Iran News
| Subscribe! | News Ticker |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
To their own By Marilyn Henry (May 1) -- During the Holocaust, American Orthodox rabbis insisted on preferential treatment for the Torah elite at the expense of rescue projects aimed at other Jews, according to a new book -- Worried about their counterparts at the outset of World War II, American Orthodox rabbis set out in November 1939 to save the Torah scholars and students in Europe - with apparent disregard for other endangered Jews. The Orthodox rabbis achieved important successes in their efforts to rescue the elite of the Torah world. They organized themselves as the Vaad Ha-hatzala (the Rescue Committee) and scrounged for funds, transportation, and visas for refugee rabbis and yeshiva students. The Vaad raised an estimated $2.5 million support for refugee yeshivot and, by focusing on refugee Torah scholars, ensured they were accorded special treatment by the Jewish community. But, until nearly the end of the war, they concentrated exclusively on the rescue of the European yeshiva world, bucking the general Jewish communal framework that was equally devoted to rescue, and did so in a divisive way, charges Efraim Zuroff in a scholarly new book, The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust: The Activities of the Vaad Ha-hatzala Rescue Committee, 1939-1945 (published by Yeshiva University Press and Ktav Publishing House). The Vaad alternated between a rancorous rivalry and an uneasy association with the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint), on which it was dependent and which it exhorted and exploited, according to the book. "They did not want to leave the fate of the rabbis in the hands of the leaders of the Joint, whose weltanschauung and lifestyle were so different from their own," Zuroff says in an interview. In this thickly documented book - the first to analyze American Orthodoxy's rescue efforts - Zuroff paints a mixed, but ultimately parochial, picture of the Orthodox. "There's no doubt that Orthodox leaders were extremely dedicated to rescue, and were able to achieve some concrete results," says Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. While there are no specific figures for the total number of people the Vaad helped, there is data for certain periods or events. Vaad records, for instance, indicate that its efforts led to the rescue of some 625 rabbis, yeshiva students, and members of their families via the Far East and Mandatory Palestine before the beginning of the war. The Vaad also helped some 2,600 yeshiva heads, students, community rabbis, and their families escape from Poland to Lithuania after the Soviet invasion. The Orthodox were virtually the only ones, along with the Revisionists, to take to the streets of Washington to demonstrate on behalf of European Jews. They were perhaps among the first to realize that various American regulations impeded rescue, and they were willing to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of American law, to help Jews abroad, Zuroff said. That's the good news. But, on the other hand, Zuroff contends, they insisted on preferential treatment for the Torah elite at the expense of rescue projects aimed at other Jews. "The Vaad was incredibly determined and dedicated, but also very stubborn and obsessed with its own, losing track of the larger picture," he says. "In their minds, saving the Torah equals saving the Jewish people. But it is hard to justify spending money to let people who are out of physical danger sit and learn when masses of Jews were being killed daily." When refugee rabbis and yeshiva students began arriving in Shanghai in the summer and fall of 1941, there already were some 20,000 German and Austrian refugees there. The strapped relief agencies agreed to provide them with food and rent subsidies of $5 a month per person. But officials of the Mir Yeshiva, for instance, demanded $7 a month, plus clothing and medical care. That was summarily rejected. The JDC agreed to assist the yeshiva in maintaining its distinctive lifestyle of Torah study - although, groused one official, the yeshiva's rabbis and students had "no conception of realities, limitations, or of anything else, except their own immediate problem." The Vaad's founding agency - the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the US and Canada, also known as Agudas Harabonim (which is distinct from the Orthodox Union) - had played a central role in founding one of the three components of the JDC. The intent was to create a unified fund-raising mechanism, to ensure the maximum success of a communal fund-raising appeal. However, the Vaad competed with the JDC in fund-raising, and its financial support for the Orthodox refugees did not free JDC funds to help others. "The haredim will never acknowledge this: All rabbis and yeshiva students who were rescued got help from the Joint. Some of them even had their tickets paid by the Joint," Zuroff says. "The Joint was definitely there helping rabbis and yeshiva students - not as much as the Orthodox leadership would have wanted - because the Joint had an obligation to help everyone." There also was double-dipping by the Orthodox, because the Vaad support was supplementing what the JDC provided. Take the case of the yeshiva-world refugees in Shanghai. The Vaad dispensed aid, but so did the JDC. In effect, according to Zuroff, each member of the group assisted by the Vaad received four times as much financial assistance as did other refugees. While the JDC fumed that the Vaad's fund-raising was siphoning resources that it needed itself, some local American Jewish fund-raisers also challenged the idea that priority should be accorded to rabbis and yeshiva students. "As far as I am personally concerned, I cannot see any reason on earth why these yeshiva students should be singled out for rescue any sooner than many others who lived in Europe," said one such fund-raiser, a federation leader from Chattanooga, Tennessee. "A life is a life, and the life of any layman is just as sweet to him as the life of a yeshiva student." "Perhaps if the JDC had been as convinced that the Vaad's program was essential for the survival of Judaism as were the rabbis who headed the Orthodox rescue agency, they would have adopted a more sympathetic approach to its efforts," Zuroff writes. Instead, by 1943, with its budget sorely strained, the JDC saw the Vaad "primarily as an unwelcome nuisance which was creating more problems than it solved," he writes. Until 1944, the Vaad's rescue efforts seemed to come at the expense of other threatened