{"id":68801,"date":"2024-06-09T00:38:05","date_gmt":"2024-06-09T00:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/09\/sigmund-rolat-who-used-his-wealth-to-memorialize-polish-jews-dies-at-93\/"},"modified":"2024-06-09T00:38:05","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T00:38:05","slug":"sigmund-rolat-who-used-his-wealth-to-memorialize-polish-jews-dies-at-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/09\/sigmund-rolat-who-used-his-wealth-to-memorialize-polish-jews-dies-at-93\/","title":{"rendered":"Sigmund Rolat, Who Used His Wealth to Memorialize Polish Jews, Dies at 93"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"930\" height=\"487\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/06\/07\/multimedia\/07ROLAT-06-lpvt\/07ROLAT-06-lpvt-facebookJumbo.jpg?resize=930,487&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Sigmund Rolat, Who Used His Wealth to Memorialize Polish Jews, Dies at 93\" title=\"Sigmund Rolat, Who Used His Wealth to Memorialize Polish Jews, Dies at 93\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Sigmund Rolat, a Polish Holocaust survivor who tapped the wealth he accumulated as a businessman in the United States to support cultural projects in his homeland, most notably a museum devoted to the history of Jews in Poland that stands on the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto, died on May 19 at his home in Alpine, N.J. He was 93.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His son, Geoffrey, confirmed the death.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Rolat believed that except for the dark chapter of World War II, with Nazi atrocities at concentration camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka in occupied Poland, the history of Polish Jewry was a mystery to most Jews, and most Americans. He donated millions of dollars to help build the interior and other elements of the <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.polin.pl\/en\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews<\/a>, which opened in 2014, and he became a major fund-raiser and an influential voice on its board.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI want the gate of our museum, and not the \u2018Arbeit macht frei\u2019 gate, to be the first gate that will be seen by Jews visiting Poland,\u201d <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/forbesinternational\/2014\/11\/02\/raising-money-for-a-jewish-legacy-american-style-4\/?sh=1427671e10b7\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Mr. Rolat told Forbes magazine in 2014<\/a>, referring to the cynical inscription (\u201cWork sets you free\u201d) that greeted inmates when they entered the main Auschwitz concentration camp.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe Jews should first learn our shared history,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd then, of course, they should see Auschwitz, but with a better understanding of what happened there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The main exhibition at the museum tells the story of Poland\u2019s Jews over 1,000 years, from the Middle Ages to the present, using artifacts, paintings, replicas and interactive installations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIt is not another museum of the Holocaust,\u201d Mr. Rolat told McClatchy Newspapers in 2013. \u201cIt is a museum of life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka was the director of development for the museum when she first met Mr. Rolat at his office in Warsaw in 2004. When he learned that she wasn\u2019t Jewish, he asked her why she was involved with a museum about Polish Jews.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI told him, \u2018There is no complete history of Poland without the history of Polish Jews,\u201d she recalled in a phone interview. \u201c\u2018Because I\u2019m Polish, I\u2019m involved.\u2019 He was surprised and said, \u2018Oh, God, if you\u2019re involved in this, how about me, a Polish Jew, standing by you?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Rolat used his money to support arts events in Poland, like the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and Singer\u2019s Warsaw Festival, named for Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He also focused on Czestochowa, his hometown in southern Poland, where Jews were one-third of the population before World War II. He paid for a memorial statue at the local railroad station \u2014 where the Nazis selected about 40,000 Jews for deportation to Treblinka \u2014 and a plaque at the slave labor camp where he and his mother were imprisoned. And he helped support the restoration of <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.czestochowajews.org\/czestochowa-today\/czestochowa-jewish-cemetery\/jewish-cemetery-history\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">parts of the Jewish cemetery in Czestochowa<\/a> where his mother and older brother were executed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">One of his most poignant efforts was producing a concert in 2009 at an orchestra hall in Czestochowa on the site of a synagogue where he had worshiped, and which the Nazis destroyed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">At that concert, the violinist Joshua Bell performed with the same Stradivarius that for decades had been owned by Bronislaw Huberman, a virtuoso from Czestochowa who later founded the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra). The Stradivarius, which was made in 1713, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1987\/05\/14\/nyregion\/a-stolen-stradivarius-a-51-year-old-secret.html\" title=\"\">was stolen<\/a> from Mr. Huberman in 1936 and did not resurface until 1987.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Bell played Brahms\u2019s Violin Concerto in D minor, which Mr. Huberman had played as a teenager for an audience that included Brahms himself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe Germans burned this synagogue down in 1939,\u201d Mr. Rolat said before the concert, which was documented in Haim Hecht\u2019s film <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0HF_YsEd-0g\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cThe Return of the Violin (2012)<\/a>. \u201cBut this place, so full of glory, will always remain ours.