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Historical and Investigative Research17 Jan 2006
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/leaders1.htm| 1 |
| How the mainstream Jewish |
| leadership failed the Jewish |
| people in World War II |
"I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany…”[1] Said on the eve of the Nazi genocide by “Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise, the undisputed leader of organized American Jewry”[19], and “probably the most influential and well-respected American Jew of his generation”[24a], in reply to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s suggestion that Jewish refugees from Hitler might settle in Tanganyika.
Stephen Wise got his wish.
< Introduction
< A few words about anti-Semitism
< Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?
< Why Peter Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong
< How passionate were “mainstream American Jewish leaders” in their opposition to Peter Bergson?
< Why did the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” oppose themselves to Peter Bergson and to other rescue efforts on behalf of the European Jews?
< How similar to “mainstream American Jewish leaders” were mainstream Jewish leaders elsewhere? As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For the Jewish people, this means repeating Catastrophe. Therefore, if you are a member of the Jewish community, which has been subjected to genocidal attacks for over 2000 years, the rational thing is to expect another such attack and prepare for it, the better to mount an effective self-defense and, ideally, to prevent the next mass killing altogether. You should study the past and remember it, so that you can recognize the signs that herald a new genocide and identify them when they recur. Unfortunately, however, the Jews are ill-equipped and ill-disposed to do this: they find it difficult to think rationally about their self defence. Jewish author Kenneth Levin has recently made the latest addition to a large literature that tries to understand this general problem.[1a]
An example of what I mean is that most Jews are unable to recognize the signs indicating that their own mainstream leaders are taking them down the path to destruction, just as mainstream Jewish leaders did the same prior to and during World War2. Don't misunderstand me: it was the German Nazis who were killing the Jews, and this was obviously not the fault of the Jewish people or of its leaders. But equally obviously, the Jewish leadership prior to and during World War2 had an obligation to defend the Jewish people, and it must be held accountable for how it reacted before the threat of Jewish extinction.
But Jewish leaders have not been held accountable. Stephen Wise, quoted above, is - absurdly - considered a hero by modern Jews, and “in the Jewish world, schools and museums and streets are named after Wise.”[1b] And yet Wise's role, as I will document below, was to use his position of supreme authority in the American Jewish community to sabotage the most successful effort to rescue the desperate European Jews, making it easier for the German Nazis to murder in cold blood between 5 and 6 million innocent people, destroying a beautiful, irreplaceable culture.
So why the Jewish celebration of Stephen Wise?
One main reason is that most ordinary Jews are unaware of what Wise and Co. did prior to and during WW2 to sabotage the defence of the Jewish people. It is irrational that Jews should not know this history well, but it is true that some special institutional difficulties exist: the same mainstream leaders who betrayed the Jewish people in WW2 created the mainstream Jewish organizations that hold sway over the Jewish people today. Stephen Wise himself was
"president of both the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress [which organizations he created], and a key figure, often chief officer, of perhaps a dozen other organizations and institutes."[1c]
In consequence, the people running these dominant organizations today have been careful not to expose the performance of their predecessors, in whose steps they are eagerly following, once again endangering the Jewish people in circumstances very similar to those that announced the German Nazi Final Solution. The connections between the past and current leadership are clear.
The present article is concerned with what happened in WW2. Its prequel,
- Part 0, covers the 1933 crisis, when Jewish leaders -- including Stephen Wise -- saved Hitler from a boycott that ordinary Jews around the world were organizing, and it explains the historical reasons for this behaviour. Its sequel,
- Part 2, will examine how today's mainstream Jewish leaders in the Diaspora are condemning the Jews to repeat a horrific history.
- Part 3 will do the same for today's Israeli leaders.
- Part 4 will examine how Israeli leaders reacted to the Holocaust. In
- Part 5 I begin to explore why it is so difficult for ordinary Jews to take their self-defence into their own hands. Beyond this, I will address the behaviour of religious Jewish leaders in Israel.
The point of this exercise is to prevent another Catastrophe, for the Jewish people is once again in mortal danger.
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A few words about anti-Semitism
Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?
Long before October 1943 everybody knew that the Jewish people was being exterminated in Nazi-occupied Europe.
“From the summer of 1941, reports were reaching the West regularly, through diplomatic and other channels, of large-scale massacres of Jews in areas of eastern Europe under Nazi control. In May, 1942, a message transmitted to the West through the Polish Government-in-Exile in London contained a compilation, by the Jewish Bund in Poland, of confirmed massacres. The Bund estimated that 700,000 Jews had already been killed and surmised that the Nazis had embarked on a campaign to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.”[3a]
A January 1943 headline in the New York Times announced, “Liquidation Day Set For France’s Jews,”[4] and another in February blared “Total Nazi Executions Are Put at 3,400,000; Poland With 2,500,000 Victims, Tops List,” followed by the explanation, in the body of the article, that in Poland “1,000,000 Jews were said to have been killed or permitted to die in concentration camps.”[5] This was, of course, precisely what Adolf Hitler had promised he would do in Mein Kampf and in his speeches: annihilate the European Jewish population. And yet, the Allies were doing worse than nothing to help stop the genocide.[6]
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Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson)
“a kind of prince... a ladies man, a bon vivant... very bright and ambitious, with British manners and a great name -- Kook ”
Eliahu Amikam, quoted in Rapoport (1999:22)
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In October of 1943, as related in an article published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, there was an effort in the United States to change that.
