AP Holocaust activist Benjamin Meed dies

NEW YORK - Benjamin Meed, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and went on to help reunite survivors and establish a national Holocaust registry and two museums, has died. He was 88.

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Meed and his wife, Vladka Meed, also established a national registry in 1981 to document the lives of Jewish survivors who came to the United States after World War II, and help them search for relatives and friends.

Meed helped create two major Holocaust museums, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1983 and the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York in 1997. The registry is housed in the Washington museum.

A Warsaw Ghetto survivor and slave laborer during World War II, Meed was born Benjamin Miedzyrzecki in Warsaw in 1918.

He joined the underground in the months leading up to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the first armed civilian rebellion against the German occupiers in Europe. The roughly 1,000 Jewish fighters held out for nearly four weeks.

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