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He called the concert \u201cone of the grand moments of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Zygmunt Rozenblat was born on July 1, 1930. His father, Henryk, was an accountant. His mother, Zyska Mariana (Szydlowska) Rozenblat, managed the household.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After Germany imposed punitive antisemitic laws, Zygmunt\u2019s childhood education ended in the fourth grade. Two years later, he, his parents and his older brother, Jerzyk, were forced into a ghetto in Czestochowa.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His parents and brother perished in 1943. His father, deported to Treblinka, died in an inmate uprising that ended the camp\u2019s operations. His brother, a Resistance fighter, was executed with five other partisans in the same cemetery where his mother was killed. Zygmunt was freed from the Hasag Pelcery slave labor camp when the Soviet Red Army liberated it in January 1945.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Zygmunt stayed in Poland for a short time before moving to Munich, where an aunt arranged for him to be tutored for six hours a day by a German professor, which enabled him to pass his secondary school equivalency test.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In 1948, he emigrated to New York City with a group of other orphaned refugees. With the help of a Jewish service organization, he received a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1952 with a bachelor\u2019s degree in political science. Around that time, he changed his name to Sigmund Rolat.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After working in a shipping company, Mr. Rolat started his own,Skyline Shipping, in Manhattan, in 1959. Three years later, he started an export finance company, Oxford International.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI went to Poland with him in the 1980s,\u201d his daughter Samantha Asulin said in a phone interview, \u201cand he realized he still felt a connection to his birthplace \u2014 and he saw business opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">One opportunity arose after Mr. Rolat saw a picture of teenagers in jeans sitting on the ruins of the Berlin Wall after it fell in 1989. He started a business in the early 1990s that exported denim to Poland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Rolat\u2019s honors include the Commander\u2019s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, which he received in 2008 from President Lech Kaczynski, and the Commander\u2019s Cross With Star of the Order of Poland, from a subsequent Polish president, Bronislaw Komorowski, in 2013.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Rolat married Jacqueline Cantor in 1952; that marriage ended in divorce. His marriage to Ingrid Busse in 1966 ended with her death in 1967, and his marriage six years later to Jacqueline Spencer ended with her death as well, in 2013.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In addition to his son, from his first marriage, and his daughter Ms. Asulin, from his third, Mr. Rolat is survived by another daughter, Amanda Rolat, also from his third marriage, and four grandchildren. Another daughter, Jane Rolat, from his first marriage, died in 2003.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The memorial that Mr. Rolat commissioned at the Czestochowa railroad station was unveiled in 2009. Created by <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/muzeumtreblinka.eu\/en\/informacje\/samuel-willenberg\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Samuel Willenberg<\/a>, a Holocaust survivor, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.czestochowajews.org\/slideshow\/umschlagplatz-2009-2\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">it consists of a brick wall<\/a>, split jaggedly in half, with two rails on one side and a Star of David, also made of rails, on the other. (In 2021, it was <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.timesofisrael.com\/monument-for-holocaust-victims-defaced-with-swastikas-in-poland\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">vandalized<\/a> with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cAll the Jewishness was broken,\u201d Mr. Willenberg, who was born in Czestochowa, said at the unveiling, referring to the broken wall. He added, as quoted in the Jewish newspaper <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/forward.com\/news\/121178\/driven-by-memory\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">The Forward<\/a>, \u201cThe rails are in the image of those sent to Treblinka, crammed into cattle cars, while the Magen David stands for the Jewish people who continue to live.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">When it was his turn to speak, Mr. Rolat said, \u201cThe importance of this monument can be summed up in one word: Memory.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/08\/world\/europe\/sigmund-rolat-dead.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sigmund Rolat, a Polish Holocaust survivor who tapped the wealth he accumulated as a businessman in the United States to support cultural projects in his homeland, most notably a museum devoted to the history of Jews in Poland that stands on the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto, died on May 19 at his home in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/06\/07\/multimedia\/07ROLAT-06-lpvt\/07ROLAT-06-lpvt-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,18699,64454,34137,64453,64452,10976],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68803,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68801\/revisions\/68803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}