Benjamin Meed, 88, Who Was a Key Advocate for Holocaust Survivors, Dies
Benjamin Meed, a leading advocate for Jewish Holocaust survivors who in the decades after the war gathered them together by the tens of thousands, reuniting people with friends, neighbors and family members presumed to have been lost forever, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia after a long illness, his son, Steven, said.
A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Mr. Meed was at his death the president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, an organization he helped found in 1981. For decades, he was a driving force behind the large-scale reunions of survivors held every few years in Washington.
“Benjamin Meed was the chief organizer and, in the best sense of the term, ward leader of the survivors,” Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and the former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “He was 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.”
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The cause was pneumonia after a long illness, his son, Steven, said.
A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Mr. Meed was at his death the president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, an organization he helped found in 1981. For decades, he was a driving force behind the large-scale reunions of survivors held every few years in Washington.
“Benjamin Meed was the chief organizer and, in the best sense of the term, ward leader of the survivors,” Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and the former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “He was 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.”