Universal Love With One Exception

By Steve Rodan

Their creed has been universal love and justice. For well over a century, they operated organizations, lobbying groups and spent millions helping America's downtrodden. That was their religion.

World War II proved to be an exception to the credo of the Reform Jewish movement. The movement's leadership at best ignored the Holocaust and often sabotaged rescue efforts by other Jews, particularly the Orthodox Jewish community.

In the end, this marked the price of maintaining the place of the Reform leadership in American society.

The Reform movement began in Germany in the 18th Century, a renewal of sects that abandoned rabbinical Judaism to assimilate into Christian society. In the mid-19th Century, the movement was established in the United States by Issac Wise. The temple replaced the synagogue. English shoved aside Hebrew in the liturgy. The seventh rest of day was reserved for recreation.

“Eager to participate and demonstrate to their neighbors what loyal and productive citizens they could be, many Jews decided to jettison kashrut [Jewish dietary laws] and other traditional laws and practices which prohibited them from eating at the homes of their gentile friends or attending social gatherings at cafés,” Lawrence Englander, a leading Reform rabbi, wrote in an essay titled "History of Reform Judaism and a Look Ahead: In Search of Belonging." "They were embarrassed, too, should neighbors accustomed to the decorum of the Protestant or Catholic church visit the synagogue and witness a spectacle of men wrapped in strange prayer shawls noisily davening [praying] a repetitive liturgy while children tore up and down the aisles."

The embarrassment proved to be a boon for Hitler's Final Solution. Reform rabbis were instructed to remain docile American citizens and do nothing to push Washington to rescue the Jews of Europe. The movement was headed by Stephen Wise, who in 1922 founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, which trained rabbis for Reform congregations, a more traditional alternative to Hebrew Union College. For some 15 years, Wise was seen as king of the Jews, wielding easy access to the White House and State Department. He controlled some seven major Jewish organizations, which he used to garner votes for the man he called the "boss," President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It would be difficult to exaggerate Wise's sabotage of Jewish rescue. His failure to use his extensive political contacts was seen in his refusal to lobby for the entry of the refugee ship St. Louis in the United States in 1938; his betrayal of the Wagner-Rogers bill in 1939, which called for the admission of 20,000 German refugee children.

Wise was directed by FDR, who before World War II established a secret panel to examine the possibility of deporting Jews from America. In November 1939, two months after the Germans invaded Poland, the rabbi condemned rescue efforts by anybody other than the Jewish Agency, which, loyal to Britain, did virtually nothing for Europe's Jews. In 1940, Wise fought a proposal by Revisionist Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky to establish a Jewish army to fight Hitler and urged British ambassador Lord Lothian to do the same. In August of that year, Wise rejected any possibility of mass rescue and opposed pressure on the Roosevelt administration to issue visas. In February 1943, Wise denied that Romania, an ally of Hitler, was offering to release 70,000 Jews for ransom.

When a group of Jews from Palestine began to lobby the administration and American people, Wise used every means to stop their efforts. From April 1941, he worked with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to find ways to deport such activists as Peter Bergson and Samuel Merlin.

Perhaps the height of Wise's obstruction was in October 1943. Bergson had organized hundreds of rabbis to march to Congress and the White House to appeal for the doomed in Europe. Wise ensured that neither Reform nor Conservative rabbis would participate. The 500 rabbis who demonstrated were all Orthodox.

On Oct. 6, the day of the march, Wise and his sidekick, World Jewish Congress founder Nahum Goldmann, met the State Department's Breckinridge Long, one of the worst anti-Semites in the administration and who fought any Jewish entry. The message by Wise and Goldmann was that Bergson did not represent "Jewish thinking" in America.

Wise had many enemies, including in the Reform movement. But virtually all of his rabbinical colleagues agreed that the Jews under Hitler were not worth endangering their privileged position in American society. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver fought Wise tooth and nail for control of the Zionist movement. But even in May 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, Silver did not see Jewish rescue as a priority.

"We should place increased emphasis on fundamental Zionist ideology," Silver told the American Zionist Emergency Council.

Like Wise, Silver knew early in the war that Hitler was killing hundreds of thousands of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. In his 1941 book "The World Crisis and Jewish Survival," Silver acknowledged German extermination, but expressed confidence that it would remain limited, perhaps only to Germany and even there die down.

"The annihilationist policy of the Nazis is not likely to become the norm which will fix the actual relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the days to come," Silver wrote. "Such policies never assume world-wide dimensions. The Jewish dispersion is too far-flung for one policy to embrace it all. What should, therefore, concern us today is not whether the Jewish people will survive, but how."

Wise and Silver ensured that the Reform movement opposed any rescue initiative. This included a resolution by Congress in late 1943, a proposal condemned from the pulpits of Reform temples.

The Central Conference of American Rabbis ignored the Holocaust. In its convention in February 1942, the Reform organization issued a lengthy statement on "The War and Our Peace Tradition." There was nothing in the statement or in the ensuing discussions regarding the Final Solution.

A leading ally of the Reform movement was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times. Sulzberger, a descendant of Issac Wise and close to Roosevelt, frequently addressed Reform congregations and invested much energy in concealing Hitler's persecution and then extermination of the Jews. Although he brought in dozens of his relatives, he used his newspaper to stop Jewish immigration to both the United States and Palestine. His credo was that Jews "were neither a race nor a people" and must reject "all manifestations of separatism, whether in social clubs, charity groups or political movements."

After the death of more than a third of the Jewish nation, the Reform movement remained stoic. Leo Baeck had been the Reform leader in Germany before and during World War II. He supported Hitler's Jewish police, concealed the murderous plans from his flock and advised them to board the trains to the gas chambers. In January 1943, with the decimation of the Jewish community in Germany and Austria, Baeck was sent to Theresienstadt, where he was appointed "honorary head" of the Judenrat. As a "prominent" inmate, Baeck was given superior housing and more food.

After the war, Baeck went to London to head the world Reform movement. He became what was termed a "cultural Zionist." But he refused to discuss or examine the Holocaust, particularly his collaboration with the Final Solution. When he died in November 1956, German President Theodor Heuss sent a wreath to the funeral.

Wise died in 1949 at the age of 75. He and later his aides made sure to remove anything from his files thought to incriminate the rabbi in the abandonment of Hitler's victims. The State of Israel named a street in Jerusalem after him.

Sulzberger eventually disassociated from the Reform movement, which he found too close to Zionism and the new State of Israel. After the war, he helped establish the American Council of Judaism, a government-backed group of anti-Zionist rabbis who assured Holocaust survivors that the Final Solution had been an "aberration" and that they should return to Germany and Poland.

"Reform Judaism doesn't demand much, but too much contact with it has drawn me far away from it..." Sulzberger wrote in 1959.

Today, the Reform leadership has come no closer to any soul-searching. But time has exacted an accounting. With more than 70 percent intermarriage, the American movement, largely a tool of the Democratic Party, has dwindled to the elderly and professionals. Earlier this year, the Reform movement closed its flagship rabbinical seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. There was simply no need for a seminary at a time when Reform temples have been closing because of lack of membership.

Edward Luttwak has been regarded as one of the leading strategists in America. The 79-year-old author and consultant is also a Jew who minces few words on the future of the community.

"American Jews are in transition on their way to disappearance," Luttwalk told the online magazine, Tablet, on June 13, 2022. "What you’re seeing is the disintegration of the community. The reason why there are Reform synagogues here is to gently convey people into non-Judaism. The ones who are Orthodox but wear suits and ties, the doctors and lawyers, are dying out too. Phenomena like J Street are part of that. Anybody who is associated with J Street, even if they are totally obtuse after a while, must realize that it exists in order to provide legitimacy for communal euthanasia."

Below: Reform rabbis with Martin Luther King in 1965/