Lerman joined the planning committee for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1978 and was appointed to the governing board by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, serving for 23 years.

Lerman helped establish the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance and a 2004 memorial at the Belzec concentration camp in Poland.

Lerman was born in Poland in 1920 and interred in a labor camp in 1942 following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

He and three other inmates escaped the camp by killing prison guards with shovels and fleeing into the surrounding woods.

He immigrated with his wife to Brooklyn and moved to New Jersey in 1948 where he eventually established a home heating oil business.

"Miles taught his successors the meaning of memory," Holocaust Museum Chairman Fred S. Zeidman said in a statement. "Those of us who follow in the path he forged owe him a debt of gratitude and bear a tremendous responsibility to carry on his legacy."

Lerman died Tuesdady at his Philadelphia home.