Bookstore Glossary Library Links News Publications Timeline Virtual Israel Experience
Anti-Semitism Biography History Holocaust Israel Israel Education Myths & Facts Politics Religion Travel US & Israel Vital Stats Women
donate subscribe Contact About Home

GIs Remember - Eugene Lipman

Rabbi Eugene Lipman, from Pittsburgh, volunteered as an Army chaplain in 1944, and reached Europe shortly before the end of World War II. Initially, he was assigned to the Rhineland, where lie met Jewish survivors returning from Buchenwald. He organized Jewish soldiers to provide food and clothing to the survivors, mid worked to help secure housing for them.

"Ill June 1945, my unit was transferred to Czechoslovakia. I worked with the Russians to transfer the last survivors remaining in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp to the U.S. Occupation Zone. I helped to organize transports of survivors from Prague through Pilsen to Austria and Italy on their way to Palestine (Israel). This work continued after my transfer to Regensburg in many displaced persons camps in North Bavaria.

Ill mid- 1946, 1 became a civilian, spent some months in the United States, then returned to Germany as liaison between the U.S. Army and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the formal designation of the Haganah in Germany." (Haganah was the main fighting force in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.)

GIs RememberNational Museum of American Jewish Military History