Denver's Holocaust Survivors Remembrance Registry
Participate In The Survey
View The Names Already Submitted
Join the 3rd and 4th Gen Facebook Page
Read Dean Rotbart's Community Yom HaShoah Address
Their addresses were Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Bergen Belsen, Majdanek and Teresienstadt. They lived on Vrain, Tennyson, Raleigh, Canejos and West Colfax.
What were their names? Do you recall what they did for a living? Where did they go to shul? What became of their children?
The legacy of Denver's remarkable community of Holocaust Survivors is endangered.
After the Shoah, a striking number of those Jews who survived the concentration camps, fought as partisans, spent the war in hiding, or emigrated ahead of the German tanks, found themselves and their meager belongings arriving on the tracks of Union Station.
Many were single. Some married. A few carried infants and toddlers.
Just how many journeyed to our state between the war's end and the early 1960s is unclear. Without a doubt there were more than 100 survivors. Likely, several hundred. A thorough search of the public records may yet pinpoint a more exact number. [Please help.]
At the time, Denver - unlike the major cities along the East Coast - hosted a tiny Jewish community consisting largely of the descendants of early pioneering mining families, and later World War I immigrants and others who were part of the respiratory wave who were treated at the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society from 1904-1940.
That so many Survivors wound up in Colorado was extraordinary. Our Jewish Family & Children's Services and other local Jewish community groups helped resettle the immigrants.
The largest cluster of Survivors planted new roots on Denver's West Side, living in modest homes and apartments located between Sheridan Boulevard and Federal Boulevard, from 13th Avenue to 17th Avenue.
The classrooms at Colfax Elementary, and to a lesser degree Cheltenham Elementary, were dotted with the children of survivors who were destined to begin anew - in a country they would come to know and appreciate as their own. America.
The heritage of Denver's Holocaust Survivors and their immigrant experience is both rich and of historical importance.
For most of these families, the horrors of the Holocaust did not cease in the arrival terminals of Union Station. Those who did survive had the dual struggle of having had their lives unimaginably shattered and needing to reconstruct their families, livelihoods and sense of community in a new land.
Their children did not witness the atrocities first hand, but read them morning and night in the faces of their parents, and spotted them at each birthday and simcha by the glaring absence of the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who they never knew.
To tell the whole story of the Holocaust and relay its lessons for future generations, the tale cannot and must not stop at with the liberations in 1944 and 1945. Indeed, the history of the Holocaust continues to be written today, as the third and fourth generation of survivors are impacted and respond to events long ago and far away.
What were their names? Do you recall what they did for a living? Where did they go to shul? What became of their children?
The legacy of Denver's remarkable community of Holocaust Survivors is endangered.
After the Shoah, a striking number of those Jews who survived the concentration camps, fought as partisans, spent the war in hiding, or emigrated ahead of the German tanks, found themselves and their meager belongings arriving on the tracks of Union Station.
Many were single. Some married. A few carried infants and toddlers.
Just how many journeyed to our state between the war's end and the early 1960s is unclear. Without a doubt there were more than 100 survivors. Likely, several hundred. A thorough search of the public records may yet pinpoint a more exact number. [Please help.]
At the time, Denver - unlike the major cities along the East Coast - hosted a tiny Jewish community consisting largely of the descendants of early pioneering mining families, and later World War I immigrants and others who were part of the respiratory wave who were treated at the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society from 1904-1940.
That so many Survivors wound up in Colorado was extraordinary. Our Jewish Family & Children's Services and other local Jewish community groups helped resettle the immigrants.
The largest cluster of Survivors planted new roots on Denver's West Side, living in modest homes and apartments located between Sheridan Boulevard and Federal Boulevard, from 13th Avenue to 17th Avenue.
The classrooms at Colfax Elementary, and to a lesser degree Cheltenham Elementary, were dotted with the children of survivors who were destined to begin anew - in a country they would come to know and appreciate as their own. America.
The heritage of Denver's Holocaust Survivors and their immigrant experience is both rich and of historical importance.
For most of these families, the horrors of the Holocaust did not cease in the arrival terminals of Union Station. Those who did survive had the dual struggle of having had their lives unimaginably shattered and needing to reconstruct their families, livelihoods and sense of community in a new land.
Their children did not witness the atrocities first hand, but read them morning and night in the faces of their parents, and spotted them at each birthday and simcha by the glaring absence of the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who they never knew.
To tell the whole story of the Holocaust and relay its lessons for future generations, the tale cannot and must not stop at with the liberations in 1944 and 1945. Indeed, the history of the Holocaust continues to be written today, as the third and fourth generation of survivors are impacted and respond to events long ago and far away.
