Among the Holocaust survivors in Austria after World War II were hundreds of Jewish children who came out of the Mauthausen and Ehensee concentration camps or who had been hidden in Christian homes. Many of them were over 18 years old but had gone into the camps at the age of 12 and had thus not had any high school education.
The American Joint Distribution Committee and the Austrian Education Ministry cooperated in the 1945-46 period to provide both material help and education for these youngsters, according to Dr. Leon Zelman, who was president of the Union of Jewish Students in Austria at the time.
Zelman, who is a travel agent and editor of a newspaper in Vienna, the “Jewish Echo,” told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview here that a school was created to provide these youngsters with an education and enable them to graduate high school. Most of the youngsters had lost their parents and they were housed in either the school’s building or with Christian families in Vienna. The program also provided psychological help, food, clothing, recreation and a camp for holidays.
Some 1000 Jewish young people went through the school and some 700 of them later graduated from universities, Zelman said. He said that some 300-400 live in the United States some 200 in Israel and about 60 in Austria, most of them holding high positions as physicians, engineers and in other professions.
Now, some 30 years later, Zelman said, a reunion of these students is planned in Vienna Aug. 20-27. The reunion will be held as part of the Congress of Jewish University Men and Former Members of the Union of Jewish Students of America, headed by Zelman.
The Congress will open with a ceremony at the Vienna City Temple which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Zelman said that one purpose of the Congress will be to create an International Academic Association which will not only provide material help to young Jews but remind them of the past which the graduates of the Vienna program lived through.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
