By: Nathan Lewin, JEWISH PRESS
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
I was seven years old in 1943 and becoming comfortable in the United States, where my parents and I had arrived as refugees from Poland, via Japan, in 1941.
Almost from the moment we hit the blessed shores of America, my father, Rabbi Dr. Isaac Lewin, z”l, worked day and night with the Va’ad Le-Hatzala to rescue the Jews trapped in Poland and the rest of Europe. They included my grandfather, Rabbi Aaron Lewin, z”l,the revered rabbi of Rzeszow who had twice been elected to the Polish parliament, and who had – unknown to my father – already been murdered by Ukrainians in Lvov in June 1941.
I remember the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 1943, as news of the slaughter of Jews by Hitler and his cohorts dribbled out to the free world and reached American media. I was already a New York Yankees fan, and attention was focused on the World Series between my Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. As a seven year old, I could not really appreciate why my father was ignoring the World Series and was busy soliciting volunteers among the Orthodox rabbinate and rank-and-file Jews to make the arduous train ride from New York to Washington to convey personally to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt how precarious the lives of Jews in Europe had become and to request decisive action against the death camps to which Jews were being transported.
A delegation of 400 rabbis, including my father, Rabbis Eliezer Silver, Israel Rosenberg, Moshe Feinstein, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik,zichronom le-veracha,arrived in Washington’s Union Station on October 6, three days before Yom Kippur – the second day of the World Series — with the announced intention of marching to the White House to meet with the president and voice their concern over the slaughter of their brethren. They were an orderly dignified group – no signs, no loud battle cries, no histrionics.
My father reported to us when he returned from Washington (I was grieving that the Yankees had lost the second game of the Series) that the group had been greeted by congressmen and had marched to the Lincoln Memorial. The rabbis assigned a select group to meet with President Roosevelt at the White House. They were shocked and offended to be told that the president did not have even a few minutes to meet with them.
They returned to New York after being shunted off to the vice president, Henry Wallace, whose influence on Roosevelt and U.S. policy was negligible and who many classify as “America’s Worst Vice President.” Their dire warnings regarding the fate of Europe’s Jews were, of course, entirely accurate. But the president, like his successor in office more than 70 years later, was not interested in meeting with Jewish leaders and having them describe to him directly the life-threatening danger facing Jews abroad.
How important was it that Roosevelt meet with a representative delegation from the rabbis’ entourage? Cynics might claim the trip to Washington was designed to generate publicity for the rescue of European Jewry and whether or not the president invited rabbis to the White House made little difference in the formulation of American priorities in waging the war. It is difficult to believe, however, that Roosevelt would have been totally unmoved by the pleas of American Orthodox Jewry’s foremost spokesmen. Rabbi Eliezer Silver, z”l, had already established a reputation as an exceedingly articulate English-speaking advocate for Jewish causes. His description of the horrors that had been reported might very well have made a difference had Roosevelt been willing to listen.
Accounts of personal meetings that Eddie Jacobson and Chaim Weizmann had with Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, regarding the Zionist dream of an independent Jewish state have shown that U.S. presidents can be moved – and American foreign policy can be affected – by face-to-face discussions with the occupant of the most important and powerful office in the world.
Truman’s willingness to meet with, and listen to, Weizmann and Jacobson reportedly led him to reject the advice of his secretary of state and White House insiders and to promptly recognize the newborn state of Israel. Roosevelt, on the other hand, refused even to listen to the message the rabbis were bringing to Washington. Like President Obama’s blanket rejection more than 70 years later of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the refusal silences the message by shutting out the messenger.
Reports that later emerged from White House insiders established that Roosevelt – like President Obama and Vice President Biden – did not really have anything important on his schedule to justify his refusal to meet Jewish leaders. Roosevelt sneaked out of the White House through a rear exit rather than meet with the 400 rabbis. His top Jewish adviser and speechwriter Samuel Rosenman told him – much as J Street is now telling President Obama and Congressional Democrats – that he would be best served by avoiding the rabbis.
