Jewish Resistance fighter Vladka Meed dies at 90

JTA — Vladka Meed, a Jewish Resistance fighter in World War II and a founder of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, has died.

Meed, who smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto, died Nov. 21 in Phoenix, Ariz., at the age of 90. She had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

Meed and her husband, Benjamin, took the lead in publicizing to the world what the Nazis had done.

The Meeds helped start the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization in 1962 and were among the founders of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

After much of her family was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, Meed, passing as a gentile, lived outside the ghetto and became a courier of weapons materials. She also smuggled Jewish children from the ghetto several times and took them to live with non-Jewish families, according to the New York Times.

She married her husband, also a courier, in 1944. Shortly after, they were on one of the first boats carrying Holocaust survivors to New York, according to the New York Times, where she began to lecture about her experiences. In the 1980s, she began training teachers in Holocaust education and took them on three-week programs to Israel and Poland, including visiting death camps and Warsaw.

Meed is survived by two children. Benjamin Meed died in 2006.