An Anniversary of Shame

By Steve Rodan

This is an anniversary in which all of the leading players are dead and the few survivors would rather forget.

Eighty years ago, the American Jewish leadership faced their first major test of their commitment to their European brethren. Hitler had conquered most of Europe, built ghettos for the Jews and began the transports to what soon would be the death camps. His strategy was to starve the Jews into complete apathy before sending them to the gas chambers.

The question for American Jews was whether they could keep their brethren alive until the war situation changed. On paper, American Jews were powerful. Millions of them were concentrated in key states and, in a close election, capable of deciding the next president. The Jewish vote became a critical factor in at least four states – New York, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania, or nearly a quarter of the Electoral College.

"The Jews are a major force in America and their votes have great weight," Werner Senator, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive, said in March 1940. "And, they wield great influence in the press, commerce, theater, science, etc. So far, not enough has been done to consolidate this power to pressure the government. And this is what we have to do now in America."

The problem was that Britain was opposed to any aid to the Jews in occupied Europe. Churchill claimed that food parcels would be stolen by the Germans and help them in their offensive. Still, during the first two years of the war, several Jewish groups sent aid to the ghettos. Until December 1941, about 100,000 parcels were sent from the United States to the Jews in Poland. The Joint Distribution Committee played a major role and helped establish Jewish Self-Help, known by its Polish acronym, ZSS. In 1941, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada set up the Emergency Committee for War-Torn Yeshivas, later known as the Rescue Committee or Vaad Hatzalah. The rabbinical group sent thousands of parcels to the Jewish ghettos in Poland, many of which were believed to have reached the starving civilians.

This was too much for Churchill. In August 1940, after the fall of France, the prime minister announced plans to block all shipments to Nazi-occupied countries regardless of the cost to civilians. Their death would simply be blamed on Hitler. By March 1941, the British embassy in Washington urged Congress to enforce a similar ban. Over the next two years, Britain rebuffed all requests to help the Jews, including one that would classify those in Poland as prisoners of war, a group that remained eligible for food and other aid. London also pressed U.S. Jewish organizations to halt supplies.

In early 1941, the World Jewish Congress capitulated. Months later, JDC followed, and, with that, its vast network of soup kitchens in the Warsaw ghetto was shut down. The last to capitulate was Agudath Israel of America, which had sent thousands of packages a month at the cut-rate price of $5.25 per unit.

British pressure was augmented by Zionist organizations, the most loyal to Churchill. The campaign was led by Joseph Tenenbaum, a Zionist leader and associate of Stephen Wise, deemed the most powerful Jew in America. His biggest target was Orthodox rabbis, particularly those from Europe, whom he termed a “sickly weed transplanted on these liberal shores.” Tenenbaum saw them as hypocrites, “who, although they speak of Torah and prayer with pious glances, yet…a dollar is a dollar.” He argued that he was not against the starving Jews. But he insisted that the Jews could not oppose Britain.

"Anything which will hinder the British war effort is contrary to the interests of the Jewish people," Tenenbaum wrote. "We must not as a people or organization cause suspicion that we are a unique, solitary people."

Tenenbaum’s reference to the rabbis was Aharon Kotler, a leading talmudical scholar and rescued during the war. Once in America, the rabbi, who founded a seminary in Lakewood, N.J., stopped at nothing to save those left behind. His first words to the group of prominent rabbis who greeted him as he disembarked at Penn Station in New York in April 1941 were unyielding. “European Jewry is being consumed in fire,” the rabbi said in Yiddish, “and the yeshivas have been destroyed. There is not much time left. Only you, the Jews of America, can save them. Now, there isn’t a second to waste. Save them.” The following day, Kotler called each of the rabbis and asked what he had done to rescue Jews.

By November 1941, Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Lord Halifax, who regularly met American Jewish leaders, warned Agudah of reprisals against Jewish refugees in his country. He implied that thousands of Jews would be arrested. The British threats stopped Agudah’s official relief program.

