Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2026, pp. 66-67
Personality
By Dr. Rosemarie M. Esber
“I’LL BRING A FEW stained-glass pieces,” Dr. Yaser Freij always tells me. Each time I contact him about another fundraiser, he responds with the same steady generosity. Long before the Gaza genocide began in October 2023, Samar, Laila and I were already organizing monthly events to support Palestinian humanitarian organizations.
Inevitably, Dr. Freij would appear at Middle East Books and More in Washington, DC or the Company of Books in Alexandria, VA on the day of the fundraiser, carrying padded bags filled with his beautiful stained glass creations. He would smile as he unpacked dozens of stylized red, black, white and green glass hearts, watermelons, olive branches, kites, doves, boats and—most of all—Palestinian flags, his favorite design.
A CHILDHOOD INTERRUPTED BY WAR
Yaser Bishara Freij was born in West Jerusalem’s Baqa’a neighborhood, the seventh child of Bishara Issa Freij and Yasmine Hanna Beida. Yaser and his eight siblings grew up in one unit in a duplex villa, while their uncle and many cousins lived on the other side. The villa’s roof tiles spelled out “Freij,” a proud marker of the family home located near the Jerusalem train station. Yaser remembers the garden filled with the laughter and energy of 15 children playing and climbing the grapevine trellis to wave and make mischievous faces at the passengers as the train sped by on its way to Jaffa.
In May 1948, while the British prepared to withdraw from Mandate Palestine as war raged, Yaser’s parents gathered their children and fled with nothing but their lives to a nearby convent. Yaser was 6 years old, but he remembers the sound of gunfire. The Freij families later found temporary refuge in Bethlehem, where they remained for several months. After the armistice in late January 1949, they returned to East Jerusalem, never to return to their former home or businesses in West Jerusalem, which the Israelis had occupied and looted.
POST-NAKBA STRUGGLES
The Freij family subsequently rented rooms from the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem’s Old City where Yaser’s grandparents were living. He recalls mornings that began with a simple breakfast of stale bread softened in hot milk sprinkled with a little sugar. Yaser attended grade school and then high school at the Collège des Frères in the Old City, all while working to help support his family.
The Old City walls were essentially his backyard. From his window, Yaser could see impoverished neighborhoods in West Jerusalem—now part of Israel—but he could not cross the “no man’s land” that divided the city. Well into 1949, Israelis continued firing across the line from positions atop Notre Dame Cathedral in West Jerusalem, killing and endangering Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Yaser’s father died when he was 14. Dispossessed and displaced during the Nakba, his eight uncles and aunt, and their children, were scattered to Beirut, Damascus and the Gulf. His older brothers also had to leave Jerusalem to find work in Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf. Yaser himself longed to leave the Arab world. He had witnessed the harm that French and British colonial rule had inflicted on the region’s peoples and lands, and he had felt its effects in his own life.
Encouraged by Joudeh, his older brother, Yaser enrolled as an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1961 and then continued on to four years of medical school there, specializing in pediatrics. He moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia to work at the Aramco health clinic, and after a year, he left in 1971 with his wife, Mary Michel Kreitem, and first child, Maysoun, for the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he began postgraduate pediatric training. He continued his training at the University of Chicago, completing a year of pediatric residency followed by two years of pediatric cardiology.
A MIDWEST PALESTINIAN PEDIATRICIAN
After completing his residencies in Chicago, Dr. Freij set up practice in Taylorville, Illinois, a small town 200 miles south of Chicago. He became the county’s only pediatrician, caring for generations of babies and children over the next 42 years. “I loved it,” he said. “Babies are so innocent and dependent. They are the essence of humanity.”
Dr. Freij credits his father, Bishara, with shaping his values and approach to work. He taught his children to be respectful and honest in whatever job they did. “My father was a Bible-reading Christian. His philosophy was simple: live and let live. He instilled his approach to life in all of us.”
As a pediatrician, Dr. Freij lived out the values his father had taught him. “My job is to do the best I can for every child, no matter their social background,” he said. “In my waiting room, the banker’s son and the mayor’s son sat beside the poorest kids in the town. My nurses knew I didn’t discriminate. Everybody is the same. You’re my patient. I take care of you.”
Dr. Freij retired from his practice in 2017 and moved to Maryland in 2018 to be closer to his children and grandchildren.
I ALWAYS LOVED GLASS
Dr. Freij had always been drawn to the beauty of glass. As a boy in Jerusalem, he kept a 700-piece marble collection and admired the stained glass windows in local churches. Years later, while living in Taylorville, he took a six-week stained glass course after work. One of his first creations was a window made of cobalt blue and clear glass.
After learning about our November 2023 fundraiser in support of medical aid for Gaza during the ongoing genocide, Maysoun Freij asked if we would be interested in a donation of her father’s stained glass pieces. Dr. Freij arrived with a treasure trove of his artwork. His pieces sold out quickly and became the fundraisers’ bestsellers.
Dr. Freij’s Palestinian-themed stained glass pieces now hang in the windows of homes and businesses, on Christmas trees, in cars and from key chains in the DC metropolitan area and beyond. Many are worn proudly as pins and necklaces, small declarations of solidarity with Palestine. I jokingly told Dr. Freij that the well-dressed Washingtonians would be wearing his stained glass art along with a keffiyeh!
I asked whether he might create poppies—a symbolic flower of Palestine. Dr. Freij wistfully recalled, “In the springtime, the hills of Jerusalem were covered in wildflowers.” Supporting Palestinians with his stained glass art—or what he modestly calls “his hobby”—has made him feel close to Palestine again. “I am 100 percent Palestinian, through and through, min al-Quds (from the Holy City), and I am proud to be Palestinian!”
Rosemarie M. Esber, Ph.D., is the author of Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians (Arabicus 2009). Her second book, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Palestinians, is forthcoming.
