President Reagan has named Harvey Meyerhoff, a Baltimore developer and philanthropist, as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which is planning and raising funds for a Holocaust Museum to be built here near the Mall.
Meyerhoff succeeds Elie Wiesel, the novelist and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Wiesel resigned in December saying that the Council now needs “a chairman with expertise in management, administration, finance and construction.”
Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, remains on the 65-member Council of which he was chairman since it was created by Congress in 1979.
Appointed to the Council last fall, Meyerhoff was chairman of the Council’s Museum Development Committee. He is a former chairman of the Associated Jewish Charities and Welfare Fund of Baltimore.
In his letter of resignation, Wiesel did not mention the incident in April 1985, when, as he was receiving the Congressional Medal of Achievement from Reagan at a White House ceremony, he appealed directly to Reagan to cancel his visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg where members of the SS were buried.
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