Abraham Silberschein

Abraham Silberschein 

Born in 1882, in Lwow, Poland, Dr. Abraham Silberschein was an attorney who dedicated himself to public service. He was one of the outstanding leaders of the Labor Zionist movement in Poland, and in 1922, he was elected by the movement to serve in the Polish Sejm as the Labor Zionist representative . In 1930 he arrived in Geneva as a representative to the Zionist Congress. Due to the outbreak of World War II, Dr. Silberschein did not return to Poland, but he remained in Switzerland from where he tried to organize relief activities for the persecuted Jews in Poland and Germany. He was the founder of the"Relic" Organization and through Relico he administered rescue and relief activities throughout the war and afterwards. He maintained contact and cooperated with Jewish institutions throughout the world as well as with non-Jewish bodies in Switzerland to which he passed on information regarding German war crimes in the occupied countries of Europe. He gleaned the most important information from testimonies of refugees who succeeded in escaping from Poland. He duplicated these reports on mimeograph machines in 1944 and made them available to newspapers and diplomatic legations in Switzerland, as well as to Jewish organizations. He considered the essence of his activity to be the sending of rescue documents to as many Jews as possible in the German occupied countries.