DALLAS — Jack (Itzhak) Belzacki Bell, a Holocaust survivor and a past chair of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, died Thursday at 79.
Born on Feb. 26, 1944, during World War II, Bell was the youngest member of Dallas' Holocaust survivor community. He was born in a work camp on the Polish-German border.
After he and his parents were liberated, they settled in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany. where his younger twin brothers were born while his parents waited on paper work to immigrate to the U.S.
Bell's family came to the U.S. through Ellis Island in 1949 and immediately moved to Dallas. They initially lived in a boarding house near Fair Park on Second Avenue managed by a man named Jack, which is where Bell adopted the name as his own when he became a U.S. citizen.
Frank and Lola Bell became tuxedo rental shop business owners and the family flourished. Jack Bell went to Hillcrest High School and attended the University of Texas at Austin and Tyler Junior College before graduating from what is now the University of North Texas.
Jack Bell spent 25 years as a banker at Republic National Bank and another two decades as an investment banker and stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, along with being involved in the Dallas Jewish community, serving on the board of Jewish Family Service and the Temple Emanu-El Brotherhood.
Bell is the fourth local Holocaust survivor to die in the past two months.