American television host Jerry Springer has visited Britain to support the work of World Jewish Relief.
The charity rescued Mr Springer’s parents and brought them to this country from Nazi Germany a month before the outbreak of war in 1939.
At a private dinner in London last week he spoke of the effect of the Holocaust on his family – 27 of his relatives were murdered by the Nazis.
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WJR, under its original name of the Central British Fund for German Jewry, rescued more than 40,000 people in the 1930s and 1940s and helped run the Kindertransport.
At the dinner Linda Rosenblatt, WJR vice-chair, presented Mr Springer with a copy of his parents’ immigration documents.
They showed that his mother, Margot, was 32 when she arrived from Berlin, and his father Richard, from Landsberg, was 34.
Mr Springer was born in 1944 in Highgate Tube Station during a bombing raid. The family lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb until they moved to New York in 1949.
WJR has digitised hundreds of thousands of similar documents so families can search online for details of their history.
Mr Springer said: “I was deeply touched when I received the records of my parents’ immigration. These papers are a piece of family history which I will treasure forever.
“I am delighted to support the organisation which helped my parents in 1939. World Jewish Relief is still doing critical life-saving work around the world some 70 years later.
“I am grateful that World Jewish Relief is making available this important archive and I hope the tens of thousands of families World Jewish Relief helped will discover the records of their families also.”
Ms Rosenblatt said: “We are immensely grateful to Jerry Springer for giving his time to us and supporting our archives.
“We want to make these family records available, without charge, to the Jewish community around the world. I urge anyone who thinks we might have helped their family to get in touch.”