Jews in Europe. It was only during the last year of World War II that the Vaad attempted to save all Jews, regardless of religiosity or religious affiliation. Zuroff tells some gripping tales that leave readers skeptical of the yeshiva world's priorities in the face of hardship and danger. He recounts the extraordinary efforts to pressure Canada to accept 80 Polish Torah scholars who were refugees in Shanghai. Once the Canadian visas were granted, and transit passes collected, in August 1941, the rabbis divided the slots among the yeshivot. But only 29 Orthodox Jews were on board when the USS President Pierce left the dock at Shanghai on September 30. The 51 others - including virtually all those chosen from Mir Yeshiva - refused to travel because crossing the international date line would have obliged them to fast for what amounted to a two-day Yom Kippur, which fell that year on October 1. The 29 arrived in Canada, via California, on October 23. But the extraordinary efforts for the 51 others to leave at a later date were complicated by the lack of transportation. There were no direct routes; there were few ships, and those had uncertain schedules. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, the US entered the war, and the refugees were blocked from crossing the Pacific. They were stuck in Shanghai for the duration of the war. Zuroff, using correspondence, reports, and other archival material, finds that not only was Orthodox Jewry out for its own, but each yeshiva was out for its own. The Vaad emissary to Japan, Frank Newman, once complained of the "chauvinism and crass selfishness" of the Mir Yeshiva rabbis and students. In his opinion, they refused to take into account the situation of the other refugees. Zuroff, who earned a doctorate in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University, chronicles the agonizing dilemmas the yeshiva heads faced, and how their decisions haunt the haredi world today. "Much is made of what is commonly referred to in haredi circles as the 'miracle of the rescue of the Mir Yeshiva,'" says Zuroff. When the Vaad's work got under way, more than 20 yeshivot, with hundreds of rabbis and yeshiva students, had fled from Poland and were in Lithuania as refugees. "More than 20 yeshivot escaped, but only Mir was rescued in its entirety. Why?" Zuroff asks. "This is something that is never discussed in the yeshiva world, certainly never spoken about openly." Zuroff documents that the Mir Yeshiva, intent on staying intact, obtained exit permits and visas to Curaao for its rabbis and students in an organized fashion. The heads of other refugee yeshivot, however, opposed the use of Curaao visas. They were afraid that if they sought Soviet exit visas, the entire yeshiva would be deported to Siberia. It was a legitimate fear, Zuroff says. However, the result was that it was those who were willing to violate the advice of "Torah giants" who were able to get to the Far East. "This is one of the reasons this is never spoken about in the Orthodox world. Those who survived are those who did not take the advice of outstanding Torah scholars and ultra-Orthodox leaders," he says. "This has got to be painful. In some cases, the roshei yeshiva [yeshiva heads] who gave the advice [to reject the visas] did not themselves need the visa to Curaao, because they had visas to America. "Do you tell people who could have gotten the Curaao visas - everyone could have gotten them - to save themselves? They said 'no'; that is not an easy thing to live with." He believes that Holocaust history, not only theological belief, is one of the reasons the haredim refuse to observe Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. "What is difficult for them is the historical mistakes that were made by Orthodox leaders, people who are deferred to in an almost godly fashion," he says. "This is absurd," says Dr. David Kranzler, historian and author of several books on rescue and rescue attempts during the Holocaust. "The Orthodox leaders' efforts were extraordinary, relative to their social, economic, and politicial power in the US at that time, which was minimal. "This book is an unfair, historically anachronistic look at a group who had rescue as its top priority. And though it made mistakes, it is wrong to judge anybody from a position of hindsight. One must judge individuals by the circumstances and genuine fears they had at the time." Kranzler adds that Zuroff is not performing the job of a historian by failing to put the events in the proper context. "He doesn't understand the real basis for the conflict between the Vaad and the Joint, for example, which was basically ideological." American-born Zuroff, whose previous book is Occupation Nazi-Hunter: The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust, first began his research on Orthodox rescue in 1972, when he was a graduate student at the Hebrew University. "I was especially interested in the community I grew up in, American Jewry, and specifically American Orthodoxy. I think I wanted to prove, to show, or find what Orthodox Jewry did," says Zuroff. The new book is not intended for the general reader, but is a scholarly, historical account of the Vaad from its establishment in 1939 until January 1944. It is a narrow focus covered in great detail, and the image that emerges is an energetic and fundamentally self-absorbed group. In this respect, the haredim were no different from others who targeted their rescue efforts on specific individuals or institutions for personal, political, or ideological reasons. And the haredi focus on its own is not unique to the Shoah. It was absorbed with its own before the Holocaust, and it is a view that continues to this day. Zuroff acknowledges this. But he argues that other actors who targeted Jews for rescue, such as the Zionists, did not leave or undermine the "communal framework." More importantly, his specific focus was the Orthodox response. He concludes that the Orthodox invested enormously in their efforts to try to save the yeshiva Jews and, ultimately, every Jew. But he also contends that "they are plagued by this sectarianism and particularism that infects everything they do." It is incredibly difficult for the Orthodox to compromise any of their principles, in any way. But, he said, "For cooperation and mutual projects to be created, there has to be some sort of give on both sides. "Hopefully this book will be part of the healing process and not create further divisiveness," Zuroff says. "Before there is healing, the truth must come out." Previous Holocaust
 |
|
|
 Click Here To Visit Yad Vashem'S Site
|
 |
Français
