by Lori Silberman Brauner
NJJN Staff

March 17, 2009

Adam Boren of Rumson, who typified and advocated for a generation of Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives to an often stunning degree in the United States, died on March 1 after a brief illness. He was 79.

After surviving the Warsaw ghetto and three concentration camps, the Polish-born Boren arrived in New York in 1946 and went on to establish a successful wholesale bakery business. Along with his wife, Claire, he devoted much of his free time to Jewish causes.

Boren was an active officer in the International Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, the Jewish Federation of Monmouth County, and the JCC of Greater Monmouth County.

He spoke frequently about his Holocaust experiences to organizations and school and university groups and in such venues as Fort Monmouth, the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“He was an excellent speaker and he had such a powerful story to tell,” Claire Boren told NJJN. “He really wanted to contribute in some way to eliminate prejudice and genocide. That was the main lesson that he wanted to submit.”

Boren drew on that powerful story in 2000, when the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington put out a call for manuscripts of memoirs.

From the over 1,000 manuscripts received, the museum selected Boren’s memoir, Journey Through the Inferno, as the first publication in the series, in 2004.

He was born Adam Borenzstein in Warsaw, Poland, the youngest of three children of chemist and businessman Israel Borenzstein and his wife, Sarah.

After the Germans occupied Warsaw in 1939, Adam, his father, and his brother left Warsaw for the Soviet-occupied part of Poland.

In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the three were captured and imprisoned. On the evening of their planned execution Boren escaped. His father, brother, and 40 other Jewish prisoners were hanged.

Boren returned to his mother in the Warsaw Ghetto, and learned that his sister had died in a typhus epidemic. He was a courier in the Warsaw ghetto uprising; his mother was killed when her building was bombed.

Boren was wounded and captured and transported to the first of three concentration camps. He survived the Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Sachsenhausen camps and a death march.

He was liberated by the United States Army in May 1945.

Boren immigrated to the United States, arriving in New York on Dec. 20, 1946. The surviving cousins he located in Germany after the war would arrive after him.

He worked for several years in New York until, on the advice of a truck driver who offered him a ride, he moved to Denver in 1948, where he became a sales and service manager of a division of Telco Company, a TV manufacturer.

In 1956 he returned to New York and formed Unico, a commercial refrigeration company supplying equipment to supermarkets. In 1961, in Eatontown, in partnership with Gil Schapiro and Herb Freedman, he formed and became president of the Adam Equipment Company, later called Adamatic Corp. It manufactured and supplied the wholesale bakery trade with production lines and ovens. At the time, it was the only U.S. manufacturer of its type creating supplies for the mass production of European-type bread products.

In 1989 the Hobart Company acquired Adamatic. Boren was retained as a COO of the Hobart division until he retired in 1994 to be treated for pancreatic cancer.

‘Larger than life’

Boren was living in Asbury Park when he went on a blind date with Claire Goldbarten, a Polish Holocaust survivor. They were married in 1961. Several years later they moved to Ocean Township, where they raised their daughter, Sari Mina, and son, Jonathan Israel. In 1990, the Borens moved to Rumson.

Throughout their marriage, the couple were active in the Jewish community and in support of Israel.

In 1996, to celebrate Boren’s recovery from cancer, the couple’s friends established the Adam Boren Endowment Fund for Holocaust Education at the Monmouth County federation. In 2006 the fund awarded a grant to Brookdale Community College’s Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center to purchase the DVDs of 156 testimonials of survivors living in Monmouth and Ocean counties, recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Collection.

“To me, Adam was a larger-than-life personality,” said Monmouth federation president Elise Feldman of Farmingdale. “He stood for high morals and ethics, and asked no less of others.” She described Boren and his wife as “a wonderful couple and role models for our Jewish community.”

Monmouth federation executive director Howard Gases said Boren “set an example for people to follow. I will miss his frequent visits to our offices and the caring and concern he showed us all.”

Boren “was a major asset, both in his tzedaka as well as his teachings and as a reflection of triumph over evil,” said federation executive board member Joe Hollander of Holmdel. “Everyone who knew him was…better for having known him.”

Boren, whose formal education was interrupted by the war, spent his entire life in the pursuit of knowledge. He spoke five languages, was an avid reader, and held a decades-long subscription to Scientific American. After retirement, he studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York and began taking a memoir-writing class at New York University.

“Adam was more like a brother to me than a cousin,” said Boren’s first cousin, Ruth Millman of Middletown, who was also born in Warsaw and was one of his few relatives to survive. “He was the patriarch of our family.”

“It’s a great loss for me. He was a wonderful person, extremely generous and kind, and a real family man,” Millman said.

Boren is survived by his wife of 47 years, Claire; his daughter, Sari Mina of Cambridge, Mass.; his son, Jonathan Israel of San Francisco; his mother-in-law, Ann Goldbarten of Parkland, Fla.; his sister- and brother-in-law, Bina and Ira Addes, and their children, Danyel and Ari, of Amherst, Mass. He is also survived by his first cousins and their families: Ruth Millman of Middletown, Lucia Schapiro of Boca Raton, Fla., Misha Adika of Ashdod, Israel, and Mark Bender of Kibbutz Dorot, Israel; and his extended family and many cherished friends.

Services were held March 1 with arrangements by Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels, Ocean Township. Memorial contributions may be made to the Boren Holocaust Education Fund at the Jewish Federation of Monmouth County. 

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