Funeral services will be held here tomorrow for Alex Shlomo Dekel, a social worker with HIAS who helped to place immigrating Syrian and Soviet Jews in New York City. Dekel, who was 51, died at his home yesterday after suffering a heart attack.
An Auschwitz camp survivor, Dekel immigrated to Israel in 1949 to join his wife and stepchildren. He came to the United States in 1963, returned to Israel for several years and then returned to the U.S. in 1967 to work for the Israel Defense Mission and then for HIAS.
Dekel was a consultant on Israel and in the Holocaust to the major radio and television networks and for both Time and Life magazines. At the time of his death, he was completing a book, “The Valley of Dry Bones,” on Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who was infamous for his experiments on inmates. Dekel himself was about to undergo surgery at Mengele’s clinic when the death camps were liberated by allied forces.
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.
