Herbert Friedman, who died Monday at 89, helped settle thousands of Jews in Israel in the wake of World War II and led the national United Jewish Appeal between 1954 and 1971. He was also founding president of the Wexner Heritage Foundation, dedicated to teaching young Jewish leaders about their heritage.

Born in New Haven, Conn., Friedman was the son of a traveling salesman. His father lost his job and the family’s home in the Depression. Friedman matriculated early at Yale, supporting himself as a short-order cook at a Howard Johnson hotel. He graduated at 19, and decided to study for the rabbinate. The Jewish Theological Seminary turned him down when he conceded in an interview that he didn’t observe Jewish law. He found a friendlier reception at the more liberal Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. The institute’s founder, Rabbi Stephen Wise, also the first president of the World Jewish Congress, instilled a political consciousness that Friedman put to good use for the rest of his career. In 1943, he was appointed rabbi of the Congregation Emanuel in Denver, the oldest congregation in the Rockies. Appalled by what he’d heard about the fate of European Jewry during the war, he applied to the Army’s chaplain school.

As a chaplain in Germany shortly after the war, Friedman was part of a crew that literally traveled back roads in a truck, looking for Jewish refugees to resettle. He loaded them into trucks and saw them onto ships headed for Palestine. “I don’t know where God was during the Holocaust,” Friedman wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Roots of the Future.” “But this work of succor was as close to god-like as anything I had done in my life.”

Resettlement and support for Israel would become his life’s work. In 1946, Friedman conducted a Passover seder at the Berlin Rathaus (city hall). It was, he claimed in a letter to a friend at the time, the first open display of the Jewish ritual in the German capital since 1932. He also helped produce the “Survivors’ Talmud,” printed in Hebrew under U.S. Army auspices on presses in Heidelberg that had only recently been used for Nazi propaganda. The Talmuds were distributed to Jewish survivors all over Europe. In his memoir, Friedman also tells of helping “liberate” arms for the Haganah, the predecessor to the Israel Defense Forces. Among his contributions was 11 mint-condition Messerschmitt fighters that helped form the nucleus of the new nation’s air defense. He later was recruited by David Ben-Gurion to join the Haganah himself.

After returning to Denver, Friedman stayed involved with refugee resettlement, including Jewish populations in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa. In 1954, he was recruited to head the UJA in New York. His fund-raising ability became legendary, and the organization’s annual appeal grew from $50 million to $450 million during his tenure as chief executive officer. He kept up a steady drumbeat in the papers to spread awareness of the continuing needs of Jewish refugees. In 1961, Friedman founded the Young Leadership Cabinet of UJA.

He stepped down as CEO of UJA in 1971, but stayed with the organization through 1982 as a volunteer leader. The Wexner Heritage Foundation, which he founded and served as president for a decade starting in 1985, educates several hundred young Jewish leaders annually in Jewish traditions in America.

One of the foundation’s teachers was the author Deborah Lipstadt, who was sued in 1997 in British court by David Irving for calling him a Holocaust denier in her book “Denying the Holocaust.”

In a recent blog posting, Ms. Lipstadt tells what happened next.

“He peered down at me and declared, in a slightly condescending tone which, had it come from anyone else, I would have resented. ‘It’s time to get organized.’ He then added: ‘Irving set his sights on you, but it’s the entire Jewish community and historical truth that he is aiming at.’ And then Friedman took charge.”

Friedman helped raise over $1 million for her successful defense, which because of the stringent requirements of British libel law required that her legal team prove that the Holocaust actually occurred.

An editorial in the Times of London the day after the decision was announced said, “History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.”

Herbert A. Friedman

Born September 25, 1918, in New Haven, Conn.; died March 31 at his home on the Upper East Side; survived by his wife, Francine Bensley; his children, Judith, Daniel, Joan, David, and Charles; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.