Kalman Sultanik, a Zionist leader and former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, died Oct. 19 in New York. He was 97.
Sultanik was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and president of the Federation of Polish Jews. He also was a member of the World Zionist Executive for many years, representing the World Confederation of United Zionists. For four decades he served on the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, and he was chairman of the American section of the World Zionist Organization.
Sultanik was elected vice president of the WJC in 1977 after serving in several leadership posts. Working with then-president Edgar Bronfman, Sultanik was instrumental in opening a dialogue with the Polish government in the late 1970s and, in the next three decades, laying the groundwork for the renewal of Jewish life and the restoration of Jewish properties and cemeteries in Poland.
The native of Miechow, Poland, was an activist in the Jewish and Zionist communities prior to World War II. During the war he was part of the underground resistance and spent time in several concentration camps. Sultanik was sent on the death march to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated in 1945.
Sultanik was a delegate to the 22nd World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1946, representing survivors of the death and concentration camps in Germany.
In 1988 the Polish government appointed Sultanik to a seat on the International Auschwitz Museum Council, where he served as deputy chairman. As chairman of the budget and finance committee of the Auschwitz museum, he raised some $30 million from European governments for upkeep of the site. He was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Poland Reborn in 1995.
Sultanik earned his law degree from LaSalle University in Chicago when he was in his 70s. — jta