EGN NEWS DESK
Sigmund Rolat, a Polish Holocaust survivor who tapped the wealth he accrued as a businessman within the United States to help cultural initiatives in his homeland, most notably a museum dedicated to the historical past of Jews in Poland that stands on the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto, died on May 19 at his residence in Alpine, N.J. He was 93.
His son, Geoffrey, confirmed the dying.
Mr. Rolat believed that aside from the darkish chapter of World War II, with Nazi atrocities at focus camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka in occupied Poland, the historical past of Polish Jewry was a thriller to most Jews, and most Americans. He donated thousands and thousands of {dollars} to assist construct the inside and different components of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in 2014, and he grew to become a serious fund-raiser and an influential voice on its board.
“I need the gate of our museum, and never the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ gate, to be the primary gate that will likely be seen by Jews visiting Poland,” Mr. Rolat instructed Forbes journal in 2014, referring to the cynical inscription (“Work units you free”) that greeted inmates once they entered the principle Auschwitz focus camp.
“The Jews ought to first be taught our shared historical past,” he added. “And then, after all, they need to see Auschwitz, however with a greater understanding of what occurred there.”
The foremost exhibition on the museum tells the story of Poland’s Jews over 1,000 years, from the Middle Ages to the current, utilizing artifacts, work, replicas and interactive installations.
“It is just not one other museum of the Holocaust,” Mr. Rolat instructed McClatchy Newspapers in 2013. “It is a museum of life.”
Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka was the director of growth for the museum when she first met Mr. Rolat at his workplace in Warsaw in 2004. When he discovered that she wasn’t Jewish, he requested her why she was concerned with a museum about Polish Jews.
“I instructed him, ‘There isn’t any full historical past of Poland with out the historical past of Polish Jews,” she recalled in a cellphone interview. “‘Because I’m Polish, I’m concerned.’ He was shocked and stated, ‘Oh, God, if you happen to’re concerned on this, how about me, a Polish Jew, standing by you?’”
Mr. Rolat used his cash to help arts occasions in Poland, just like the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and Singer’s Warsaw Festival, named for Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born author and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He additionally centered on Czestochowa, his hometown in southern Poland, the place Jews had been one-third of the inhabitants earlier than World War II. He paid for a memorial statue on the native railroad station — the place the Nazis chosen about 40,000 Jews for deportation to Treblinka — and a plaque on the slave labor camp the place he and his mom had been imprisoned. And he helped help the restoration of elements of the Jewish cemetery in Czestochowa the place his mom and older brother had been executed.
One of his most poignant efforts was producing a live performance in 2009 at an orchestra corridor in Czestochowa on the positioning of a synagogue the place he had worshiped, and which the Nazis destroyed.
At that live performance, the violinist Joshua Bell carried out with the identical Stradivarius that for many years had been owned by Bronislaw Huberman, a virtuoso from Czestochowa who later based the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra). The Stradivarius, which was made in 1713, was stolen from Mr. Huberman in 1936 and didn’t resurface till 1987.
Mr. Bell performed Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D minor, which Mr. Huberman had performed as a youngster for an viewers that included Brahms himself.
“The Germans burned this synagogue down in 1939,” Mr. Rolat stated earlier than the live performance, which was documented in Haim Hecht’s movie “The Return of the Violin (2012). “But this place, so filled with glory, will at all times stay ours.”
He referred to as the live performance “one of many grand moments of my life.”
Zygmunt Rozenblat was born on July 1, 1930. His father, Henryk, was an accountant. His mom, Zyska Mariana (Szydlowska) Rozenblat, managed the family.
After Germany imposed punitive antisemitic legal guidelines, Zygmunt’s childhood schooling ended within the fourth grade. Two years later, he, his mother and father and his older brother, Jerzyk, had been compelled right into a ghetto in Czestochowa.
His mother and father and brother perished in 1943. His father, deported to Treblinka, died in an inmate rebellion that ended the camp’s operations. His brother, a Resistance fighter, was executed with 5 different partisans in the identical cemetery the place his mom was killed. Zygmunt was free of the Hasag Pelcery slave labor camp when the Soviet Red Army liberated it in January 1945.
Zygmunt stayed in Poland for a short while earlier than transferring to Munich, the place an aunt organized for him to be tutored for six hours a day by a German professor, which enabled him to go his secondary faculty equivalency check.
In 1948, he emigrated to New York City with a bunch of different orphaned refugees. With the assistance of a Jewish service group, he acquired a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1952 with a bachelor’s diploma in political science. Around that point, he modified his identify to Sigmund Rolat.
After working in a transport firm, Mr. Rolat began his personal,Skyline Shipping, in Manhattan, in 1959. Three years later, he began an export finance firm, Oxford International.
“I went to Poland with him within the Eighties,” his daughter Samantha Asulin stated in a cellphone interview, “and he realized he nonetheless felt a connection to his birthplace — and he noticed enterprise alternatives.”
One alternative arose after Mr. Rolat noticed an image of youngsters in denims sitting on the ruins of the Berlin Wall after it fell in 1989. He began a enterprise within the early Nineties that exported denim to Poland.
Mr. Rolat’s honors embody the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, which he acquired in 2008 from President Lech Kaczynski, and the Commander’s Cross With Star of the Order of Poland, from a subsequent Polish president, Bronislaw Komorowski, in 2013.
Mr. Rolat married Jacqueline Cantor in 1952; that marriage resulted in divorce. His marriage to Ingrid Busse in 1966 ended along with her dying in 1967, and his marriage six years later to Jacqueline Spencer ended along with her dying as nicely, in 2013.
In addition to his son, from his first marriage, and his daughter Ms. Asulin, from his third, Mr. Rolat is survived by one other daughter, Amanda Rolat, additionally from his third marriage, and 4 grandchildren. Another daughter, Jane Rolat, from his first marriage, died in 2003.
The memorial that Mr. Rolat commissioned on the Czestochowa railroad station was unveiled in 2009. Created by Samuel Willenberg, a Holocaust survivor, it consists of a brick wall, cut up jaggedly in half, with two rails on one aspect and a Star of David, additionally product of rails, on the opposite. (In 2021, it was vandalized with swastikas and different Nazi symbols.)
“All the Jewishness was damaged,” Mr. Willenberg, who was born in Czestochowa, stated on the unveiling, referring to the damaged wall. He added, as quoted within the Jewish newspaper The Forward, “The rails are within the picture of these despatched to Treblinka, crammed into cattle automobiles, whereas the Magen David stands for the Jewish individuals who proceed to dwell.”
When it was his flip to talk, Mr. Rolat stated, “The significance of this monument will be summed up in a single phrase: Memory.”
