The Day the Truth Came Out
- Steven Rodan
- Dec 5, 2022
- 4 min read
By Steve Rodan
It was late 1942 and the Germans were in the midst of their genocide of the Jews. The orders were to kill Jews everywhere. An estimated one million to two million Jews in Europe were already been eliminated There would be at least another five million to go.
Reports of mass murder had long been coming out of German-occupied Poland, and for a while the British government endorsed their contents. But the British Mandate in Palestine refused to connect the dots that Hitler was exterminating the Jews.
On Nov. 23, 1942, the Jewish Agency in Palestine broke its silence. In a decision approved by Britain, the agency released a communique that acknowledged the German war against the Jews. The agency said Hitler had launched an extermination campaign in Poland in the spring following the visit to Warsaw by SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Himmler's orders were to eradicate every Jewish community in that occupied country.
"The Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem has received from authoritative and trustworthy sources detailed news on acts of killings and massacres done to the Polish Jews as well as Jews in Central and Western Europe deported to Poland," the communique read.
The Jewish Agency supplied examples of the Final Solution. Thousands of Jewish children were executed. In the Kielce ghetto, 27,000 out of 30,000 Jews were deported and never heard from again. Thousands of Jews from Brest-Litovsk were thrown into the Bug River to drown. In Bialystok, the Germans stuffed 1,500 Jews into the Great Synagogue and then torched the building.
What took the agency so long to release its report on the Holocaust? There was no attempt to explain. The communique merely blamed the world.
"The foreign-language newspapers in the world have kept silent," the communique read. "They allow only superficial news items, including the reaction of the Jews of the ghetto."
On Nov. 24, the day after the communique, Davar, the most powerful Zionist daily and run directly by Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion, insisted that the world would not care about the Jews..
"To whom should we scream?" Davar asked. "Which ear hears? Which hand is extended in help?"
And then, Davar came up with an idea that the Zionists employed throughout the war -- selection. "If it is not in our power to save from the enemy in war the adults -- let's at least save the children. They are certainly not needed by the enemy. According to every perspective, they are also not dangerous."
The Jewish Agency communique did not mark a policy of openness. On the following day, most of the Zionist-aligned media resumed the practice of burying reports of the Holocaust on the bottom of the page. There was no discussion over whether or how the Zionist leadership would respond to the largest extermination of Jews in modern times. On Nov. 25, the Palestine Post devoted all of three paragraphs to a Reuters dispatch headlined "Mass Butchery of Poland's Jews."
On its website, the Jewish Agency said the 1942 communique reflected "In Eretz Israel the first reliable news regarding the horrifying extent of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is published."
Actually, the Jewish Agency and Zionist leadership knew of the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginning of the war in September 1939. Bound by their wide-ranging economic and political agreement with Germany and its servitude to the British, the Zionist leadership pleaded ignorance while their newspapers played down or simply ignored reports of the massacre of Jews. In March 1942, the Mizrahi daily Hatsofe simply warned journalists, "Don't be so quick to pour Jewish blood in your reporting!"
On Dec. 7, 1942, Yitzhak Greenbaum, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and close to Ben-Gurion, admitted the lie. Greenbaum, who later became head of the agency's so-called rescue committee, said he knew of the German campaign to wipe out Polish Jewry during the previous summer. Asked by Jewish youth leaders, why he withheld the news, Greenbaum said he had been motivated by the welfare of the Jewish community in Palestine -- then threatened by the advance of the German Army under Gen. Erwin Rommel.
The Jewish Agency went on lying after its communique. Weeks after Greenbaum admitted to withholding news of the Final Solution, Zionist leaders insisted that the Reich had stopped the killings in Poland. After Greenbaum again acknowledged that this was a lie, the Zionist leadership regarded European Jews as decimated and no longer saw the need to raise the rescue issue. A Zionist position paper to the international conference on refugees in April 1943 even failed to recommend an end to the German killing.
On Aug. 2, 1943, Hatsofe, which regularly published stories from the Torah and sages, intimated that perhaps the Jews should simply shut up about the Final Solution.
"Many have grown sick and tired of the matter [of rescue]," Hatsofe said. "Not only the many who are not Jewish who are not overly pleased with being 'harassed' in this manner...[but also] for many Jews and members of the Yishuv in Palestine, talking about it has become a burden that is not highly desired."
Below: link of Davar's publication of the Jewish Agency communique, Nov. 23, 1942
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