The first yahrzeit of Rabbi Herzel Kranz, z”l, of Silver Spring MD, will be on 14 Tevet (January 14). In memory of Rabbi Kranz, the Jewish Press presents this exclusive interview with Dr. Rafael Medoff, a leading historian of American Zionism, concerning a previously unknown chapter in Rabbi Kranz’s illustrious life of activism.
The Jewish Press: We tend to think of President Harry Truman as a great friend of Israel and Zionism, since he recognized the State of Israel just minutes after it was proclaimed. So why did he impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state during the 1948 War of Independence?
Dr. Medoff: Truman was anxious to keep the United States out of the Middle East conflict, so he maintained a strict embargo on military supplies to the region. In theory, it was “even-handed” – the U.S. didn’t send weapons to the Arabs, either. But the Arabs already had fully-equipped military forces, and they had assistance from the British and other sources. So that left the Jews scrambling to find weapons to fight off five invading Arab armies.
How did American Jews respond?
American Jewish groups protested against the embargo, but to no avail. So some of them turned to smuggling weapons to the newborn Jewish state.
Who organized the arms smuggling?
Both the Haganah and the Irgun Zvai Leumi organized underground networks to gather weapons and send them overseas. I once interviewed someone whose family had owned a store that sold flooring materials in lower Manhattan in the 1940s. He described how Jewish veterans of World War II who returned to America with guns, which they had taken as souvenirs, brought the weapons to the store, to be hidden in large rolls of linoleum. At night, “fellows from Palestine” – they never knew their names or anything about them – would come get the guns, pack them up in crates, and whisk them away.
I also once spoke with a woman who, as a young girl, served as a pretend mourner at “funerals” that were staged at a Jewish funeral parlor in the Bronx. The weeping “relatives” served as a disguise – the coffins were filled with weapons. The caskets were driven from the Bronx to the docks at the southern end of Manhattan, marked “For Burial in the Holy Land.” The dock workers were predominantly Irish-Americans who were sympathetic to the Zionists because their people, too, were struggling for independence from the British. They agreed not to open the coffins for inspection before loading them.
How did Rabbi Kranz become involved in this activity?
In 1948, he was an 18-year-old student at the Telz Yeshiva in Cleveland. Somehow, he caught wind of the fact that Zionist activists were looking for young men and women to help the Jewish state in unconventional ways. Herzel volunteered.
That’s not what the kind of thing you would expect a teenage yeshiva bochur to get mixed up in.
Herzel was in his first year of his rabbinical studies. He was planning for a respectable career in the rabbinate. To engage in illegal activity, especially something as serious as gun-running, meant putting his entire professional future at risk. He could have spent years in prison. One can imagine what his parents, or the rabbis at Telz, would have thought if they knew what he was doing. But Israel’s desperate plight tugged at his conscience, so he disregarded the risks.
What was he asked to do?
Herzel’s assignment was to drive a truck from Cleveland to New York City, ostensibly carrying dental equipment. But behind the equipment, hidden inside the truck’s side panels, were guns bound for Eretz Yisrael. Some of those “fellows from Palestine” met Herzel and his truck at a Manhattan dock, late at night. Together, they dismantled the truck’s panels and crated the weapons for shipping.
It’s remarkable that this story has never before come to light.
Rabbi Kranz was a humble man. He never boasted about what happened, never sought accolades or recognition. He was just glad to have played some small role in that noble cause. As a rabbi and Jewish leader in the decades to follow, Herzel Kranz would devote countless hours to Israel’s cause in more conventional ways – public speaking, fundraising, organizing, lobbying. But when the Jewish state needed daring young Jews to help in unconventional ways in 1948, he rose to that challenge, too.
