Jack Eis­ner (1925 – 2003) was a Holo­caust sur­vivor, edu­ca­tor, author, and accom­plished busi­ness­man. As a teenag­er in Poland under Nazi occu­pa­tion, he smug­gled food to Jew­ish fam­i­lies and fought in the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing before he was impris­oned in a series of con­cen­tra­tion camps, includ­ing Maj­danek, Budzyn, Flossen­burg, and Dachau. One of two sur­vivors in a fam­i­ly that lost more than 100 mem­bers, he helped the U.S. gov­ern­ment track war crim­i­nals in the after­math of WWII and served as a wit­ness at the tri­al of Nazis at Dachau. He immi­grat­ed to New York City in 1949 and went on to build his import-export com­pa­ny, Stafford Indus­tries, into a $50-mil­lion busi­ness, often using the acu­men gleaned from his black-mar­ket expe­ri­ences in the War­saw ghet­to. He then spent the last 25 years of his life bear­ing wit­ness to the hor­rors of the Holo­caust. He found­ed the Holo­caust Sur­vivors Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, estab­lished first Insti­tute of Holo­caust Stud­ies at the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter at CUNY, worked with oth­er sur­vivors to found the War­saw Ghet­to Resis­tance Foun­da­tion, and cre­at­ed a per­ma­nent mon­u­ment in the War­saw Jew­ish Ceme­tery ded­i­cat­ed to the mem­o­ry of the Jew­ish chil­dren mur­dered dur­ing the Holo­caust. His best­selling auto­bi­og­ra­phy, The Sur­vivor of the Holo­caust, was adapt­ed into a Broad­way play as well as a full-length film released in 1985 as ​“War and Love.” A leader in pro­mot­ing Jew­ish-Chris­t­ian rela­tions via dia­logue, he was the dri­ving force behind the first ever Holo­caust Com­mem­o­ra­tion at the Vat­i­can with Pope John Paul II. He was sur­vived by his wife and three children