ARDNER - The first thing Hadassah Lieberman's mother, Ella Freilich, says about her daughter is a surprise, a comment from left field. But it proves to be a telling tidbit.
''She would have been an actress, if her father would permit her,'' said Freilich about her daughter, the wife of Al Gore's running mate, Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Hadassah Lieberman, then, is a woman at home in the limelight, a woman complemented by an audience. She is also a woman of family and tradition, a good girl from a small community where the social woes of the 1960s seemed far away.
Even though her strict immigrant parents and her observant Jewish upbringing made her different from her peers in Gardner, she never rebelled. Without any sign of angst, for example, she gave up the theater and found other areas of interest, like government and political science.
Born half a world away to Holocaust survivors, then reared in Central Massachusetts (and educated at Boston University and Northeastern), Lieberman is very much a product of both those origins, according to friends and Lieberman herself. Those who know her well say she is strong and passionate, but also unassuming and gentle.
''She's got a lot of class and a lot of elegance,'' said Pattie Gallant Mitchell, her best friend from high school. She's not afraid to speak her mind, but she's also loving and soft in a lot of ways.''
What separates Lieberman, 52, from many political wives is her immigrant background and the horrors her Czech family experienced in the Holocaust. Her mother survived the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps and her father escaped from a Nazi slave labor camp. In an interview yesterday, Lieberman said that her parents have shaped both her personality and the way she has lived her life.
''There's a certain strength to the way you're raised,'' said Lieberman yesterday, after a campaign appearance with Tipper Gore in front of 400 supporters at the Elm Street School, which used to be Gardner High when Lieberman was a teen here. ''A certain, almost, I don't want to use the world guilt - that's not the right word - but you do feel a pressure that you have to make it, you have to move forward for all the people that didn't make it.''
Before the war, Samuel Freilich was a scholar, rabbi, and lawyer. Drafted into a Jewish slave-labor battalion in Hungary after the German occupation, he was forced to march to the Russian front with 60,000 other Jews. He escaped in 1945, helped resettle Jews, and set up schools for orphans. Ella Freilich survived the death camps, but the rest of her family did not.
Just months after the Soviet Union took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Ella and Samuel, married a year, fled with Hadassah, then an infant. In New York, the rabbi taught himself English, and Lieberman said yesterday she can still remember him practicing with language tapes. Then he looked for a posting in a synagogue.
''Gardner seemed like a nice town,'' said Lieberman.
A nice town it proved to be. Freilich became a leader of the small, but vibrant, Jewish community as rabbi of Congregation Ohave Shalom.
Hadassah, whose name means Esther in Hebrew, spoke only Yiddish, which she still understands, until she started kindergarten. Her Jewish upbringing did place limits on the popular, pretty girl. She couldn't drive a car or attend a dance on Shabbat - Friday night and Saturday. Nor could she eat at friends' homes, since her family kept kosher. She never complained, though, friends say, but instead enjoyed relaxing, reading and taking walks on the sabbath.
Until Hadassah came along, school dances and proms had always been on Friday nights. Her close-knit group of friends petitioned the school and got the prom changed to a Saturday night, so Hadassah, fun-loving and a gentle tease, could go.
Lieberman was a drama star as well as a good debater. The school scheduled all plays to meet her needs, Thursday night, Saturday night and Sunday. Yesterday, Lieberman joked about her days dressing up as a football and doing monologues during half-time, or mortifying her brother with a Joan of Arc routine.
She loved reading, especially Shakespeare and poetry, said Mitchell, who walked with her to and from school every day. The girls gossiped about boys, but Hadassah never had a steady boyfriend. Her father, very strict, did not want her to date a young man who wasn't Jewish.
''Of course she was beautiful and boys were crazy about her,'' Mitchell said. ''But the few who were Jewish were intimidated because her father was the rabbi.''
While the Holocaust was seared in their souls, the Frielichs were also very patriotic, grateful to the United States for the freedom it represented. Mitchell remembers sobbing with Lieberman when the two heard the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
After high school, Lieberman spent two years at Stern College, the women's branch of Yeshiva University in New York. She then transferred to Boston University, she said, for the theater scene, and because she wanted to focus on political studies, especially China and Maoism. She earned a degree in government in 1970, the same year as Tipper Gore and the year BU held no commencement because of the turmoil of the Vietnam era. Lieberman went on to earn a master's degree in political science at Northeastern.
Lieberman's first marriage was to a rabbi, Gordon Tucker. They had a son, Ethan, now 24, who is married and studying to be a rabbi. She divorced in 1981, then married Joseph Lieberman in 1983. They have a daughter, Hana, 13, who attended the rally yesterday along with Ella Freilich and her brother, Ary Freilich, a real estate investor in New Jersey. Samuel Freilich died several years ago.
''I've never seen Hadassah as happy as she is since she's been married to Joe,'' Mitchell said. ''She was fairly fine in a traditional marriage, but she was just cut out for this. She never thought she could be so complete.''
In recent years, Lieberman has done public relations work and health care consulting, but has made raising her daughter a priority. She has also been active in charitable causes, serving on the board of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and undertaking several ventures to promote women's health. She is helping a Jerusalem hospital, for example, tackle heart disease among Arab and Jewish women.
''She's extremely committed to making the world a better place,'' said US Assistant Surgeon General Susan Blumenthal, a friend. ''Being a Holocaust survivors' daughter has given her that sense of social justice.''
Religion plays a major role in Joe and Hadassah's life. They maintain Shabbat, and send Hana to an Orthodox school. Many have wondered how such strict observance will affect their campaigning, and yesterday was a test. It happened to be an important Jewish holiday, Tishah b'Ab, when observant Jews fast. But Lieberman would not reveal whether she was fasting.
''It's a traditional fast today. Some people do fast, and that's all I can tell you right now,'' said Lieberman.
