David Schaecter, president of Holocaust survivors foundation, dies at 96

The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation stated that Schaecter was a “dedicated advocate for survivors.”

“David led by example in sharing the memories of survivors along with those who perished,” stated Melinda Goldrich, board chair of the Shoah Foundation. “He exemplified ‘never again’ throughout the rest of his life.”

A Slovakian native, Schaecter was 10 when the Nazis took his father away. He never saw his father again. The next year, the Nazis loaded him and the rest of his family onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. He jumped off the train taking him to Buchenwald when the U.S. Air Force bombed the train. He was the only one of 105 family members to survive.

Schaecter came to the United States on a student exchange program. He started a family and settled in South Florida for the next seven decades, and launched a manufacturing business. He later worked in real estate.

Relatives say that his advocacy for Holocaust survivors became his true life’s work, including his service as president of the Holocaust Survivors Foundation.

Some 50 members of the Young Lions of Judah program, a community service initiative in Miami that connects bar and bat mitzvah students with Holocaust Survivors, attended her husband’s funeral, Carpel said.

“There were kids there that David met 13 years ago, there were kids that he met last year, and there were parents who flew their kids in for the funeral to be with David, so his voice will always be heard,” she said. “David will continue to be heard through so many people, at least for the next 70 years.”

Schaecter’s son, Neal Schaecter, told JNS that his father was a family man first.

“He was a father to me and my sister Lisa, a grandfather to my niece and nephew and my three children, and a great-grandfather to five great-grandchildren,” Neal Schaecter told JNS.

“He was an activist, philanthropist and Zionist, and all these things kept on growing and kept on getting bigger,” Neal Schaecter said of his father.

Schaecter “came from the true ashes of the world to achieve not just greatness but to achieve every goal that he ever set out to do in his life,” his son said. He added that his father “walked his talk” when it came to Holocaust survivor advocacy.

“He didn’t need reparations. He didn’t need help,” Neal Schaecter said. “But he saw such an injustice that survivors everywhere were taken advantage of, weren’t given the right health care or the right treatment by everyone from the government to Jewish agencies and organizations that he supported and loved.”

Schaecter took on insurance companies, the government, Jewish organizations and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

“He took them to the mat,” Neal Schaecter said. He added that Sam Dubbin, who has served as Holocaust Survivors Foundation counsel since its founding, aided Schaecter.

“David’s determination, along with his brothers and sisters in the survivor leadership, to reflect the truth about the Holocaust and demand justice for Holocaust survivors—whether speaking to presidents, members of Congress, community and organizational leaders, even federal judges—made waves and made history,” Dubbin told JNS.

It also “educated so many throughout the community and government leadership to take note and take action,” he said.

“To his last day, he wasn’t satisfied with the totality of the world’s support for Holocaust survivors and families,” Dubbin said.

As recently as April, Schaecter testified about rising antisemitism and supporting older Americans before the Senate Select Committee on Aging.

Schaecter was also passionate about the Holocaust Memorial of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, which he and three others led.

“They were all survivors, and they all had this soul in them that said, ‘We need to build this,’” Neal Schaecter.

His father spoke about the Holocaust with students across the country.

“There are kids that I’ve gotten texts from who heard him 15 years ago when they were in an inner city school,” Neal Schaecter said. “The outpouring is crazy that he touched them in such a way with this story.”

A recording of Schaecter answering some 1,500 questions about the Holocaust will be a part of a new Holocaust memorial scheduled to open in Boston next year, according to Neal Schaecter.

Some questions “made him so uncomfortable and so sad,” and others “that uplifted him, and he answered each and every one,” Neal Schaecter said.

One difficult question was about what it was like to be Block 8 in Auschwitz, where David Schaecter and his brother Yaakov were held.

Schaecter visited Auschwitz in April 2023 with the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and was allowed to enter the barracks where he was held—a place that is generally closed to the public.

“We walked in, and he went into another place,” Carpel told JNS. “Everybody thought he was going to have a heart attack. It was a very quiet moment.”

Carpel said it took months before Schaecter overcame the experience, but he needed the closure.

Once she heard him “screaming out for his brother and having a nightmare,” she said. “He buried all of that deep in him. He compartmentalised things and lived in the moment.”