In 1963, Mark E. Talisman organized one of the first efforts to examine the role of Switzerland’s government and banks in stealing money and other assets from Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors.
He did this as chief of staff for Rep. Charles Vanik (D-Ohio). According to a biography that Talisman furnished, “Those early efforts ended in abject failure….”
But they became the prelude to a long occupation with the fate and well-being of Holocaust survivors. It is “a subject I’ve been involved in all my life,” Talisman told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
He will talk about his work in Milwaukee, where he will be the featured speaker at the Jewish community’s Yom HaShoah Commemoration.
This event, the “Memorial to the Six Million and of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and All Resistance,” will take place at Congregation Beth Israel, 6880 N. Green Bay Ave., on Sunday, April 15, at 2 p.m.
Talisman, 65 and a native of Cleveland, said he will speak about “the recent history of the treatment of survivors living in the United States,” including “resettlement, restitution and integration within our own country.”
His involvement in Holocaust-related issues persisted long after his work for Vanik. Talisman was the founding vice chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
And, according to his biography, Talisman “has served as a consultant to a number of groups working to assure that survivors of the Holocaust receive appropriate shares of the funds negotiated in many different areas in which the Nazis and others stole Jewish assets.”
Today, Talisman is a teacher and consultant. He is also president of the Project Judaica Foundation, which he and his wife, Jill, created about 28 years ago “to do major exhibitions and Jewish cultural activities,” he said.
The first of those was “The Precious Legacy,” built in 1983 around Judaic treasures from then-Czechoslovakia. Talisman said the foundation is preparing two major exhibitions, one he can’t discuss yet, but the other on a journal that teen boys wrote in the Terezin ghetto.
In the past, Talisman worked for the Council of Jewish Federations; and in that and other capacities he has spoken “at least two dozen times” in Milwaukee and made many friends here.
“I like Milwaukee very much,” he said. “It is an exceptional Jewish community.”
The Yom HaShoah Commemoration will also pay tribute to recently deceased local Holocaust educators Henri Zvi Deutsch and Fela Warschau. In addition, it will present awards to winners of the Holocaust Essay Contest sponsored by the Habush Family Foundation.
The event is chaired by Sandra Hoffman. It is a program of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and is co-sponsored by the Generation After and numerous other community synagogues and organizations.
It is partially funded by the JCC Raye and David David Yom HaShoah Endowment Fund, the JCC Luba Szlosberg Memorial Endowment Fund and the Pincus and Bluma Weinstock Yom HaShoah Endowment Fund.
For more information, contact Dorene Paley, 414-967-8217.
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