Eli Zborowski, 86; survivor fought to keep memory of Holocaust alive
NEW YORK — Eli Zborowski, a survivor of the Holocaust who made it his mission to ensure that it would never be forgotten, founded a US organization to support Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, and raised more than $100 million for it, died Sept. 10 in Queens. He was 86.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said Rochel Berman, who with her husband, George, published a biography of Mr. Zborowski last year.
Mr. Zborowski started the American and International Societies for Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial, in 1953, a year after he arrived in the United States as a penniless Jewish immigrant from Poland with little knowledge of English. He was the founding and only chairman of what was — in fact, if not in name — a single organization. Under him, it grew to 50,000 members.
Mr. Zborowski served on the board of the memorial and helped come up with the idea, which it adopted, of remembering communities, not just individuals, lost in the Holocaust.
He also founded the American Federation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates, and Nazi Victims, and was one of six survivors — and the only American — to greet Pope John Paul II during his visit to Yad Vashem in 2000.
Mr. Zborowski and his wife, Diana, established a chair in Holocaust studies at Yeshiva University in Manhattan in 1976, the first such professorship in the country. He started a newspaper on Holocaust issues, Martyrdom and Resistance, which has been published for 37 years.
Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan appointed him to the US Holocaust Memorial Council, and Mayor Edward I. Koch named him to the New York Permanent Commission on the Holocaust. Among many campaigns, he fought for compensation for victims of Nazi medical experiments and for the return of property seized from Jews during World War II.
He also started a program for younger members of the American Society for Yad Vashem to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.
Eliezer Zborowski was born in Zarki, Poland, on Sept. 20, 1925. In 1939, at the war’s beginning, Nazis confined his family in a ghetto they created for Jews. Taking advantage of his fair complexion and forged papers identifying him as a gentile, Mr. Zborowski acted as a courier between the ghetto and other Poles opposed to the occupiers.
When the Nazis’ program to exterminate Jews and other minorities began in 1942, the ghettos were liquidated. Mr. Zborowski and his family were hidden by Christians in an attic and a chicken coop. His father was separated from the family and was shot dead while trying to escape a German work camp.
After the war, Mr. Zborowski helped smuggle Jews to British-ruled Palestine.
Mr. Zborowski had planned to settle in Israel himself, but he had met and married Diana Wilf, whose asthma was aggravated by the Middle Eastern climate. They came to New York in 1952, and Mr. Zborowski imported camera parts from Germany, then began trading in currency.
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