Category Archives: Archives

Archived material regarding HSF-USA’s activities over the past two decades.

Shira Stoll - SIAdvance

Survivor Stories We Remember on Yom HaShoah

On this solemn day of Yom HaShoah we encourage everyone to spend some time with the first-person testimony of Holocaust survivors. It is important to hear many survivors’ stories to appreciate the gravity and horror of the Shoah.

Renée Firestone is a distinguished fashion designer and survivor. She began sharing testimony about the devastation her family experienced in the Shoah after a Jewish cemetery and synagogue in her home city of Los Angeles, CA were vandalized with swastikas. Her mother and sister were both murdered at Auschwitz.

Leo Rechter was the founding Secretary of the HSF-USA, and served as the long-time President of the National Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (NAHOS). He passed away in February.

Holocaust survivor Margot Capell, 100 years old, spoke to the Staten Island Advance about her family’s experience under the Nazi Holocaust for their “Stories We Can’t Forget” series. Her parents were killed in a concentration camp in Poland.

Thank you to the community who visits this page for your support and encouragement as we pursue justice and dignity for survivors.

"With all those promises, I applied to ICHEIC. They said they could not find my father’s name. They sent a check for $1000 as a 'humanitarian payment.' ICHEIC sent out 34,000 of those $1000 checks. Survivors deeply resent the idea of a 'humanitarian payment' instead of the funds we know our parents set aside in case of a disaster. The whole thing was an insult to survivors, and it still is."

Full Senate Judiciary Hearing from September 17, 2019

Senate Judiciary Committee Examines Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Holocaust-era insurance claims. The committee was considering whether legislation might be necessary to process Holocaust-era insurance claims that were not adequately addressed by the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC…
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
September 17, 2019
Panel:
Mr. Baird Webel
Specialist in Financial Economics
Congressional Research Service
Washington , DC
Mr. David Mermelstein
President
Holocaust Survivors of Miami-Dade County, FL
Miami , FL
Ms. Anna B. Rubin
Director
Holocaust Claims Processing Office
New York State Department of Financial Services
New York, NY
Mr. Samuel Dubbin
Counsel to
Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA
Coral Gables , FL
Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat
Former U.S. Ambassador and Special Advisor on Holocaust Issues
United States Department of State
Washington , DC
The Red Cross administered archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany finally opened to the public in 2007, allowing evidence of Nazi death camps and government and corporate complicity in genocide to be seen after they were shamefully suppressed for 60 years.

Opening of Bad Arolsen Archives

This page collects journalism and testimony documenting our efforts to finally open public access to the 50 million pages of Nazi Germany archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany.

Holocaust survivors worked in 2006 and 2007 to publicize these documents, which reveal government and corporate complicity in the genocide, and had been suppressed for 60 years.

This transcript of remarks by Hon. Alcee L. Hastings of Florida from December 27, 2006 session of the US House of Representatives Cmte. on Foreign Affairs Europe subcommittee relates concern over the delayed release of the Bad Arolsen Holocaust Archives.

HSF-USA President David Schaecter’s testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe regarding the opening of Bad Arolsen Nazi archives on March 28, 2007.

Leo Rechter’s testimony to the Subcommittee on Europe on March 28, 2007.

This Yom Hashoah Editorial by HSF-USA counsel Samuel J. Dubbin on Yom Hashoah 2007, in the Miami Herald, related how the overdue opening of Bad Arolsen archives relates to survivors’ contemporary needs and the broader systemic failure to hold Holocaust profiteers to justice.