that somebody remembered them.