Zev Birger, co-founder of the Romema Family Project, was Director of the Jerusalem International Book Fair for over 50 years. With the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941, Birger and his older brother, Mordechai, were forcibly resettled in the Kovno ghetto. Still in his early teens, he founded an underground Zionist movement, which abetted guerrilla groups fighting the Natzis, saved and circulated Hebrew books and built undergoround bunkers where Jewish families could hide.
In 1944, when the Nazis obliterated the Kovno ghetto, Birger, his brother and their father were captured and transported to Dachau; Birger's mother was sent to a different camp, and he never saw her again. His father perished in Dachau; Mordechai was transferred to another camp, escaped and was eventually caught and executed.
By the time Birger was liberated by American soldiers in 1945, he was a typhus-stricken living skeleton. While serving as a translator in an American army unit, he joined a Jewish underground movement that helped displaced Jewish refugees emigrate illegally to British Palestine. Armed with false passprots, he and his young bride, Trudi, sailed from Marseilles to Haifa, cramped on a converted yacht.
Trudi Birger, co-founder of the Romema Family Project, was a child survivor of the Holocaust death camps, came to Israel with her husband, Zev with a promise to herself to help children have a better life. Trudi started with one family and then another, and soon had 30 families from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Jerusalem – a neighborhood filled with poor, illiterate immigrants from Arab countries.
After Trudi's passing in 2002, the work has been carried out by Zev.