Sixty-two years ago on Oct. 6, more than four hundred rabbis from around the country marched in Washington, D.C., to plead with President Franklin Roosevelt for action to rescue Europe’s Jews. It was the only such rally in the nation’s capitol during the Holocaust.
The marchers included many rabbinical giants of the era, among them Eliezer Silver and Israel Rosenberg, co-presidents of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis; Solomon Friedman (the Boyaner Rebbe), president of the Union of Grand Rabbis; and Bernard Levinthal, known as the Chief Rabbi of Philadelphia. Also present were a number of younger scholars who would later emerge as leaders, including Moshe Feinstein.
Three days before Yom Kippur, they left their homes and pulpits to travel to Washington, in some cases coming from as far away as Ohio, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
Some prominent Jews feared the march would embarrass the president or stir anti-Semitism. Congressman Sol Bloom of New York, a staunch supporter of the State Department’s refugee policy, argued that “it would be very undignified for a group of such un-American looking people to appear in Washington.”
One of President Roosevelt’s closest advisers and speech-writers, American Jewish Committee member Samuel Rosenman, urged FDR to avoid the rabbis, and regretted that he had been unable “to keep the horde from storming Washington.”
American Jewish Congress president Dr. Stephen Wise condemned the march as “a painful and even lamentable exhibition.”
Six decades later, the rabbis who took part in that protest are under attack again. A new book, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust by attorney Robert N. Rosen, denigrates the rabbis and praises President Roosevelt for refusing to meet them.
Rosen mocks the rabbis as “foreign-looking” with “their long black velvet coats, big hats, and Hasidic garb.” (In fact, many – perhaps most – of the rabbis were not chassidim, and they were not all dressed alike.) It was natural, according to Rosen, that FDR was not interested in “seeing a group of Orthodox rabbis sent by an unpopular, unrepresentative Palestinian terrorist front group.”
The “terrorists” to whom Rosen refers are the Bergson Group, a political action committee headed by Hillel Kook (nephew of Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook), better known as Peter Bergson. The Bergson activists conceived the march and collaborated with the Union of Orthodox Rabbis to bring the marchers to Washington.
Prior to World War II, Kook had been involved with the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the militant Zionist underground group in British Mandatory Palestine. When Kook came to the U.S. in 1940 (and adopted the name Bergson), he chose to undertake his own independent activism. The Irgun, meanwhile, hd declared a truce with the British at the outbreak of the war, and was almost completely inactive for the next four years.
The link between Bergson and the Irgun is thus irrelevant to the story, but Rosen is obsessed with pinning the “Irgun” label on him and his colleagues. Rosen cannot even bring himself to use the names that historians normally use, such as “Bergson Group” or “Bergsonites.” Instead, Rosen continually refers to them as “Irgunists” – in one 17-page span, he uses that term no less than twenty-five times.
By emphasizing Bergson’s Irgun link, regardless of how dormant that link was, Rosen is able to smear the Bergson Group as “terrorists.” This sleight of hand, in turn, justifies FDR’s snub of the rabbis: according to Rosen, FDR spurned them because “he did not want to raise the stature of the Irgun.”
In fact, there is no record of Roosevelt ever mentioning the Irgun in his remarks on Jewish subjects, and indeed he may never even have heard of it, given its inactivity during that period. What Roosevelt really did not want to raise was the stature of those who were asking legitimate questions about his refusal to lift a finger (as Fowler Harper of the Interior Department once put it) to help Europe’s Jews.
