My father quoted an article that had just been published in the Hebrew-language monthly Bitzaron (Fortress) titled “The Assault on Washington.” Its pseudonymous author (“Bar Bei Rav”) ridiculed the rabbis of the delegation for their appearance – peyos, beards, kapotes, shtreimlech, and gartelen.
President Roosevelt, said the taunting author, shut the rabbis out of the White House because he was not interested in discussing minutiae of halacha (Jewish ritual law), implying that the members of this delegation would have been incompetent to discuss any other subject with the President. The heavy-handed Hebrew satirist added that Vice President Henry Wallace surely conversed with them about the honor due to Torah.
“I was in Washington and participated in the ‘March,’ “ wrote my father. “The calm and respectful demonstration reflected Jewish suffering and our terrible churban (destruction).” My father was angry that a Jewish journal – particularly one directed to intellectuals – could so callously demean the event.
He asked: “Zenen mir take in ganzen hefker?” (Are we truly so totally irresponsible?) “Jews are murdered in cold blood and rabbis join together to travel to Washington before Yom Kippur, and one makes them objects of ridicule!”
My father would have been dismayed to learn that the views expressed in Bitzaron were also the views of Samuel Rosenman, the president’s closest Jewish adviser. Rosenman told his boss that the delegation was “a group of rabbis who just recently left the darkest period of the medieval world.”
Rosenman was wrong. History has judged them to be revered spiritual leaders who were trying to avert the darkest period of the modern world.