President Clinton today announced his intent to appoint Pam Fleischaker, Harold Gershowitz, John F. Kordek and Leo Melamed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

     Ms. Pam Fleischaker, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, is a columnist and Contributing Editor for the Oklahoma Gazette. She has also served as a commissioner and vice-chair of the Oklahoma City Human Rights Commission and is a past member of Leadership Oklahoma City and the national governing boards of Common Cause and the Jewish Fund for Justice. As a columnist, Ms. Fleischaker has won statewide media awards from the Oklahoma Chapter of the National Conference for Community and Justice for opinion pieces that contributed to a tolerant and ethnically diverse community and promoting individual freedom. She received a Bachelor?s degree in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

     Mr. Harold Gershowitz, of Chicago, Illinois, is Chairman and CEO of New Century Information Services, Inc. He is also an author, and his works include Remember This Dream, which was a Chicago Tribune Best Seller and received the 1989 Award for Fiction by the Friends of Literature. He currently serves as a member of the Anti-Defamation League?s National Commission and National Executive Committee, as President of the Board of Chicago?s Goodman Theatre and is a Director of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. He received a Bachelor's degree in Business and Public Administration from the University of Maryland.

     Ambassador John F. Kordek is a former U.S. Ambassador and career foreign service officer who spent 26 years in the U.S. diplomatic corps working in Croatia, Serbia, Poland, Belgium, Botswana, Italy and Venezuela. He currently is Associate Vice President for External Relations at DePaul University, and also co-teaches a course on the Holocaust and directs a Law School program on "Memory and Conscience." Chicago Mayor Richard Daley appointed Kordek to serve on the board of Chicago?s Sisters Cities International Program and to co-chair the Warsaw-Chicago Sister City relationship. He also serves on the boards of the Illinois Humanities Council, the International Human Rights Law Institute and the Chicago International Visitors Center and is a member of the Executive Committee of the National Polish American-Jewish American Council. He has also served on a number of presidential delegations, including the 50th anniversary commemorations of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mr. Kordek was educated at DePaul University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Studies. He is also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.

     Mr. Leo Melamed, of Glencoe, Illinois, is currently chairman and CEO of Sakura Dellsher, Inc, and is Chairman Emeritus and Senior Policy Advisor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). In 1972, while serving as chairman of CME, he launched the International Monetary Market -- the first futures market for financial instruments. For this and a number of other initiatives he is widely recognized as the innovator of financial futures markets. As an advisor to markets worldwide, he has lectured and written extensively on the subject of financial futures, including his memoirs, Escape to the Futures, and authored a science fiction novel, The Tenth Planet. In 1979 the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business established a prize in his name for "A Work of Outstanding Scholarship by a Business School Professor," and in 1991 the same school established the Leo Melamed Endowed Chair for the study of futures markets.

     The United States Holocaust Memorial Council was established in 1979 to provide for the annual commemoration and observance of the Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust, and to construct and operate a living memorial to its victims. The Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated in 1993.