Abraham Klausner, 92, Hailed as Protector of Living Holocaust Victims

The Santa Fe, N.M. Jewish community mourned the demise of one of their own following the death late last month of retired U.S. Army Chaplain Abraham Klausner. Klausner, the first Jewish chaplain to tend to the survivors of the Dachau concentration camp following its liberation in 1945, was 92.

Rabbi Berel Levertov, co-director of the Chabad Jewish Center in Santa Fe, where Klausner resided after his retirement, remembered the chaplain as a heroic figure who helped turn American attention to the plight of surviving Holocaust victims.

"General Eisenhower sent [an officer] to asses the situation in the camps. Others wanted to paint a rosy situation, but Klausner, in his words, shlepped him to all of the gloomy situations in the camps," explained Levertov. "Thus, the general penned a grim report of the situation and brought the issue of the survivors to the table of the President of the United States."

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According to Levertov, who, in keeping with Jewish law organized a round-the-clock vigil to keep watch over Klausner’s body prior to burial, the veteran buried Jews everyday by himself in Dachau, saying Kaddish at the graves he dug for them. He also nursed many former prisoners back to health, helped them send mail to family and arranged separate displaced persons camps for Jews to protect them from anti-Semitic attacks.

"It was my honor to meet such a Jew, who did so much for Jews and Judaism following the war," said Levertov. "What I learned from him is that we can all do things alone, even when others are doing nothing. He never gave up; for six months no one even looked his way, and he single-handedly nurtured the survivors in Dachau.

"There is no doubt that he was a special Jew," continued Levertov. "He told me that he nurtured to life Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam, the Klausenberger Rebbe, and that when the rabbi wanted a mikvah, a ritual bath, he defied all expectations and built him one with cement he purchased on the black market."