Adam Boren

(Asbury Park Press)

ADAM BOREN
AGE: 79 RUMSON
Adam Boren of Rumson, NJ died on March 1, 2009 after a brief illness. He was 79. Adam was born Adam Borenzstein in Warsaw Poland, to chemist and businessman Israel Borenzstein and his wife Sarah Gold Borenzstein. Adam delighted in his status as the youngest of three children, spoiled by his mother and his adored older sister Mina. As an adult Adam would describe his mischievous childhood in stories of homemade electrical experiments gone awry, hopping trolley cars and dropping water-filled paper bags from the apartment balcony onto people walking below.
After the Germans occupied Warsaw in 1939, Adam, his father and brother Mietek left Warsaw for the part of Poland occupied by the Soviets. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Israel, Mietek and Adam were captured and imprisoned. On the evening of their execution Adam escaped. His father, brother and forty other Jewish prisoners were executed by hanging. Adam returned to his mother in the Warsaw ghetto to find that his sister had died in a typhus epidemic. Adam participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising and was a courier. His mother was killed during the uprising when her building was bombed. Adam was wounded and captured, and transported to the first of three concentration camps. He survived Majdanek, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen concentration camps and a death march. He was liberated by the American Army in May 1945.
Adam immigrated to the United States and arrived alone in New York on December 20, 1946. The surviving cousins he located in Germany after the war would arrive after him. He worked for several years in New York then, on the advice of a truck driver who offered him a ride, Adam decided to go west. He moved to Denver, Colorado in 1948 where he became a sales and service manager of a Colorado division of Telco Company, a television manufacturer. In 1956 he returned to New York (but never lost his love of Colorado) and formed Unico, a commercial refrigeration company supplying equipment to supermarkets. In 1961, in Eatontown, NJ, in partnership with Gil Schapiro and Herb Freedman, he formed the Adam Equipment Company, later called Adamatic Corp., with Adam as President, to manufacture and supply the wholesale bakery trade with high-speed roll and bread production lines and ovens. At the time, Adamatic was the only U.S. manufacturer of roll and bread lines for the production of European-type bread and rolls, bagels, pitas, and more. In 1989 the Hobart Company acquired Adamatic. Adam was retained as a COO of the Hobart division until he retired in 1994 to be treated for pancreatic cancer.
After moving to Asbury Park, N.J., Adam met Claire Goldbarten, a Polish Holocaust survivor, on a blind date in New York in May of 1961. They married December 10, 1961, and several years later moved to Ocean Township where they raised their daughter Sari and son Jonathan. In 1990, Adam and Claire moved to Rumson.
Throughout their marriage, Adam and Claire were very involved in the Jewish community and in their support of Israel. Adam was an active officer in the International Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the Monmouth County Jewish Federation and Jewish Community Center. Adam spoke frequently about his Holocaust experience at schools, universities, Fort Monmouth, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and other organizations. Thousands of people were moved by Adam's talks of his personal history and his emphasis on the lessons to be learned from his experience: To treat all people with respect and dignity, to always confront hatred and prejudice, and to abandon hatred towards your enemies because your enemies win when you can't let go of your hatred.
In 1996, to celebrate Adam's miraculous recovery from cancer, Adam and Claire's friends established the Boren Holocaust Education Fund at the Jewish Federation of Monmouth County. In 2006 the Fund awarded a grant to Brookdale College's Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center to purchase the DVDs of 156 Holocaust testimonials of survivors living in Monmouth and Ocean County recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Collection. The Claire and Adam Boren Collection's library of testimonials for public research and education is one of the largest repositories of the Shoah Foundation DVDs in the country.
Adam regretted that the war interrupted his formal education and spent his entire life in the energetic pursuit of self-education. Adam read constantly and held a decades-long subscription to "Scientific American." He reportedly helped himself learn English when he arrived in the U.S. by reading his favorite childhood book, Jack London's "Call of the Wild," in English, a book that he almost knew by heart in Polish. After retirement Adam studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York and began taking a memoir writing class at New York University. In 2000, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum put out a call for manuscripts of Holocaust memoirs to publish. From the over 1,000 manuscripts received, the museum selected Adam's memoir "Journey Through the Inferno," to publish first, in 2004.
Above all, Adam treasured his life and his family. He and Claire traveled often throughout the world, sometimes with friends or with their children. Adam was extremely active and was an avid cyclist long before it became fashionable, and skied every winter, often returning to Colorado. After Adam's retirement Adam and Claire lived part-time in New York City and loved to visit museums, galleries, concerts and the theater. Adam and Claire enjoyed the company of many close friends and Adam could always be counted upon to enliven parties and dinners with his exceptional storytelling and lively political discussions. Adam would often recite from memory Polish and Russian poetry that he had learned in his childhood and loved to sing songs in Polish, Russian, Yiddish and English, often leading a party through a song, now familiar to everyone from Adam's tutelage.
Adam was the patriarch of his extended family, a valued friend and a leader in the community. Renown for his integrity, honesty and generosity, Adam left a strong impression on virtually everyone he met, from the school children who listened to his personal stories, to his many business associates, and to the nurses who cared for him the last days of his life.
Adam is survived by his beloved wife of 47 years, Claire, of Rumson; his daughter Sari Mina of Cambridge, Mass.; and 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.; and his first cousins and their families: Ruth Millman of Middletown, N.J., Lucia Schapiro of Boca Raton, Fla., Misha Adika of Ashdot, Israel, and Mark Bender of Kibbutz Dorot, Israel; and his extended family and many cherished friends.
Funeral services were held 1:00 p.m. Sunday, March 1, 2009 at the Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels Ocean, N.J. The family will sit Shiva until the beginning of Shabbat on Friday, March 6, 2009 at the family home at 7 Bellevue Avenue in Rumson. Memorial donations can be made to the Boren Holocaust Education Fund at the Jewish Federation of Monmouth County. Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels, Ocean Twp. is in charge of arrangements.