In 1943, Agudah sought to resume sending parcels through the International Committee of the Red Cross in cooperation with the U.S. government. Again, the Zionist network intervened. The Zionists, in conjunction with the British embassy and the State Department, claimed that the German branch of ICRC would receive the food aid, a violation of the blockade on Nazi-occupied Europe. By this time, the Warsaw ghetto had been decimated and Agudah sought to save the remaining Jews in Cracow. The organization’s proposal was rejected despite a guarantee by ICRC that the food parcels would reach the Polish city.

The Agudah plan was promoted by Issac Lewin. A professor at Yeshiva University, Lewin predicted that Berlin would not confiscate the food shipments and undermine its propaganda that the Jews of Poland were being well-treated. He warned that the Jews in Cracow faced starvation because of the inaction of their coreligionists in America. Some in Congress agreed.

“We have been told that the Germans would be willing to relax the blockade sufficiently to permit food for children to go through,” Rep. John Vorys, a Republican from Ohio, told Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long in an executive session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in November 1943. “There have been experiments to show that this food would go through and get to the children and not get to the Germans and would not be a substitute for German food."

As it turned out, the Allied embargo applied nearly exclusively to the Jews. As the ghettos starved, the British, in coordination with Washington, allowed ICRC to send ships loaded with grain to Nazi-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia. The British agreed to lift the Allied blockade in face of public pressure in Europe and the United States. The first monthly ICRC shipment to Greece took place in September 1942, which brought 17,500 tons of grain from Turkey. The Germans agreed not to block the deliveries and kept their word.

The British also supported rescue -- as long as it didn't involve Jews. London saved hundreds of thousands of people trapped in Poland and other Nazi-occupied countries. The great majority of them were gentiles, evacuated by the British and U.S. navies from Europe to the Middle East. Many of them came to Palestine as soldiers of exiled armies, now adopted by Britain. Others were refugees from Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland and Yugoslavia. For gentile refugees, there was no shortage of ships.

Many leading Americans could not understand the passivity of the Jewish leadership. They advised the Jews to protest -- loudly and vigorously. In the spring of 1943, Vice President Henry Wallace invited Peter Bergson and his chief lobbyist, Baruch Rabinowitz, to the White House. Bergson was the gadfly of the American Jewish community, placing huge ads in newspapers that told of the Holocaust and rescue proposals.

During their meeting, Wallace and Bergson discussed ways to save the Jews from Hitler. At one point, the vice president's aide, Harold Young proposed a sit-in by 500,000 people outside the White House that would paralyze Washington. The demand by the protesters would be Roosevelt’s promise to save the Jews. Bergson was uncertain whether this was feasible. He asked whether such a large number of demonstrators could board the trains to Washington during wartime. Young was disgusted.

"That’s the trouble with you Jews," Young said. "You always want to appear as gentlemen."

For decades, the American Jewish leadership refused to acknowledge any mistakes in their wartime behavior. Most insisted that they were powerless and could do nothing other than support the Allies, even if that meant the decimation of European Jews.

The exception was Nahum Goldmann, for years the right-hand man of Wise and who torpedoed rescue efforts during the war. In April 1964, Goldmann addressed a memorial in Paris for the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He predicted that Jewish history would judge him and the entire generation who lived in the United States as guilty of failing their European brethren.

“We did not do so, because the majority of Jewish leaders then were of the opinion that they should not interfere with the free world’s war effort against the Nazis with stormy protests," Goldmann said. "Therefore we should not transfer the guilt to those who suffered and paid with their lives. If there is a basis to the historical ‘I accuse’, let us have the courage now to direct it against that part of the generation which was lucky enough to be outside of the Nazi domination and did not fulfill its obligation toward the millions killed.”

[This article was presented to two major mainstream Jewish news sites. They both rejected the piece without comment.]