October 24: Gathering the Survivors

Benjamin Meed (Miedzyrzecki), who helped to found the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1981 and led the organization until 2006, died on this date in that year at age 88. Meed was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who was recruited to the underground by his future wife, Vladka (Fayge) Peltel, with whom he lived on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw while helping to smuggle out ghetto fighters and other Jews. In 1966 they founded the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization; fifteen years later, they helped convene the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which attracted more than 10,000 survivors to Israel. Michael Berenbaum of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which Meed helped to found and advise, described Meed as “ward leader of the survivors . . . the one survivor who really had a constituency and could produce thousands, and tens of thousands, of survivors to events, to meetings, to gatherings, to reunions.” The Meeds also funded the Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, a searchable database at the Washington museum that has reunited hundreds of survivors.

“We now pass our torch onto our children and to their children and beyond. The torch of memory is precious. It can illuminate the world.” —Benjamin Meed