Some 5,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families are expected to meet here April 21 to 22 to participate in the Inaugural Assembly of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors at the Civic Center, an event which will coincide with the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
Survivors and their families, according to Benjamin Meed, president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, will also seek to evaluate the positive effects of the moral dimension of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.
“It will be a time of reunion and exchange of memories, a mixture of joy and sadness, anger and hope; and a reaffirming experience that participants will cherish and which will have a positive effect on the rest of their lives,” Meed told reporters at a news conference here.
‘TIME HAS TAKEN ITS TOLL’
“Time has taken its toll,” Meed continued. “More than 200,000 survivors most of them between the ages of 18 and 35 came to the United States after World War II when they emerged from the Nazi death camps. Perhaps half that many survivors are alive today.
“Many survivors see the American Gathering as the time when they can best bear witness en masse to the atrocities they experienced and the chance to search for loved ones who survived the war or for some word of the fate of those who did not.”
The gathering in Philadelphia follows the 1983 gathering of some 20,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families in Washington. In 1981, 5,000 survivors from 14 different countries met in Jerusalem for the first International Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
As in the past gatherings, the Civic Center will be transformed into a “survivors’ village” where participants can gather according to the cities of their birth and the camps of their incarceration to meet each other again.
Central to the survivors’ village will be a computer bank linked with the National Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors which now contains over 55,000 names. Survivors can use the computer system to search for friends or relatives and to learn of those who did not survive. The computer system aided in reuniting more than 600 people at the Washington Gathering two years ago. Among the scheduled events, there will be programs demonstrating solidarity with Israel and with oppressed Jews all over the world.
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