Benjamin Meed, who died Tuesday at 88, was a member of the Warsaw ghetto Jewish resistance during World War II and spent the rest of his life bearing witness to the destruction of European Jewry.

As founder and president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Meed engineered reunions of Holocaust survivors and negotiated for reparations for workers who were, like himself, enslaved during the war. A registry of Holocaust survivors that the American Gathering started in the 1980s now contains information on nearly 200,000 survivors and their families worldwide.

Benjamin Miedzyrzecki was raised in Warsaw, Poland, in a religiously observant home. His father was a tanner and a member of the Agudat Yisrael Party and the Zionist Mizrahi movement. Young Benjamin studied first in yeshiva school but then attended public high schools and became comfortable with Polish language and culture. He was attending business school at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939.

In 1940, when the ghetto was officially established, the Miedzyrzecki family already lived within it and took in members of their extended family. Benjamin was made to labor removing bricks from bombed-out buildings to send to Germany for reuse. He became a smuggler, trading goods for scarce food, and it was thus that he met his future wife, Feigele Peltel (later called Vladka), who was, as a courier in the Jewish resistance, a hero in her own right.

Posing as a Pole with forged papers, Benjamin smuggled his family out of the ghetto and into a hiding place behind a false wall above a sausage factory in a non-Jewish part of Warsaw. Through Feigele, he became involved in the resistance as an expert on constructing hiding places.

During the ghetto uprising of 1943, Benjamin, still undercover, attended church services on Palm Sunday and was shocked to see parishioners picnicking while gunshots and flames erupted nearby. “From time to time we heard screaming, ‘Look. Look. People are jumping from the roofs,'” he said in an oral history recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990.” Others will make remarks, ‘Jews are frying.'”

He lost a brother and a sister in the war, but his parents and another sister survived. After Warsaw was liberated, in early 1945, Benjamin’s father insisted that he marry Feigele, with whom he was living.

In 1946, after various travails that found them briefly in a British lockup on the Belgian border, Benjamin and Feigele managed to immigrate to New York under the sponsorship of the Jewish Labor Committee. His parents and sister ended up in Palestine.

Benjamin became a furrier and later started a prosperous import-export business. His wife wrote for the Forward. In the early 1950s, they officially changed their names to Benjamin and Vladka Meed.

Meed become involved in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Committee in 1964, and in 1968 he participated in ceremonies in New York to mark the 25th anniversary of the uprising. He told the New York Times that the remembrance “does not merely serve to evoke memories, but will always serve as a reminder that a certain part of ourselves shall always remain empty.”

He was a founder of both the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he was chairman of the committee that oversaw the creation of the museum’s permanent exhibits.

In 1981, Meed helped organize the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, in Jerusalem. “We say to the world, ‘We will never be silenced or allow the hallowed memories of our people to be defiled,'” he told more than 5,000 survivors gathered at the Wailing Wall.

Meed next founded the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which was chartered with a meeting of 20,000 survivors and their families in Washington in 1983. In 1985, the American Gathering urged President Reagan to refrain from laying a wreath at the German cemetery of Bitburg, where the Waffen SS were buried.

The American Gathering also joined the Conference of Material Claims against Germany. When Germany agreed in 1999 to establish a $5.2 billion fund to compensate those it had enslaved during the war, Meed wrote to members, “Was this a satisfactory solution? No. It’s long overdue, it’s coming too late.”

“Ben Meed epitomized the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the survivor community as a whole,” the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, David Marwell, said. “His passing is a poignant reminder that the survivor community is getting smaller and smaller.”

Meed “left an enormous legacy to the world — not just to survivors, but to the entire world,” a senior adviser to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Arthur Burger, said.

Benjamin Meed

Born Benjamin Miedzyrzecki on February 19, 1918, in Warsaw, Poland; died October 22 of pneumonia following a lengthy illness; survived by his wife of 61 years, Vladka, his children, Steven Meed and Anna Scherzer, and five grandchildren. The funeral will be Friday at 9:30 a.m. at the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan.