The Jews and the Fleas

By Steve Rodan

Shlomo Zalman Shragai held a life-long passion for the Land of Israel. The son of a Hasidic family, he married his sweetheart in Poland in 1924 and months later arrived in the British mandate of Palestine. Shragai was also a committed Zionist and attended every congress by the movement from 1929. He was a member of the Jewish Agency as well as the Vaad Leumi, or National Committee, touted as the parliament of the Jewish people in Palestine.

In September 1943, Shragai concluded that the Third Reich was falling, and the prospects of rescuing more than a few Jews were genuine. He lobbied for a meeting of the Zionist leadership that would for the first time discuss how to rescue the doomed Jews of Europe and how much it would cost.

"The time has come to do more than mourn," Shragai, who held a news conference in Jerusalem, said. "Money can save." [1]

Not interested

Shragai gathered numerous rabbis and other public figures to lobby the Zionist leadership to launch the first serious rescue effort of World War II. For the last four years, the Jews in Palestine watched the German slaughter of their relatives in Poland and the rest of Hitler-occupied Europe. The Zionist leadership, working with British authorities, did not permit a protest campaign or labor strike. The Zionist newspapers usually censored the or distorted the Nazi genocide, even saying that the world was not interested. [2]

The Zionist leadership had no intention of moving toward Jewish rescue. They, however, were interested in the fundraising campaign launched by Shragai. The Jewish community in Palestine, known in Hebrew as the Yishuv, sought to raise at least 250,000 lira, well over $1 million. The campaign was based on the assessment of Zionist and Jewish emissaries in Turkey that the Germans, particularly after the massive defeat at Stalingrad, could be bought.

There were other options: One was to bolster the Jewish underground in Poland. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in May 1943, thousands of Jews were joining Soviet-sponsored partisan groups and operating on their own to blow up bridges and kill Germans. One Jewish commando unit in the Lublin region contained 300 fighters. [3]

The leaders assigned to oversee Shragai were the most trusted members of the Zionist leadership. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi had been working with David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann from World War I. He was head of the Vaad Leumi and ensured that it would never go beyond a rubber stamp for Ben-Gurion and the ruling Mapai Party. To prevent surprises, Ben-Zvi, eventually the second president of the State of Israel, foiled any attempt at elections since 1931.

Moshe Shertok was the head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department and liked to think of himself as the foreign minister of the Zionist movement. Shertok, later the second prime minister of Israel, was regarded as Ben-Gurion's chief aide and assigned to monitor the Zionist dialogue with Germany, conducted mostly in Istanbul.

The aim of the special session of the Vaad Leumi on Sept. 15 was to persuade the Zionist leadership to use their contacts, influence and money to stop the Final Solution. But Shragai also wanted an accounting of the millions of dollars raised by the leadership for Jewish rescue. Where did the money go? Why couldn't the leadership show any results? Even Ben-Gurion's Histadrut trade federation was asking questions.

Ben-Zvi addressed the conference and agreed that there were opportunities to save Jews. He cited the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in Romania, now moving away from the Axis. He talked about the tens of thousands of survivors still in Bulgaria. He did not cite Hungary, which was already being threatened by Hitler and within less than six months would be invaded by the Wehrmacht and SS.

Hungary was special -- an arena of German-Zionist cooperation since at least 1941. The Zionist leadership was working with the SS and Gestapo in transferring money, orders that ensured that the Germans would know every hideout left in Warsaw and other Polish cities. The SS' Adolf Eichmann was in communication with the leadership as well as the so-called Rescue Committee in Budapest, which turned into the key facilitator of the Final Solution in Hungary.

As a result, the mission of the Zionist leadership was to raise funds for rescue and pocket the cash. The policy continued even as up to 14,000 Jews a day were being transported by train from Hungary to Auschwitz and gassed that very day. Ben-Gurion would tell his colleagues in the Jewish Agency that rescue was impossible while telling the Jews that more money was needed.

Many in the leadership understood the need to lie. German-Zionist cooperation was built on facilitating the Final Solution, denying genocide and foiling any attempts at rescue. Sometimes, some of the Zionists themselves needed to be reminded of this. Any attempt would be reserved for a Zionist rather than a Jew. There was a difference.

Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. The two are different, certainly contradictory. When a person cannot be a Jew he becomes a Zionist. Zionism begins from the destruction of Judaism, where the power of the people is exhausted... [4]

Chaim Hazaz, who asserted that Zionism was meant to "uproot" Judaism, elaborated the movement's dogma in his book "Holocaust from Heaven," published by the Histadrut's Am Oved. The work was quoted in Haaretz in September 1943 as Shragai was intensifying his rescue campaign. Hazaz was celebrated as a leading thinker of the Zionist movement and Haaretz was its most prestigious organ.

The Zionist exploitation of rescue continued until the end of the war. During the last months of the war, Hungarian Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner, in contact with Shertok and Ben-Gurion, appealed for millions of dollars for his SS partner, Col. Kurt Becher, to rescue Jews. The Jewish Agency and other emissaries in Istanbul, who monitored Kastner, knew this was merely a ploy to share money with the Germans.

Cynical game

But resentment grew that the Zionist leadership were playing this cynical game. At one point, a veritable revolt threatened to divide the Jewish Agency mission in Istanbul over the issue of rescue. Finally, the leadership sent a leading emissary to Istanbul to meet with staffers and explain policy. The visitor from Jerusalem, who was never identified, sat up all night with the Istanbul delegation to convince them that the Zionists could not allow the Jewish masses to reach Palestine.

Here, the emissary reflected that which Hazaz said months earlier. The Jews were of no value. Indeed, the observant Jews could not even be seen as human. They were fleas that could not be touched. If you would place fleas in cotton, they would multiply and infect everyone.

The bottom line: the Zionist would and must not rescue Jews, rather those aligned with Mapai and its secular allies. That meant that Orthodox Jews as well as the elderly and impoverished must be kept out of Palestine regardless of the cost.

The Istanbul staffers kept quiet. [5]

Notes

1. "This Morning: A Special Rescue Session of the Assembly of the Elected. Haaretz. Sept. 15, 1943. Page 1.

2. "So Short Is Our Reach." Hatsofe, Aug. 2, 1943.

3. "Guerrilla Fighters in Poland". Haaretz, Sept. 24, 1943. Page 6.

4. Holocaust from Heaven. Chaim Hazaz. Page 81. Am Oved, Tel Aviv.

5. Yigal Ben-David, a former Jewish Agency representative, in the film Herzl and Zionism, banned in Israel. הרצל והציונות - הסרט המלא!! (youtube.com)

Below: Chaim Hazaz in 1942.