It is enough to blame the Gentiles

The behavior of the Jewish leadership in the free world during the Holocaust must be dealt with

Becky Cook

January 17 marks the anniversary of Raul Wallenberg's disappearance. The Knesset noted this at a state event, the first of its kind. The event was dignified and restrained. The speakers seemed pleased with him and themselves. Words of praise were spoken about Wallenberg, slanderous words were spoken against the Russians and against the rest of the world, which abandoned Wallenberg in his time of great need. And the conclusion: it's time to educate our children about his heroic stories.

Why haven't our children been educated about these stories until now? The special ceremony passed without a single word of self-criticism, not even a hint of questioning our ways of dealing with the memory of the Holocaust, not even a note of soul-searching. At the ceremony, Haim Hecht's film ("One Flight for Us"), which was screened recently on Channel Two, about the inaction of the American government during the Holocaust, was mentioned.

Power and sovereignty are probably the right and just answer to the Holocaust. There is almost no debate about this today. But power requires soul-searching. And the greater the power, the sharper the reckoning must be. The story of "the neglect of the Jews" contains another story, no less important in its implications for our identity as a nation, and it is the story of the leaders of world Jewry in general, and American Jewry in particular, during the Holocaust: about the heroic actions of some, and the shameful neglect by others.

Hecht relies on the familiar and convenient narrative: the anti-Semitism and evil of the gentiles cross borders and seas and reach every good part, including the USA. And indeed, the Americans did not do what could have been done - to try to stop the mass murder of European Jews. Saving Jews was not defined as a war goal of the Allies, and thus any possible action aimed at saving them was seen as thwarting, rather than promoting, the goals of the war against the Nazis.

True, the American State Department was steeped in anti-Semitism, which thwarted attempts to rescue Jews and remove them from Europe out of grave concern that they would eventually end up in the US. But what is forgotten is that for the most part the leaders of American Jewry, the largest Jewish community in the free world, exerted very weak pressure on the American government to act for the rescue. They very politely accepted the Roosevelt administration's claim that the only way to save Jews was to win the war. It is a fact that since 1943, the financial community of the Jewish community in the free world determined that the great effort must be aimed at opening the gates of the Land of Israel in order to guarantee Israel's sovereignty after the war. For them, the great effort should be aimed at the future, because the present - for the millions of remaining Jews in Europe - is already lost.

The leaders of the community undoubtedly felt great pain the destruction of their brothers, and in most cases their relatives, in Europe. There were also organizations, such as the Orthodox Rescue Committee, that worked to save Jews. Great leaders like Abba Hillel Silver also tried to arouse the compassion of the American leadership for the plight of European Jews. But these protest attempts were mostly polite and quiet.

No established American Jewish leader went on a hunger sabbath, raised a loud protest, or tore his clothes in sorrow at the destruction of European Jewry. Furthermore, many of them worked vigorously to thwart the attempts of other Jews (and non-Jews), as these caused a commotion and disturbed the peace. This is how they acted against Hillel Kook, my father, and against the committee he founded - the Committee to Save the Jews of Europe - which exerted unceasing loud pressure on the American government and public: through large ads in hundreds of newspapers; through a protest of 400 rabbis in Washington; through the production of huge shows in major cities in the USA; through recruiting hundreds of members of Congress and dozens of celebrities, such as Marlon Brando, Kurt Weill and Dorothy Parker, to support the committee and its goals; And finally, through the demand from the government to establish a special body to deal with rescue matters - the War Refugee Board - a body that was responsible, among other things, for sending Wallenberg to Budapest.

The great question that was not asked is: if the Jewish leadership in the USA did not scream loudly for salvation, why should the gentiles scream and act?

Just as the Holocaust revealed the ultimate evil, it also revealed the ultimate good - the nobility of soul, sacrifice and the ability to resist. The ability to oppose not only evil but also the opacity of institutions such as the American State Department, and such as, it is unpleasant to say, the World Zionist Organization and the American Jewish Committee.

The Israeli people do not educate their children on the knees of stories of heroism and resistance of great people in the US and Europe, such as Wallenberg himself, and thus they lose a historic opportunity to educate the generations to responsibility, individualism and resourcefulness, all those qualities that can only be used to fight against evil. We are not comfortable telling the story of these people because it requires dealing with those people and entities that did not act, or did not act enough. Such a confrontation, sooner or later, will lead to a serious discussion of the crisis that befell the Zionist and Jewish leadership in the free world during the most difficult time for the Jewish people.

The author is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University