The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HOW HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN POVERTY ARE GETTING HELP
Nonprofit helps with groceries, dental care, repairs, other needs.
Bernard Offen knows hunger and despair. From ages 10 to 16, he survived five concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Now 92, Offen divides his time between California and Poland, where he gives tours of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-birkenau and shows visitors the bunk where he slept crammed with other Jewish prisoners, the building where he was tattooed with his identification number and the crematorium where his father’s body was burned.
Offen was determined to rebuild his life after World War II ended and he immigrated to Detroit, where he and his wife raised two sons and started a coin laundry business in 1951. It never occurred to him that when he reached his 90s, he might need to ask for help to keep food in his refrigerator.
Two years ago, when John Pregulman and Amy Israel Pregulman of Denver met Offen while visiting the Auschwitz-birkenau Memorial, they told him about a program they had founded for Holocaust survivors in the United States called KAVOD — a word that roughly means “dignity” in Hebrew.
The nonprofit group works with Jewish human service agencies in about 60 cities and towns from Seattle to Philadelphia to help survivors with emergency needs such as dental care, home repairs, transportation and groceries, said Amy Pregulman.
Offen didn’t think he would ever need to reach out to KAVOD, but a few months after returning to his home in Yucca Valley, California, from Krakow in 2019, he found himself running short on funds and unable to pay all his bills and buy food, he said.
Although he was reluctant to ask for assistance, Offen contacted the Pregulmans and was put in touch with someone from a local Jewish Family Service agency who gave him several grocery gift cards paid for by KAVOD donors. The cards helped him to get through a few difficult months, he said.
“I’d just been trudging along, doing the best that I could,” said Offen, a Korean War veteran who has written a book, “My Hometown Concentration Camp,” about how he and two older brothers (now deceased) survived.
“I’m very grateful for the help, but I honestly didn’t like to ask for it,” he said. “And I still don’t.”
The idea for KAVOD came about after John Pregulman, 63, an investment banker and freelance photographer, was asked by a friend to photograph several Holocaust survivors for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in 2012.
“It was life-changing for me, and my friend encouraged me to continue taking photographs of survivors,” he said. “He told me their biggest fear was that they’d be forgotten.”
In 2015, John Pregulman went to Orlando and ended up at a 94-year-old survivor’s house.
“She wanted to give me something to eat, but when she opened her fridge, I could see that this lady didn’t have much of anything,” he said. “‘What happened? Where is your food?’” he recalled asking her. “She told me her air conditioner had broken and she had to use her money for the month to fix it,” he said.
He told his wife about the conversation and they arranged to get the woman some help. Then they decided to start a nonprofit group to help take care of needs for Holocaust survivors that often aren’t met by other agencies, he said.
The Pregulmans found out in 2018 that one-third of 80,000 Holocaust survivors in the United States were living in poverty, according to the Blue Card Foundation, another charity that helps survivors, said Amy Pregulman.
“It’s a complex question as to why this happens,” she said. “Part of it is that their medical and emotional needs are magnified based upon the trauma they experienced. They were beaten and put through starvation. We’ve found that dental issues are a huge problem.”
KAVOD recently partnered with the Seed the Dream Foundation so that more needs can be filled through Jewish community organizations, she said. So far, the Pregulmans estimate more than 18,000 requests for help have been met through KAVOD.