At the Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors: from All over the U.S. Survivors Gathered to Recall

They could be your average group of tourists to the nation’s capital with their cameras, raincoats, and I.D. badges except that those badges said “American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors,” and the hometowns listed were Lodz, Kovno, Warsaw, and other European towns. The I.D. cards also bore the names of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Birkenau and other Nazi death camps.

The 15,000 survivors and their relatives who assembled to attend this conference here represented “an unparalleled number of participants not only of survivors but in the history of the American Jewish community,” according to a Gathering official.

To help house the delegates, over 400 people in the area offered their homes, including non-Jews, many of whom sent flowers. Hundreds of volunteers, both Jewish and Christian, organized by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Washington, helped with many tasks. At noon today, the closing day, Washington churches of all faiths rang their bells as a token of their solidarity.

One of the primary tasks of the Gathering at Washington’s huge new downtown convention center was the process of matching survivors to long-lost friends and relatives. A computer containing names of 35,000 Holocaust survivors was set up to facilitate this task. The first two people to be reunited were Ellie Oking from Philadelphia with his relative Sidney Bachner of California. Soon there were additional reunions; most, however, did not locate the loved ones they sought, lost so long ago.

MULTI-FACETED ACTIVITIES

Throughout the three days, the crowds attended plenary sessions and workshops, visited the numerous booths of the major American Jewish organizations and other institutions such as Yad Vashem, and just enjoyed mingling with one another.

One section of the huge center which attracted many visitors was the exhibit, “The Artist as Witness: Art By Survivors.” In many different media the artists, Holocaust survivors, had chronicled their heart-searing memories of the doomed ghettos and the indignities, punishments and death in the camps of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Many of the conferees also examined the scale model of the future United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to be established in two old U.S. government buildings near the Washington Monument on the mall. The transfer of these buildings which resemble concentration camp barracks took place today when Vice President George Bush presented the keys to the famed writer, Elie Weisel, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Another feature of the Gathering was the continuous showing of several films about the Holocaust and taking of videotape testimonies for the Yale University Documentary and Research Center.

The second day of the gathering was devoted to discussing the role of children of survivors, the second generation. These young people attended in large numbers and many brought their children to include the third generation. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked some delegates how they felt about attending the conference and the inclusion of the second generation.

Esther and Abe Feigenbaum of Chattanooga, Tenn, who both lived in the Kovno Ghetto, expressed a positive opinion about the value of the huge reunion of survivors. Mr. Feigenbaum said, “My feeling is that the second generations, children of Holocaust survivors, must assume the responsibilities of making sure it is not forgotten for future generations, for posterity.”

Helen Milich of Flushing, N.Y., who was sent from Lodz, Poland, to several internment camps, was liberated when she was 19 years old and came to the U.S. in 1949. She felt somewhat sadly that the Gathering “was almost like reliving those days … there are no words.” Although she is proud of the life she made for herself in the U.S. and her fine family, she said. “There is still so much heartache, so much turmoil inside you because you know that your life would have been entirely different.”

One of the two-generation families attending, that of Esther Elbaum of Whitestone, N.Y., herself a survivor and widow of a survivor, also used the Gathering for a family reunion. Her three children and daughter-in-law came from both east and west coasts.

Her son, Stanley Elbaum of Woodland Hills, Ca., said, “The children of survivors have to carry on and continuously promote the fact that the Holocaust will never die. The only way that it will live on is by the children of the Holocaust survivors being involved in this type of event … Next year the children of Holocaust survivors are staging a conference themselves.”

‘A HAPPENING’

Like most conferences, the Gathering was a mixture of formal speeches and informal discussions, asking questions and pondering the right future policies — but it will be many a day before Washington, a city which hosts hundreds of conventions each year, sees a conference as unique, emotional, and appreciated as the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, It could be truly described as “a happening.”