Mount Washington Based Survivor Mitzvah Project Aids Holocaust's Forgotten Victims

As a TV director and producer, Zane Buzby’s credits are a testament to her talents as a leader, organizer and storyteller.  

Her directorial credits include popular television shows The Golden Girls, Married With Children, Charles in Charge and Blossom.

Now, it is through her most recent effort--The Survivor Mitzvah Project--the world’s only organization dedicated to providing direct and continuous financial aid to elderly Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe--that her directorial skills are being put to their greatest use.
 
For the last nine years, Buzby has run the non-profit Survivor Mitzvah Project out of the basement of her Mount Washington home, where she raises funds that are sent directly to survivors. Her humanitarian trips to Eastern Europe bring them emergency aid, and allow her to videotape the survivors' oral histories.  
 
In May, Buzby was named a “Local Hero” for her efforts by KCET  and Union Bank in recognition of Jewish American Heritage month.
 
“In a tireless effort, Buzby helps these elderly and forgotten Holocaust survivors live out their final years in comfort and dignity, with friendship and hope,” KCET wrote in a statement honoring Buzby.
 
“The award will shine a light on the charity, help it to grow and provide support to more survivors”, Buzby said, “and that’s what matters.”
 
“It’s been seven days a week for the last ten years. It’s more grueling than making a film,”  she said. “So [the Local Hero award] was encouraging. Hopefully, now more people will know about the desperate needs of these elderly Holocaust Survivors. Every time we get a little bit of press, the donations come in. Donations and public awareness are the only thing that are going to help these people in their final years.”
 
Buzby founded The Survivor Mitzvah Project in 2001 after a roots trip she took to Belarus and Lithuania to visit the villages of her grandmothers.  While held over in Lithuania, waiting for the visa that would allow her to cross the country’s border with Belarus, Buzby said she encountered Professor Dovid Katz who gave her a list of eight elderly survivors in need of food, medicine, money and kindness.
 
It was during that trip, which was supposed to be a vacation from her heavy shooting schedule, that she traveled through numerous villages where elderly Holocaust survivors were suffering through brutal winters with only sparse pensions of approximately $60 per month.
  
“It was in the fall, so it was starting to get cold there and the ground was starting to freeze and all these 90-year-olds were trying to dig up their potatoes before the ground froze so they would have a winter food supply, because if they don’t get what they grow out of the ground they don’t eat,” Buzby said. “One man had only one leg and no neighbors to help, another woman was sitting there with all this firewood that needed to be chopped. I couldn’t believe the fact that they weren’t being helped by anyone and the fact that they weren’t receiving reparations money—60 years after the start of the war.”
 
Buzby returned to Los Angeles after the trip, but as winter approached she could not forget about the people she met in during her visit. She began sending them money and notes containing only a heart encircling a star. “It was a way to let them know somebody cared about them,” Buzby said.  

Shortly thereafter, letters written in Russian began to pour in from the survivors who had received aid.
 
The Survivor Mitzvah Project gradually began to grow around the skeleton of responsibilities that attend assisting strangers in need. Buzby began receiving letters from contacts in Eastern Europe, imploring her to add more names to her “list” of aid recipients.

 As the list grew, she also needed to find translators who could read and respond to all the letters she was receiving.  Gradually, Buzby recruited supporters for the project from the long list of contacts she developed during her years of working in Hollywood.

 Before she knew it, Buzby said, she was in the basement of her Mount Washington home surrounded by stacks of letters—spearheading a charity she was surprised had not already been established.

 Joining her was Los Angeles Philanthropist Chic Wolk.  Together they grew the project and in 2008 it became a 501c3 non-profit public charity, helping over 1200 survivors in 7 countries, including Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Slovakia, Moldova, Ukraine and Russia.
 
There is an assistance deficit to Holocaust survivors, Buzby said. The Survivor Mitzvah Project considers all Jewish men women and children who were affected by the Holocaust to be survivors and victims entitled to aid.  Germany’s definition is more narrow, Buzby said, meaning reparations money does not flow to everyone who has suffered the consequences of the Holocaust.

“Many thousands of people fall through the cracks.  Reparation payments exclude anyone who fought against the Germans, many people who ran from the killing squads as their families and communities were brutally destroyed and many people who would otherwise receive reparations but due to the fact they still live in countries where the killing was done, they are excluded,” Buzby said.  “The red tape, bureaucracy and narrow definitions continue to be stumbling blocks for releasing these reparations payments to the elderly survivors.”

In the numerous return trips she’s taken to Eastern Europe over the last ten years, Buzby said she’s been consistently astonished by the deep reservoir of gratitude and generosity within the survivors she’s encountered, despite all the tragedy they have endured.
 
“These are people, the oldest of whom, fought in the Czar’s army. They survived that. They went through the Russian revolution. If they survived that, they were faced with World War I. If they survived that, they had to live through the 1920s when there were enormous famines imposed by Stalin. Millions died. If they survived that, here came the 1930s, the rise of the Nazis and then in the 40s invasion of their country by Germany and the mobile killing squads of Operation Barbarossa. After that, the Iron Curtain falls and Stalin starts building concentration camps and sending people to Siberia and the Gulag. Then, if they survive that and they live in Ukraine, there’s Chernobyl. Then comes Perestroika, thought to be a good thing in the West, but for these people it meant that their entire savings were taken when the banks failed. Then the Soviet Union collapses, and now there’s no infrastructure, no medical help, no free education,” she said.
 
“What’s different about these people is that possessions mean nothing to them. Everything they’ve ever had has been destroyed. But they know the value of human relationships. Five minutes of sitting with them, befriending them, and interacting means everything,” she said. “They know this like no one knows this. To a person they say, the most important thing in life is helping someone.”

Buzby said that, during the 30s and 40s, it was criminal to offer assistance to Jews in many Eastern European countries. Today, though, she believes The Survivor Mitzvah Project has made reaching out to those who have suffered through years of persecution much easier.