Menachem ‘Manny’ Silver and Stella Silver

The Central British Fund (CBF) put together a large team of people to look after the Boys.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The British government offered 1,000 visas to bring the Boys to the UK but the caveat was that the CBF were responsible for their care and would pay all the expenses.

^{Manny Silver}

Manny Silver was born in Leeds. He was a member of the youth movement Habonim and had worked with the Jewish children who had been evacuated from the East End of London to Devon, and then as the warden at Woodcote House in Ascot during the Blitz.

When he worked at Ascot hostel, he was only slightly older than the Boys. He later recalled “Thinking back on my own long professional training and work, I am amazed that we had the chitzpah to think that we could do the job. (I was only 22 years old). But no one else was trained for it – and who would accept the minimal pay and work conditions? As the Talmud says “In a place where there is no man, try to be a man.”

Silver recognised that for the Boys, survival had meant breaking the rules while in the concentration camps. At Ascot he tried to create a “co-operative lifestyle based on mutual respect”.

The Silvers met at the Ascot hostel. Stella was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and spoke Yiddish. The couple were married in Ascot.

^{Stella Silver}

The Committee for the Care of the Concentration Camp Children considered Ascot a failing hostel, so Silver was dismissed in June 1946. The Boys were so angry that they went to Leonard Montefiore’s office in Bloomsbury Square, London to protest. Nevertheless, Silver was replaced.

After leaving Woodcote House he and his wife went to work with Jewish refugees in Austria with the Jewish Relief Unit. He then worked as a relief worker with the American Joint Jewish Joint Distribution Committee as the Director of Displaced Person Homes in Stroble, Austria 1946-1948. He played a role in the illegal Jewish underground movement known as the Bricha.

He and his wife, Stella, sailed from Italy for Palestine in 1948. After serving in the Israeli Defence Forces, he studied at the Teachers Seminary of Youth Aliyah in Jerusalem. He cared for Jewish child refugees from North Africa. The Silvers then divorced. He then moved to the USA, where he continued to work in Jewish educational and communal services.