“The date was October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, and more than four hundred rabbis had come to plead for US government action to save Jews from Hitler.
The march was the brainchild of 33-year-old Hillel Kook of Jerusalem, nephew of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. Kook, who used the pseudonym Peter Bergson, travelled to the United States in 1940 to lobby for US support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. After news of the Nazi genocide reached the United States in late 1942 and early 1943, Bergson established the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, a political action committee that sought US action to rescue Jewish refugees.
Bergson understood the need for dramatic tactics to publicize his cause. To alert the American public about the Nazi massacres, the Bergson group sponsored a theatrical pageant called ‘We Will Never Die,’ authored by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht, which was viewed by more than 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden and then in other cities around the country. The Bergson activists also sponsored more than two hundred newspaper advertisements urging the United States government to rescue the refugees.”[7]
The identification of an absurdity is something that should make any rational person stop, for it is evidence that something important remains to be properly understood. But I have not shown you one yet -- so far this all makes sense. If the European Jews were being exterminated, it was perfectly natural for Jews who were in safety to try to do something about it. Jewish unity was equally to be expected, and in fact the Bergson effort brought together “an interesting array of hasidic rabbis side by side with rabbis known as mitnagdim, the traditional theological critics of Hasidism.” In other words, important differences were set aside in the Bergson effort because the Jewish people was being exterminated in Europe and unity was more important. The above does not contain absurdities: the Bergson effort made perfect sense.
No, the absurdity is here, in the article’s next sentence:
“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke anti-Semitism.”
Ponder that. What could be the most extreme consequence of anti-Semitism? Why, an anti-Jewish genocide. So what could “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” fear might happen? The Jewish people was already being exterminated.
There is a joke told of two Jews, right before they are killed:
“Sam and Irving are facing the firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the blindfold on them. Sam disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing the thing from his face. Irving turns to him and pleads: ‘Please Sam, don’t make trouble!’”
The structure of this joke is identical to what happened when Peter Bergson tried to pressure the US government to save Jewish lives in Europe, causing “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” to say to his protesting rabbis: “Please, don’t make trouble.” The joke makes fun of a pathology of reasoning but the extermination of the Jewish people is not funny; if we do not want more exterminations of the Jewish people, we must understand this pathology of reasoning.
There is a promise in the above joke, and in that promise is locked a hope of mine. The joke is Jewish not only because it depicts Jews but because it is told by Jews (it is quite famous, and I heard it first from a Jewish friend). This is important, because by telling this joke Jews demonstrate that they are - at some level - aware that a certain pathology of reasoning makes their self-defence difficult.[7a] I have reason to hope, therefore, that a more careful reflection may be possible for the Jewish people before it is too late again. But we must move to a level of analysis considerably more sophisticated than the passing joke. And then there must be action.
Let us now return to the Wyman Institute piece and look the full absurdity in the face:
“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke anti-Semitism. …Yet there were also pockets of sympathy for the Bergson group within the Jewish leadership.”
Given that the death factories from Auschwitz to Jasenovac were at that very minute busy murdering millions of innocent Jews, and billowing with smoke, where would you expect to find mere “pockets of sympathy” for those protesting this outrage? In a mostly antisemitic population. But the population in question here is “the Jewish leadership.”
“[the Bergson march] was to be the only rally in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust [but t]he idea of Jews marching through streets of the nation’s capital, promoting specifically Jewish requests such as rescue, especially during wartime, was anathema to mainstream Jewish leaders.”
The above does not make one little bit of sense. Why is the idea of rescue odious “especially during wartime”? Are people supposed to be rescued in peacetime? And why is “the only rally [!] in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust” a “specifically Jewish request”? It isn’t. This was a crime against humanity.
You see, the problem is not merely that the reaction of the Jewish leadership was absurd, but that the author chronicling this reaction writes absurdly. After all, given that the Jewish people was already being exterminated, the right thing to do here was obvious. So how could the request for rescue be “anathema” to mainstream Jewish leaders? What in the world were they for, as Jewish leaders, if they could not find it in themselves to oppose an anti-Jewish genocide?
It is significant that the author, Rafael Medoff, directs the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and also that he is one of the few people to do significant research on the Bergson effort. If he finds it difficult to write in a sensible manner, then it is unlikely that the majority of the Jewish people can learn from their own history. An institute of Holocaust studies should straightforwardly refute the arguments that supported the reasoning of Bergson's opponents, and which contributed to the deaths of millions. This is what I am doing here. My task is not difficult, because the issue is very clear, and the facts speak very loudly.
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Why Peter Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong.
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