Betty Ungar, one of the Gruenzweigs’ daughters, said her mother had not let wartime horrors embitter her. In their tight-knit Brooklyn community, Mrs. Ungar said, when “anybody needed help, they came running to my mother.”

At Pesach Tikvah, everyone passed around copies of the group portrait that an Army photographer took in 1945. The women, in their dresses made from the cloth bought at gunpoint, posed at the Eschwege school with an Army chaplain, Robert S. Marcus, who had been comforting the frail survivors at Buchenwald, too. Mr. Golub’s original copy of the photo, which he donated in 1999 to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, is inscribed on the back with the women’s names and a thank-you note to Mr. Golub.

The crowd took photos of Mr. Golub and the survivors holding up copies of the group portrait. People admired the varied collars, sleeves, buttons and pockets on the dresses and remembered the names of ancestral Hungarian villages. Mr. Golub, a retired toy and sporting goods distributor from Canton, Mass., briefly summarized his own 70 ensuing years spent raising five children with his wife, Dorothy. In the crowd, taking more pictures and answering and asking questions, was the Golubs’ daughter Abby Sullivan, her husband, Gary Sullivan, and their children.

Image An undated photograph of Mr. Golub.

There were brief speeches by Pesach Tikvah executives and the head of the board, Rabbi David Niederman. But mostly, impromptu blessings poured forth for Mr. Golub: “There isn’t enough ink to write down all the good deeds that you did!” and “You saved a whole people!” and “May you live to be 120!”

Mr. Golub did not intend to be fussed over. “I’m a little embarrassed by it all, to tell you the truth,” he said in a side conversation. “I don’t need the honor. I’m just happy that I played a very, very small part in helping unfortunate people. I felt that it was a duty that had to be done.”

A year ago, Mr. Sullivan, a prominent dealer in American antiques, had grown curious about the fates of the women in the matching dresses and tried to research them. In July he was put in touch with a Hungarian museum expert, Anna Czekmany, who contacted various institutions including Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. She was eventually directed to a German historian, Fritz Brinkmann-Frisch, who runs a memorial museum for slave labor victims in Stadtallendorf, where the Hungarian women had performed hazardous, filthy tasks for Dynamit Nobel, a chemical and weapons company.