Showing posts with label American Jewish Congress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Jewish Congress. Show all posts

Friday, July 28, 2023

By Daled Amos

If there was ever a time that Jews needed the help of the West, it was against Hitler.

And we all know how that turned out.

Put aside the refusal to bomb railroad tracks in order to slow down the transportation of Jews to their death in the concentration camps. And put aside how long it took countries to get together to make a united effort to save Jewish refugees who needed destinations in order to escape the Holocaust. 

What happened when countries did get together with the sole purpose to help Jewish refugees escape the danger and find a new home? The answer is Evian.

And the results were not pretty.

In his new book, And None Shall Make Them Afraid, Rick Richman describes "Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel" -- the stories of 8 Jews whose lives and actions contributed to the success of Zionism and the establishment of the Modern State of Israel. The 1938 Evian Conference intersects with the life of Golda Meir, who attended the conference, and the life of playwright Ben Hecht, who dealt with the Jewish leadership that followed and relied too much on world leaders they thought actually wanted to help.

The problem with Evian became clear before it even convened, starting with the invitation itself, which defined the goal as to

consider what steps can be taken to facilitate the settlement in other countries of political refugees from Germany (including Austria).

Notice that there is no mention of the identity of the refugees that the conference was supposed to help--Jews. Merely political refugees.

This avoidance was pervasive.

Richman points out:

To read the speeches of the nine-day Evian Conference, which convened on July 6, 1938, in the Hotel Royal's Grand Ballroom with 140 representatives from thirty-two countries, is to see a cascade of euphemisms, all designed to avoid using the words "Jews" (who were the subject of the Conference) and "Hitler" (who had created the problem the Conference was called to address). (p. 141, emphasis added)

This included the lack of any condemnation of Hitler or even any "message" addressed to him (p. 144).

That use of euphemisms is reminiscent of the tendency of today's media which in their headlines reduce Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis into cars that on their own volition run down Israelis --



At the conclusion of the conference, only the Dominican Republic was willing to accept Jewish refugees.

A political cartoon that depicted the situation of the Jews before the Evian Conference served as an accurate description of its result:


But Nazi Germany knew that the purpose was to help the Jews and not just refugees in general. Hitler's Foreign Office publicly gloated in response to the refusal of the participants in the Conference to offer to help:

it appears astounding that [those] countries seem in no way anxious to make use of these elements [the Jews] themselves now that the opportunity offers. (p. 148)

Richman writes about the inaction of the Conference:

It sent a signal to Hitler that no nation in the world wanted the Jews, that Palestine had effectively been closed as a place of refuge, and that German could deal internally with the Jews as it wished, without fear of even a critical resolution from the West. (p.148-149)

He notes that some historians find a connection between the failure of the Evian Conference and the Kristallnacht pogrom that occurred 4 months later. (p.149)

World leaders today are not doing much better. A look at the UN gives a snapshot of where those countries stand today.

And what about Jewish leaders?

During Kristallnacht, more than a thousand synagogues were burned and more than 7,000 businesses were destroyed. Hundreds of Jews died and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

What was the response from Jewish organizations?

Three days after Kristallnacht, the major American Jewish organizations met and formally agreed that "there should be no parades, public demonstrations or protests by Jews." They adopted a strategy of silence, out of fear that Jewish protests might lead to accusations of special pleading. [p. 158, emphasis added]

When Roosevelt condemned the pogrom 5 days later, he made no reference to Jews. What he did make were some generalized platitudes, concluding that there would be no protests and no increase in immigration quotas. The Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise wrote at the time, "At long last, America has spoken."

Someone less satisfied was the Jewish playwright Ben Hecht, who once wrote about himself, "Most of the Jews I know are, like myself, a little startled to find themselves Jews." Despite what was, up to then, a weak Jewish identification, seven months after Kristallnacht, Hecht wrote a collection of stories in a book called A Book of Miracles. It included The Little Candle, which vividly recounted an international pogrom in Germany in which half a million Jews were murdered. He became friends with Peter Bergson, a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, leading to Hecht becoming even more active.

He wrote about what was happening in Germany, getting the word out at a time when FDR was doing nothing and Jewish leadership was passive. In March 1943, he wrote a script for a pageant at Madison Square Garden entitled "We Will Never Die," highlighting the dangerous situation of Jews in Europe. It featured a number of famous Broadway stage personalities. In his autobiography, Hecht writes about a phone call he received from Rabbi Wise reaction:
I have read your pageant script and I disapprove of it. I must ask you to cancel this pageant and discontinue all your further activities on behalf of the Jews. If you wish hereafter to work for the Jewish Cause, you will please consult me and let me advise you. [p.170]
Hecht hung up on him. 

There were 2 sold-out performances the first night and 40,000 saw the pageant, with thousands more listening outside on loudspeakers. It went on to be performed in DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.

In September, Hecht wrote a poem entitled Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe, which the Bergson Group had published in an ad in The New York Times.

And again, Jewish organizations were opposed:
Both the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress opposed the ad's publication when Hecht had proposed it at the end of 1942, fearing it was too provocative. When it was ultimately published a year later, another 1 million Jews had been murdered.

During this period, the Roosevelt administration took no action whatsoever to save the European Jews. (p. 172)
Finally, in January 1944, Roosevelt took action on the advice of his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr, who informed him that the State Department was blocking aid to Jewish refugees. According to Morgenthau, if FDR did not act quickly, he would risk an election-year scandal. This is what led to the creation of the War Refugee Board.

The Board was successful in saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, but it came into existence far too late, after more than 5 million Jews had been murdered.

Jewish organizations failed.
Today, Jewish organizations again suffer from a lack of confidence.

Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, is a collection of 22 essays assembled by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser. As established in the book's Acknowledgments, there is a need to address
The failure of the American Jewish establishment to counter the growing hostility toward the Jewish community [which] is endangering Jews across the country. This failure is scandalous.

...we have weak, politicized bureaucrats too often more concerned with their social status, the perks of power, and their organizations’ financial success than with their responsibility to defend the community. As can be seen in their priorities, staffing, and programs, they seem more loyal to a progressive ideology than to the safety of Jews.
Jews and Israel can no more rely today on the nations of the world to help them than it could when those same Western countries were needed the most. By the same token, Jewish organizations cannot afford to be complacent, valuing the connections with world leaders above the best interests of the Jewish people. At a time when there is growing friction between Israel and American Jews, it is even more important for Jewish organizations to put Jews and Israel before politics and progressive ideology




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, February 13, 2023

The latest AJC report on antisemitism in America has an interesting datapoint.

There were a number of questions asked of both Jews and the general American public about antisemitism, and for most of them, the responses were very similar. For example:



Amazingly, a higher percentage of the American public (90%) feels that the statement "ISrael has no right to exist" is antisemitic than Jews! (87%)

Where they diverge is concerning, though.

34% of the American public is not familiar with classic antisemitic tropes, and therefore they don't see the problem with a statement like "Jews control the media."

The next question is even more concerning - both about the general American response and the Jewish response:


58% of Americans and even 41% of Jews don't see comparing Covid mandates to the Holocaust  as antisemitic - somehow, apparently, conflating mandatory wearing of the yellow star, as bad as that is, with gas chambers. 

A lot of people are very uneducated.And the ignorance that results can help bring about the next wave of antisemitism.






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, September 20, 2022




On October 6, 1943, a group of hundreds of Orthodox rabbis came to Washington DC to plead for the lives of their brethren in Europe.

They presented a letter to Vice President Wallace asking for a government agency to help save the remaining Jews from the Holocaust. The letter demanded that the US open its doors to Jewish refugees, that the UN create a passport that could be used for Jews to travel, and for Britain to "open the doors of Palestine."

Some of the details about this trip are outrageous. 

Dressed in long, dark rabbinic attire, the rabbis walked from Union Station to the Capitol Building. There, Rabbis Eliezer Silver, Israel Rosenberg and Bernhard Louis Levinthal led a recitation of Psalms. Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was head of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, introduced them to Vice President Henry Wallace and a number of Congressmen.

Bergson enlisted the rabbis and the American Jewish Legion of Veterans for the march. He expected American clergy would join, but none did. Only the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada, the Union of Hassidic Rabbis and a commander of the Jewish Legion participated. The modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America sent Rabbi David Silver, Rabbi Eliezer Silver’s son.

White House adviser Judge Samuel Rosenman told the president that those “behind this petition” were “not representative of the most thoughtful elements in Jewry.” The “leading Jews” Rosenman knew opposed the march, but he admitted failing to “keep the horde from storming Washington.”

A number of Jewish congressmen had attempted to dissuade the rabbis from marching. This backfired when Congressman Sol Bloom, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that “It would be undignified for these un-American looking rabbis to appear in the nation’s capital.”

At the Lincoln Memorial, the rabbis—who had declared a fast day—prayed for the welfare of the armed forces and the Jews of Europe and a quick Allied victory. Then they walked to the White House and prayed outside the gates. Though they expected to meet with the President, they were told he was unavailable. Later they learned he went to Bolling Field Air Force Base for a minor ceremony to avoid meeting them.
The era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, criticized the march in somewhat similar terms. Wise, who headed the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Zionist movement, wrote that “the orthodox rabbinical parade [ sic]” was a “painful and even lamentable exhibition.” He derided the organizers as “stuntists” and accused them of offending “the dignity of [the Jewish] people.”
The oh-so-dignified Jews were aghast that Orthodox rabbis would make a scene while pleading for the lives of Jews in Europe.  

And these self-appointed leaders were dead wrong. They thought that since they had their own access to corridors of power, they had influence in those corridors. In fact, Roosevelt didn't want to meet the rabbis specifically because he didn't want to be pressured to help save the Jewish refugees from Europe. FDR knew the power of public pressure. (His schedule that afternoon was remarkably open.) 


The vice president issued a vague, meaningless statement of support meant to get rid of these strange Jews.

And there was a more than a little self-hating from the American secular Jews in this event, as these supposed defenders of Jews in America did not want to be associated with people who looked like their grandfathers did. The Orthodox embarrassed them. Public tears to help save millions of lives is not the image they want Americans to see. 

They thought of themselves as superior, at having left their visible Judaism behind. And their conceit that they are better, and know better, than other Jews, indirectly resulted in more European Jews being murdered.

It is the same conceit that kept the daily attacks on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn out of the news cycle for so long.






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, June 16, 2022




In June, 1962, the American Jewish Congress sponsored a conference in Jerusalem about maintaining the relationship between American Jews and Israel, which they were afraid would fray within 10-20 years.

American Jews remain overwhelmingly Zionist even 60 years after those dire predictions.

Not to say we should be complacent, but it is interesting to see what the perspective was then,










Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!


 

 


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