New York –Well known Zionist leader Kalman Sultanik z’’l died in New York over the weekend. He was 97 years old.
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Sultanik served for decades in the leadership of the World Jewish Congress, and was vice-president from 1977. He served on the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel for forty years, and was chairman of the American Section of the World Zionist Organization.
He was born in Miechów, Poland in 1917. During World War II, he took part in the underground resistance movement against the Nazi invaders, and was deported to a concentration camp in Płaszów, before being transferred to a camp in Dresden, Germany. From Dresden, he was sent on the death march to Terezin (Theresienstadt), where he was liberated in 1945.
Sultanik was chosen as a delegate to the 22nd World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1946. He was one of the initiators of the movement to support the Jews who survived, and helped many Jews reach Israel.
In 1947, he was elected to the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Munich, and in 1988, the Polish government appointed him to a seat on the International Auschwitz Museum Council as deputy chairman. Sultanik was also a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and president of the Federation of Polish Jews.
He was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Poland Reborn in 1995.
Sultanik’s funeral service will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 10 a.m. at Park East Synagogue, New York.
A holocaust survivor who devoted his life to his people dies, and not one person has a thing to say? What a shondah!