A Charity Leader Helps People Who Fought the Holocaust
November 1, 2007 | Read Time: 5 minutes
When I explain my job at the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, people always ask the same question: “What? Why would a Jewish organization collect money for the gentiles?” The only people who don’t react that way are the ones who mishear me. They assume I said “the gentle.”
I’ve been executive vice president of the foundation for 15 years now. In short, we collect money
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for righteous gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The vast majority are Christian; a few are Muslim. We don’t look at it that way. They risked their lives to save Jewish people, and this is the least we can do to repay that debt.
Most of our 1,276 beneficiaries are concentrated in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and the rest of eastern Europe. Over all, we distribute around $1.3-million yearly to people in 26 countries, including 21 people in the United States. Most live on pitiful pensions, and the awards pay for food, clothing, fuel, and prescription drugs, which are ghastly expensive in eastern Europe. We’ve committed to providing for these people until they pass away, and, when they do, we help with a grant to defray funeral costs.
This work moves me because I grew up, in New Jersey, amid stories about family members who didn’t make it out of concentration camps. Other family members fought to liberate Europe during that time. In fact, I’m named after an uncle, Stanley, who died in the Battle of Rome in 1944, a year before I was born. (My parents didn’t tell me it was a boy’s name, though.)
I gained experience for this position — how to distribute goods and fight poverty — at my previous job, director of Extra Help, in New Jersey, which picks up leftover food from restaurants, corporate cafeterias, and caterers and delivers it to the poor. Before that, I worked for two decades at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Handy experience, since day-to-day I’m running a mini-Social Security system! Along the way, I came within weeks of earning my doctorate in health planning from New York University. Then, one day, someone stole my thesis — why, I don’t know — out of my car. I had to bow out with a master’s degree.
My most formative experiences came outside of school and work, though. During the early 1970s, just after college, I hitchhiked across Europe and North Africa, finally finding my way to Israel.
There I worked for American Red Magen David for Israel (the support arm in the United States of the Israeli Red Cross, which uses a red star of David, the “magen”). In Israel, I first heard about the movement to recognize the “righteous,” those who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust. The idea isn’t well known here, but Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust survivors’ authority in Jerusalem, officially recognizes these truly exceptional people: Of the 700 million people in Europe during World War II, Yad Vashem has recognized just 22,000 as righteous gentiles.
My job doesn’t take me back to Israel often, but I make four visits per year to clients’ homes in eastern Europe. It’s like visiting grandma four times a day, except with translators. And according to custom there, I always bring flowers. Many people live in premodern houses that lack indoor plumbing and electricity.
Of all the visits I’ve done, probably the most remarkable story was that of Preben Munch Nielson, who as a 17-year-old ferried 1,200 Jews to safety from his native Denmark to Sweden in a tiny rowboat. (You can see the boat on display in the U.S. Holocaust Museum, in Washington.) I brought Mr. Nielson to my son’s bar mitzvah in 1997, as a moral exemplar. I told my son, “If called upon, may you have the courage to do the right thing, too.”
Mr. Nielson passed away in October 2002. And as time passes, we know we will lose more and more rescuers, most of whom are already in their 80s or 90s. At our peak in 2003, the foundation served 1,750 people, meaning we’ve lost 500 in the past four years alone. In the future, therefore, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous will shift its focus to Holocaust education.
We currently have partnerships with 14 Holocaust museums and education centers, and we aim to develop a national cadre of teachers. To this end, we run institutes every summer at Columbia University to train 35 to 40 teachers, usually with a few each from Poland and Croatia. After the summer courses, they return to their communities to train other teachers. Every other summer, we also fly 15 teachers to Germany and Poland to further their Holocaust education.
We train our teachers in two ways. First, we ground them with an historical education, the A to Zed of Holocaust history. This grounding is crucial, because in my experience teachers don’t teach what they don’t know. Or if they do, they teach it badly.
We also stress moral education. Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis — who started the foundation as an arm of the Anti-Defamation League in 1986 — always knew this would be an important part of the foundation. “We have a double memory, of both evil and of righteousness,” he used to say. “We need to teach the evil. But we need to acknowledge the handful who did everything to save a Jew.”
In addition to direct training, we reach classrooms across the world with sets of posters, each of which portrays two rescuers and their outstanding character trait. Oskar Schindler, for instance, is under “Ingenuity.” So far, we’ve translated them into four languages, with more coming. The Croatian government has distributed a set to every secondary school in the country.
These posters give children recent examples of righteousness. I tell teachers we don’t need to look back to long-ago eras, when people fought wars with funny helmets on their heads, to find people who display moral courage. In fact, some of them are still with us, for a while at least.
