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January 6, 2009

Fund raises money for gentiles who sheltered Jews during Holocaust

by Jeff Diamant
Religion News Service

NEW YORK ― Stanlee Stahl, a feisty tornado of a woman with piercing blue eyes and a strong dislike for the word “no,” is at this moment trying to overcome the innumerable obstacles of international phone service to convey a message to a man in Serbia.
   
“I understand that. I understand that,” she shouts into the phone in her 19th-floor Manhattan office that looks out on the Hudson River. “I understand. I will have to call Western Union, but Peter, it’s not going to happen probably until Friday. I have no control over Western Union. I will do my best. You will get the money.”
   
Stahl persists because she is trying to transfer money to a married couple in Belgrade who helped hide Jews from Nazis 64 years ago. The couple do not speak English, and Stahl is using their son’s friend, who does, as an intermediary.
   
She is executive vice president of a unique charitable organization called the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which gives money to needy non-Jews around the world who, more than six decades ago, helped protect Jews during the Holocaust.
   
The job has placed her on a historic mission, says Stahl, who is Jewish and whose uncle, an American serviceman, died in the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944.
   
“The mission resonates,” said Stahl, a longtime resident of South Orange, NJ. “It’s more than a job. I’m not working. This is passion. There’s not a day when I get up where I don’t want to go to work.”
   
No one doubts Stahl’s passion. At 63, she works 12-hour days, not including her commute time. Day to day, she is the leading force at the Manhattan-based foundation, a mini-welfare service that provides regular stipends, mailed three or four times a year, to 1,150 poor gentiles around the world who were recognized by Israel as having placed their lives ― and their families’ lives ― at great risk by shielding Jews from Nazis.
   
“The Jewish community does not forget,” Stahl said. “Our mission is, we’re repaying a debt of gratitude. Most of our donors are not (Holocaust) survivors. They were born in America and realize we need to say thank you.”
   
Stahl knows the stories of hundreds of rescuers ― all of them incredible, she says: A Nazi’s wife in Berlin who hid Jews in defiance of her husband. An Olympic rower in Denmark who rowed Jews in a canoe to neutral Sweden. A male non-Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz who escaped with a Jewish woman he loved.
   
Her detailed recountings are so enthusiastic it sounds as if she were there 65 years ago, or as if she’s bragging about a favorite aunt or uncle. The rescuers hid Jews in basements, barns and boats, or helped smooth the path to escape in other ways.
   
Jerzy Bielecki, a Pole, helped Cyla Cubulska, a Polish Jewish woman he loved deeply, escape from Auschwitz. Knud Christiansen, the Dane Olympic rower, not only secured the release of Jewish friends from German occupiers, but also hid Jews in his home and, later, rowed hundreds across the Oresund, the body of water separating Denmark and Sweden. He now lives in Manhattan.
   
His daughter said the work of Stahl and her foundation have been critical to her father.
   
“We love her. The things she did for our father have made all the difference,” said Marianne Marstrand.
   
Besides a stipend, the foundation also arranged for Christiansen, who has lived in a small apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to be given a lifetime membership to the nearby Jewish Community Center, where, among other things, he can use the rowing machine. “This was the one wish he had,” said Marstrand.
        
Since 1963, Israeli law has recognized non-Jewish Holocaust rescuers with the title “Righteous among the Nations,” bestowed by the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.
   
The authority, better known to Jews as Yad Vashem, gives recipients a medal and certificate of honor, and if they live in Israel, as fewer than three dozen do, they receive a government pension.
   
The idea of actually paying stipends to the Righteous among the Nations originated with a California rabbi named Harold Schulweis, who first shopped it around in the 1960s. The following decade he found a backer, the Anti-Defamation League, under which the organization was called the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers.
   
After an amicable split in 1996, the foundation took on its current name, and Stahl, who began working for the organization in 1992, was named executive vice president. “It became a cause, a personal cause, and not just an employment vocation,” Schulweis said of Stahl, in an interview from Encino, CA, where he is rabbi of Temple Valley Beth Shalom.
       
At its height, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous helped 1,750 people in 30 countries. But the war ended 63 years ago and, like Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans, the rescuers are dying. There are now about 1,179 in 25 countries receiving the foundation’s stipends. Most stipends are $100 or $150 a month, depending on the country.
    
The foundation says it sends about $1.3 million to rescuers around the world each year. It is funded through private donations.
   
“Some people think, ‘Oh, you're giving only $100 a month? That's very little. That doesn't do anything.’ The reality is, when you look at the pensions for these rescuers, mostly in Eastern European countries, what we are giving makes a difference. I can show you a pension statement from Albania that's $99 a month, and then we give her $100 a month.”
   
The main mission of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous will expire when its last heroes expire, probably in about 25 years. But Stahl has built an educational archive about rescuers that she hopes will live on, a component she says is usually dwarfed by other information about the Holocaust, if not ignored entirely.
   
“This is, in many respects, a silent chapter” in the annals of Holocaust history, she said.
   
“Most people don’t think about rescuers during the Holocaust. Most people think about the people who perished. And you always need to remember the 6 million and the millions of others of non-Jews who perished, but there were those quiet heroes, and they had to be quiet because if they told people they were saving Jews, they would be denounced. They and the Jews would be killed.”
    
Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, NJ.