Union County, NJ – A Holocaust survivor and longtime New Jersey developer, who was indicted on charges of corruption and had his passport revoked, received special permission from federal officials to travel to Israel this week to meet with Pope Benedict XVI during his historic visit to the Holy Land.
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Edward Mosberg, a philanthropist from Union County, was one of only six people who met with the pontiff at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, said his attorney, Peter Till.
A survivor of the Krakow-Plaszow and Mauthausen concentration camps, Mosberg still wears his camp registration number, 85454, and the number of his wife, Cecile, 81. The couple have been married 52 years.
“Not only was he in concentration camps, he was in work camps, on death marches; he experienced every degradation there was — and his whole family was wiped out,” Till said. “He was selected to be one of six persons who were representing the 6 million” Jews who perished in the Holocaust. “We’re very proud of him.”
Mosberg was accompanied to Israel by his wife and one of their three daughters, Till said.
“This was very important,” Mosberg said.
Born in Krakow, Poland, in 1926, Mosberg lost his family in the Holocaust and barely survived himself.
“First, I worked in the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp, where the famous sadist Amon Goeth was the commandant,” Mosberg has said. “Then, I worked in Mauthausen (in Austria) in the stone mines. I worked carrying boulders up and down the stairs — 186 steps, up and down. It started in the morning, till it got dark. Then, I was transported to Linz, to the Hermann Goering factory.”
Mosberg remained a slave laborer until May 5, 1945. As the Allies were closing in on the concentration camp, the slave laborers marched into caves in the countryside. The caves were set to explode and kill them. But the dynamite failed to ignite.
On May, 5, 1945, Mosberg — the only surviving member of his family — was liberated.
In Italy, he met Cecile, another Krakow native who also had lost many members of her family in the Holocaust. The couple, who have three daughters and several grandchildren, have devoted their time to the Jewish community and to recovering, restoring and preserving many Jewish cultural artifacts lost during the Holocaust. Some of these artifacts include Torah scrolls used in many synagogues throughout the United States and Israel.
Mosberg has been a developer in Parsippany, Morris County, since 1965, when he came to town as the local representative of the Wilf family, a real estate organization based in Millburn. Over the past four decades, his companies have built thousands of homes in Parsippany.
He is a resident of Union, where his Mosberg Family Foundation also is based.
In September, Mosberg was indicted in a federal corruption probe, and the charges against him are pending in U.S. District Court in Newark. He is accused of paying thousands of dollars in bribes through $15,000 to $20,000 discounts on homes he sold to the Parsippany planning board’s attorney and his family.
Once indicted, Mosberg had to surrender his passport, but he could still travel overseas if he first received approval from the court’s Pretrial Services Division, which he did for this week’s trip to Israel, authorities and Till said.
very interesting. he suffered enough in the war and I hope they let him go, there are much worse criminals out there, let the old man go!
Mr Mosberg built many fine homes and it took them until now, in his old age, to find any dirt on him. For an NJ developer that says a lot.
It’s very simple. If you want to do business, you have to pay the entry fee. If the wheels need greasing, you have to grease them, or you don’t get anywhere. Note well that the Torah does NOT ban paying bribes. That’s because there’s nothing wrong with it. Those who pay them often have no choice, and in any case they have no fiduciary duty to the public. It’s those who TAKE and DEMAND bribes who are the criminals. They are in breach of their duty to the public and to the people from whom they extract these payments.
This fellow has nothing to be ashamed of.