Private collection of Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner (Sign. P 68)

Abraham Judah Klausner (1915-2007) was an American Rabbi and United States Army captain and chaplain. He became a “father figure” for the more than 30,000 emaciated survivors liberated at the Dachau Concentration Camp, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Munich. He arrived with his unit in May 1945, three weeks after the camp had been liberated on April 29, 1945. Rabbi Klausner worked tirelessly to find the 32,000 survivors bedding, food (including kosher provisions), clothing, dictionaries, and religious objects. He also put together lists of survivors at Dachau (called Sharit Ha-Platah "surviving remnant") and eventually published six volumes that he distributed worldwide. He traveled throughout Bavaria looking for survivors in order to help to reunite families and set up a center for survivors at the "Deutsches Museum" in Munich. Klausner and Zalman Grinberg, a survivor of Dachau, established the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in Bavaria on July 1, 1945. The purpose of the Central Committee was to champion the interests of the Jewish DPs and draw international attention to their plight. He corresponded extensively with American and British Jewish organizations, the U.S. military and other chaplains about trying to receive aid for the Jews living in the former Dachau concentration camp and the greater Bavarian area.

When Earl G. Harrison was commissioned in 1945 by President Truman to conduct an inspection tour of camps holding DPs in Europe, Klausner met with him in Dachau and served as his guide during visits to the camps at Landsberg, Feldafing, St. Ottilien, and elsewhere. Klausner made sure that Harrison became acquainted with representatives of the Jewish DPs and observed first-hand the prevailing living conditions. Harrison’s report to President Truman maintained that the living conditions of the DPs under the supervision of the United States’ Army were not much better than they had been under the Nazis. On orders from General Eisenhower, conditions soon improved in the camps.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, Klausner left the military and began recruiting pilots and nurses for the Israeli Defense Forces in the United States. He became Provost of the Hebrew Union College in 1948, was the Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel in Boston from 1949 to 1953, and earned a Doctorate in Divinity at Harvard University. He was the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Yonkers from 1954 until his retirement in 1989, after which he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rabbi Klausner wrote several books, including his memoir, A Letter to My Children: From the Edge of the Holocaust (2002). He was also featured in the 1997 Academy Award-winning documentary The Long Way Home, about Holocaust survivors in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps. (Source: CAHJP)