Sam E. Bloch (1924–2018)

Sam E. Bloch was born Shmayahu Eliahu Bloch to a Jewish family in Iwie (or Ivie), Poland. His father Joshua Bloch was one of the founders of the modern Hebrew language movement. As a teenager, Sam studied at the Tarbut School in Vilnius, Lithuania, and was at home on a school break when World War II broke out. In 1941, after his father was murdered in a mass killing by the Nazis, Mr. Bloch, aged 16, had to use all his wits and guile to survive. With his mother Sonia and 5-year-old brother Martin, he escaped the Jewish ghetto just before it was liquidated, and sought temporary shelter with a family of Polish farmers. They later fled into the countryside, hiding in the woods, where they met the Bielski Partisans, an armed unit of Jewish resistance fighters led by three brothers. The Bielski group hid hundreds of people in makeshift camps deep in the Naliboki forest. Mr. Bloch engaged in sabotage, fought against the Nazis and their collaborators, and helped rescue other Jews. In 1945, the Bloch family ended up in a displaced-persons camp near the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany with about 50,000 other Holocaust survivors. Mr. Bloch became the youngest member of the camp's governing committee. While there, he met Lilly Czaban; the couple married in 1949 and immigrated to the USA, settling in New York City. Mr. Bloch took an entry-level job with the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency. He wound up working for the organization for more than 50 years, eventually becoming director of publications. He edited and published some 30 volumes of Holocaust history, memoirs, and poetry in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish editions. In 1965, on the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Mr. Bloch organized one of the first major reunions of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. He compiled and edited a book called Holocaust and Rebirth: Bergen-Belsen 1945-1965, that became a key early resource about survivors and their later lives. Mr. Bloch was a founding member of the International Society for Yad Vashem, the leading Holocaust remembrance organization in Israel, and helped distribute financial aid to needy survivors worldwide. In the 1980s, he was a principal organizer of more survivors' reunions. He served on a commission to help create New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. He served on committees that oversaw the early development of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and helped create museums dedicated to the Holocaust and Jewish history at Bergen-Belsen and in Israel. He was fluent in six languages, and spoke at gatherings around the world.