JSSA Establishes Herman Taube Fund to Support Holocaust Survivors

The following announcement was submitted by JSSA (Jewish Social Service Agency):

To pay tribute to Herman Taube, author, journalist, Holocaust survivor and supporter of JSSA’s Holocaust survivor program on the occasion of his 95^th birthday, JSSA has established the Herman Taube Fund for Holocaust Survivors. To date, the Herman Taube Fund has raised $10,000. JSSA’s Holocaust survivor program provides basic safety net services including personal care, homemaker, health, social services and financial assistance for the community’s neediest survivors. Many of those who turn to JSSA for help are rapidly aging and growing increasingly frail. They rely on the agency’s services to remain independent. Due to the rising costs of managing this program and the decrease in traditional funding sources, JSSA depends on support from the community in order to remain true to the agency’s mission of never turning a Holocaust survivor in need away.

Herman Taube is the author of more than 20 novels and books of poetry and has worked as writer and journalist for more than 60 years. He and his wife Susan are founding members of Club Shalom – Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Washington, and Mr. Taube serves on the JSSA Holocaust Survivors Advisory Committee.

Herman Taube was born in Lodz, Poland in 1918. He became a nurse in 1937 and was called for duty as a medic in the Polish Army in August 1939. At the start of WWII when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he was sent to Siberia in the Soviet Union where gulags (Soviet work camps) were located.

Upon his release, Mr. Taube went to Uzbekistan to join the Second Polish Army and worked as a medic in Uzbekistan for two years until his unit moved to the eastern front. He worked in the Majdanek hospital, former Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp, caring for the liberated prisoners who were left behind when the retreating Nazis liquidated the camp. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Taube was sent to work in a hospital in Pomerania where he worked until the end of the war. After the war, he married Susan Strauss, also a Holocaust survivor. The couple immigrated to the United States in 1947.

Donations to the Herman Taube fund can be made online at: www.jssa.org/supportsurvivors or by calling 301-610-8370.