The organizers of the Gathering of American Jewish Holocaust Survivors believe that some 15,000 survivors and their children expected in Washington for the April 11-14 event will come together like one large “mishpocha.”
“It will not take more than one day before everyone will get to know each other,” according to Benjamin Meed, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, who is president of the Gathering. The survivors will want to talk to each other, to touch, to embrace, he said.
Meed said as proof of this desire to get together is that by mid-January there were 5,000 paid registrants “and we hadn’t even told them what the program would be.”
The program sketched by Meed and Sam Bloch, a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, who is a senior vice president of the Gathering, to a small group of reporters recently, will cover events in all parts of the nation’s capital. Much of it will be in coordination with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council which is in the process of establishing a Holocaust memorial-museum near the Washington Monument.
But the ceremonies will take second place to the meeting of survivors, many of whom will be reunited with people they have not seen since the dark days of World War II. This is what happened at the first World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem in June 1981. Some 3,000 attended the Jerusalem event from the United States. Most of them will be in Washington in April. But the event here will allow even more people from the U.S. and Canada to participate.
A ‘SURVIVOR’S VILLAGE’ WILL BE SET UP
To help them meet each other, Washington’s new Convention Center will become a ‘Survivor’s Village.” Meed said a list containing some 35,000 survivors names has already been compiled and participants will be able to search for relatives or friends. The “village” will have a kosher cafeteria and seats will be provided all around the building so people can sit and talk.
Meed said the Gathering has two other aspects besides the first ever meeting of survivors in the U.S. First, it will bear witness to the Holocaust and commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Bloch said that in view of the recent charges that the Holocaust did not happen, there is need to describe it again to a new generation. “Don’t tell us it didn’t happen,” he said. “We were there.”
JEWS DID RESIST THE NAZIS
But beyond this, he said there is need to put to rest the belief that the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust did so without resisting. He said not only were there other uprising in addition to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but there was also spiritual resistance. He said there were many types of defiance of the Nazis which were also forms of resistance.
“Jews died with dignity and survived with dignity,” Bloch said. But he said the Gathering will also be a “celebration of life and of the Miracle of Survival.”
On this the third important role of the Gathering will be based. Meed said this will be a show of appreciation to the United States for taking the survivors in after the war and allowing them to rebuild their lives.
WILL NOT IGNORE FAILURE OF U.S. AID
Bloch noted that the Gathering will not ignore the failure of the U.S. to do more to help European Jews before World War II. “But we owe a debt to America,” he said. He noted that the U.S. led the fight to defeat Nazi Germany and U.S. soldiers liberated death camps.
Both he and Meed stressed how proud they were that survivors were able to rebuild their lives in this country, many of them prospering. They also talked proudly of the lives their children and grandchildren have. The children of survivors will play an important part in the Gathering.
Meanwhile, the organizers are busy preparing for the event. Survivors pay their own way to Washington, but Meed noted that some communities are helping survivors with the arrangements.
Locally, the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington plans to have 500 volunteers work on the Gathering and is seeking 1,000 homes where survivors may be put up during their stay in Washington. The event itself should be one of the most exciting even for this city. “We have a unique story to tell,” Bloch said.
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