Menachem on arrival in Israel

Menachem Perlmutter was born in Eastern Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), in the city of Koshice. "In April 1944, when I was 16, I was taken to Auschwitz with 10,000 Jews from the city and neighboring areas," he recalls. "In January 1945, during the evacuation to Germany-the march of the dead -- I was able to escape with my older brother Ladislav, who was 19. We were arrested by the Gestapo, but a kind German police officer saved us. We found shelter in a convent until the war ended."

In 1946, Perlmutter left Slovakia and undertook an illegal journey to Palestine with a group organized by the Jewish Brigade.

He was arrested and imprisoned several times before arriving at Haifa port in 1947. "In Haifa, I was arrested by the British and expelled to the detention camp in Cyprus for 18 months," he continues. Released by the British in July 1948, Perlmutter was mobilized into the Israeli army. He fought in a combat until through most of Israel's wars. The survivor was also trained as a surveyor in the army-a profession that led him to establishing his home in the fledgling town of Beersheva.

"There was a recession in Israel in 1952 and jobs were scarce," Perlmutter says. "So I took a position as the Chief Surveyor for the Settlement of the Negev." Today, Menachem Perlmutter is an internationally acclaimed expert in the field of environmentally conscious agriculture. For more than four decades he has focused his efforts on the greening of the harsh Negev desert as Director of the Jewish Agency's Settlement Department's Engineering Division for the Negev region. He often hosts missions from countries throughout the world, briefing them on the subject of desert development.

Menachem today with his brother

The list of Perlmutter's contributions to the city of Beersheva grew even longer in January, 1990 as he joined the Executive Committee of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This Yom Hashoah, as the Beersheva municipality honors Menachem Perlmutter among the Holocaust survivors who helped build the city, this veteran resident of the Negev's capital expresses pride that his wife, Pirhia, is a teacher in one of the city's high schools, and that his two married daughters and six grandchildren all live in Beersheva.

	Baruch Fettman
	Miriam and Yehuda Goldman
	Amb. Benjamin Navon
	Prof. Zvi Eyal
	Shmuel Armal