The New York Times-20080124-Miles Lerman- a Leading Force Behind Holocaust Museum- Dies at 88- -Obituary -Obit--

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Miles Lerman, a Leading Force Behind Holocaust Museum, Dies at 88; [Obituary (Obit)]

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Miles Lerman, a Jewish resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Poland who was a major figure in creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and persuading Soviet bloc countries to give it thousands of artifacts of the Holocaust, died on Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 88.

The death was confirmed by his daughter, Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer.

Mr. Lerman was chairman of the museum's governing council from the time it opened on the Mall on April 22, 1993, until 2000. But his work to create the six-story building near the Washington Monument, with its silence-inducing exhibition spaces leading to an eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance, began in 1979. That year, President Jimmy Carter named Mr. Lerman to the advisory board of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, with the mission of building the museum.

Although Congress had passed legislation donating the land, all construction money had to be raised from private sources. Mr. Lerman was chairman of the Campaign to Remember, which raised $190 million to build, equip and endow the museum.

At the same time, he was chairman of the museum's International Relations Committee, which negotiated with Eastern European countries for the artifacts that became the museum's permanent exhibition. Among them were a railroad boxcar of the type used to transport Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp; barracks from the Birkenau camp; suitcases, combs, shaving kits and toothbrushes from Auschwitz; 5,000 shoes from Majdanek; and canisters that had held Zyklon B, the gas used to kill Jews.

Visitors step on cobblestones from Warsaw and see sewing machines from Lodz before entering the boxcar and the barracks.

He was indispensable, Michael Berenbaum, the project director for the creation of museum, said Wednesday. He spoke many languages and knew how to deal with East European officialdom at the time the Soviet Union was collapsing.

The museum's current director, Sara J. Bloomfield, said Mr. Lerman's breadth of vision extended beyond building the collections. As museum chairman, Ms. Bloomfield said, Mr. Lerman started the Committee on Conscience, which deals with contemporary genocide.

It calls attention, for example, to issues like Darfur, she said, and why it is still so hard for governments to prevent genocide.

Born Shmuel Milek Lerman in 1920 in Tomaszov-Lubelski, Poland, Mr. Lerman was one of five children of Israel and Yochevet Feldzon Lerman. His father owned several businesses, including flour mills, in eastern Poland; his mother owned a business that imported and exported groceries.

After the Germans invaded Poland, the family fled to the city of Lvov. Then in his 20s, Mr. Lerman was arrested and sent to a forced-labor camp. He managed to escape and, for 23 months, fought with the resistance in the forest around Lvov.

At Mr. Lerman's urging, the Holocaust museum opened the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance, to dispel the myth that Jews did not resist the Nazis.

After the war, Mr. Lerman went to Lodz, Poland, where he met Krysia Rozalia Laks. They married in a displaced-persons camp and, in 1947, immigrated to the United States.

Besides his daughter, Jeanette, of Philadelphia, Mr. Lerman is survived by his wife, who uses the name Chris; a son, David, also of Philadelphia; a brother, Jona, of Palm Beach, Fla.; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

In the United States, Mr. Lerman bought a poultry farm in Vineland, N.J., and started profitable gasoline, heating and real estate businesses.

After resigning as chairman of the museum, Mr. Lerman returned to Poland to lobby for a proper memorial for members of his family who were among approximately 500,000 Jews killed at the Belzec extermination camp. A Communist-era memorial on a former garbage dump at the site, which did not mention the Jews, had fallen into disrepair. Working with the Polish government in partnership with the museum, and later with the American Jewish Committee, Mr. Lerman raised $5 million to build a new memorial.

Mr. Berenbaum, the former project director for the creation of the museum in Washington, recalled that among the thousands of artifacts that Mr. Lerman had acquired was a milk can containing part of the Ringelblum Archives, a collection of diaries, letters, poems, songs and historical accounts of life in Nazi-occupied Poland that had been gathered and hidden in the doomed Warsaw ghetto.

History is usually written by the victors, Mr. Berenbaum said. The idea was even if we die, at least we will leave behind the material to tell our story.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Visitors at the Holocaust Memorial Museum viewing photographs from Lithuania. (PHOTOGRAPH BY WILFREDO LEE/ASSOCIATED PRESS); Miles Lerman (PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD KRAMER/ASSOCIATED PRESS)