The Hollow Appeals for Rescue

By Steve Rodan

Throughout 1943, the Jewish grassroots pressured their leadership to do something to stop Hitler's slaughter in Europe. News of the Final Solution was reaching the West and in November 1942 the Jewish leadership in Britain, Palestine and the United States acknowledged the rapid disappearance of their European brethren.

Despite their statements of sympathy, Jewish and Zionist leaders were determined to quell any serious pressure on the Allies for rescue. Protests were either ignored or condemned in London, Washington and Tel Aviv. Instead, the leadership chose what was termed "quiet diplomacy," appeals to Western governments unaccompanied by action by Jewish constituencies.

The Jewish leadership in the West was dominated by the Zionist movement. Throughout World War II, the movement, working closely with Britain and the United States, stopped or sabotaged mass protests, warned that lobbying for rescue would increase anti-Semitism and advised governments to ignore rescue activists, who included numerous gentiles.

Instead, the Zionist-aligned leadership engaged in gestures that they later acknowledged were empty. In London, Selig Brodetsky and Leonard Stein, wrote a letter to a British Foreign Office official that suggested the establishment of havens for the refugees -- whether in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden or Palestine.

By March 1943, when the letter was written, Brodetsky's credibility was in tatters. As head of the British Board of Deputies and a member of the Zionist Executive, he had led the opposition against such havens, including an island bought by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld. Working with Brodetsky was Stein, a top adviser to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. The result was that on March 15, the Foreign Office did nothing more than acknowledge the letter by Brodetsky and Stein.

American Jewish leaders were under greater pressure than their British counterparts. In March 1943, 75,000 people packed New York's Madison Square Garden for a rally to save Jews. Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann, the two men who dominated the organized Jewish community, sabotaged the protest campaign by scheduling competing rallies, calling on non-Orthodox rabbis to boycott marches and lobby against rescue legislation in Congress. Wise and Goldmann led an effort to deport a Palestinian Jew, Peter Bergson, who was lobbying both Congress and the Roosevelt administration to save Jews.

In Palestine, the Zionist leadership had an easier time in quelling demonstrations. Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion used the Haganah militia to stop protests against the British Mandate, which blocked Jews from arriving in Palestine under what was known as the White Paper. Moreover, Ben-Gurion dismissed as useless any expression of dissent.

But under heavy grassroots pressure Ben-Gurion acceded to a proposal for a national petition to save the Jews of Europe. The July 1943 petition was organized by the Jewish National Council, the so-called parliament which had not held elections in more than a decade. Virtually the entire Yishuv, or Jewish community, signed the petition which ended up as a paean to the empire.

"We, the children of Israel, who live in our land a life of freedom and calm, hear with great trepidation what is taking place each day and each hour to our brethren in the Exile," the petition, which did not mention the British ban on Jewish immigration, read.

The Zionist leadership tried hard to maintain the image expressed in the petition of a friendly British administration in Palestine. But the leadership faced growing anger for obeying London's diktats, whether forcing conscription to the British military by Haganah squads or pressuring Jewish women to consort with Allied soldiers. In September 1943, 28 Jews were injured in a clash with U.S. soldiers found with alleged Jewish prostitutes in Tel Aviv.

"Ever since the danger of invasion was removed by the North African victories, the Palestine Administration has consistently attempted to provoke the Yishuv to an armed uprising, hoping to prove to the outside world that Palestine Jewry is a menace to security in the Middle East and to the Allied war effort," the American Zionist Emergency Council wrote in what was termed a "confidential bulletin" on Nov. 26, 1943.

Eventually, the Zionist leadership came under the nagging feeling that they would lose control over the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout the war, the Zionists did little more than extricate a few hundred Jews in prisoner exchanges with Germany. By the summer of 1943, there were nearly no Zionists alive deemed important to rescue. Selection, the policy of the Zionists from the start, would no longer be feasible.

The concern of the leadership was that they would be forced to allow non-affiliated Jews to Palestine. The big question was would these Jews, abandoned by the Zionist movement during the war, support the status quo. The hope of the leaders was that the children of the immigrants would become loyal to the movement. Therefore, they must be the focus of any Zionist effort.

"There is no question now of carrying out a selection process among the olim [Jewish immigrants] because the members of our movement are extremely few and no pioneering movement or frameworks exist there [in occupied Europe]," Shaul Meyerov, the head of Zionist intelligence, told the Central Committee of the ruling Mapai Party on May 3, 1943. "In practice, we will have to take whatever comes, with the exception of absolutely anti-social types and incorrigible criminals. We [will] need a large dose of love for the Jewish people."

Below: Selig Brodetsky