Klausner, Abraham J.

Abraham Judah Klausner was born in Memphis, Tennessee on April 27, 1915, one of five children of Joseph Klausner, a Hungarian immigrant who owned a dry goods store, and Tillie Binstalk Klausner, an Austrian immigrant. He was raised in Denver, Colorado and graduated from the University of Denver in 1938 and was ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1941. Following ordination, Klausner joined the army and served as a chaplain at the Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Klausner eventually shipped out to Germany and was assigned to join the 116th Evacuation Hospital, which had just entered Dachau. The 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau, which was 10 miles northwest of Munich, in May 1945, three weeks after the camp had been liberated on April 29, 1945. While Rabbi Eli Bohnen was the first Jewish chaplain in the United States Army to arrive at the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation, Bohnen’s unit remained only a short time. Rabbi Klausner arrived soon after.

During his first days at Dachau, survivors asked him over and over if he knew their family members and if he could provide aid in finding them. Experiences such as these convinced Klausner of the importance of working to reunite families that had been separated by the war. In the several weeks that the 116th Evacuation Hospital was stationed at Dachau, Rabbi Klausner worked to find the 32,000 survivors bedding and food, including kosher provisions. He also worked to put together lists of survivors at Dachau and made sure that these lists, which he called shearit ha’pleita or surviving remnant, were posted at other camps. Klausner eventually published six volumes of the shearit ha’pleita lists and distributed them worldwide. He traveled throughout Bavaria looking for survivors, helping to reunite families and setting up a center for survivors at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Those who did not find the names of relatives on the shearit ha’pleita lists wrote notes and tacked them to the walls at the center, in the hopes that relatives might visit and find them. When the 116th Evacuation Hospital was ordered to move on to an Army rest camp, Klausner initially went with them but surreptitiously returned to Dachau against Army orders and told the commander of the 127th Evacuation Hospital unit at Dachau that he had been reassigned. Eventually the 127th would also depart Dachau, on a day that Klausner was traveling around Bavaria, allowing Klausner to remain behind once again.

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