Rosenman is also reported to have told Nahum Goldmann – co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress – that when Roosevelt heard of the rabbis’ request to meet with him, Roosevelt “had used language that morning while breakfasting which would have pleased Hitler himself.” In his recently revealed correspondence with Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did Mr. Obama similarly refer to Prime Minister Netanyahu with language that “would have pleased” Khamenei himself?
About the Author: Nathan Lewin is a Washington lawyer who was president of the Greater Washington Jewish Community Relations Council between 1982 and 1984 and has argued many Jewish-interest cases before the Supreme Court and lower federal courts.
bernard ross Said:
Another Obama lie and betrayal. But then as a candidate for extortion and blackmail himself he must do what he is told. The knowledge and connections from the CIA and its shadow covert org remains with Bush. Shadow CIA assets remain available to those in the loop, this was exposed in the southern air transport scandal of the 1980’s. Corporations, networks, human assets all remain available.
Weinberger is the murderer of Pollard, and weinberger was the Bush reagan point man. The reasons giving make little sense, there is a personal vengeance here and it comes from the bush family who still have all the info on everyone from his days as head of CIA Bush did the same to Noriega, sent in troops to capture him and kept him incognito for decades in prison. Its a Bush MO. Noriega and pollard knew too much.
@ yamit82:
what is your source for this?
The Germans had no plans whatsoever for extermination before 1942. They killed the mentally ill but not the Jews, who would ostensibly be the target much more acceptable to German public opinion. Not even the Jewish mental patients were killed initially, nor even the masses of German Jewish communists. Germans cooperated with Zionists on resettling their Jews elsewhere. Zionist education—agricultural and thinly disguised military training—was conducted with the explicit approval of Nazi authorities. The Germans even went so far as to allow Jewish emigrants to take out large amounts of scarce foreign exchange. Unfortunately, American Jewish organizations stonewalled the German efforts, preferring Jews to stay in the Diaspora. In order to bug Germany with the Jewish problem, the United States and Britain rejected resettling of refugees just anywhere in the world—including the Jewish homeland allotted to us even by the League of Nations. The much-touted German plan of resettling its Jews on Madagascar was not a sneer, but a serious attempt to find any place accessible to Germany and amenable to it. As someone who wants Israel free of Arabs, I have no problem with Germans trying to expel their Jews without significant loss of life.
The Germans switched to extermination for three reasons. The first reason was that the Allies had blocked all the options for relocation of the Jews. Jewish refugees could get no visas. When they managed to cross the border illegally, Switzerland turned them back to the Nazis. Britain pressed the governments of Bulgaria and Romania to tighten their lax border policies, which allowed Jews to escape. Britain also pressed Turkey to allow no safe haven to Jews, lest they move afterwards “illegally” to the Land of Israel.
Two, the Nazis wanted revenge: Jews, they thought, were instrumental in Soviet and American aggression against Germany. The reasoning was wrong but not silly: seeing the intense opposition of international Jewry to pogroms and other signals that Jews were not welcome in Germany, the Nazis decided that war was the next logical step after the Jews tried to boycott them.
Three, an apocalyptic mindset descended on Nazi leaders when they embarked on war with the Soviet Union against the better judgment of the German military. They started thinking in terms of their final obligation to change the world by destroying Jews.
Many nations were instrumental in the Holocaust: just about every European nation, America, and some Arabs. But the Soviets made the Holocaust possible. Notoriously full of Jews, the communist establishment prepared a mortal blow for Germany: with the 1939 non-belligerence pact Stalin lured Germany into attacking Britain, to further weaken the aggressor. With massive rearmament he hinted to the Germans of his own aggressive intent, forcing them to amass troops near the Soviet border. The Germans understood Stalin’s trap: he wanted to crush much of their army with a single strike. Such treachery called for revenge, and in the German mind Jews should be targeted.
The Soviets showed Germany that mass ethnic extermination works and is tolerated by international community. Soviet work camps were less deadly than German camps for Jews, but still more deadly for Jews than for gentiles. Soviet camps were no less deadly than German camps for gentiles: thus, 400,000 of 1.8 million Germans taken prisoner after the war died. German forced labor camps were modeled on Soviet ones; no other country practiced them at the time.
The Soviet Union openly started ethnic repression against Jews in 1940. But months before, the Russians had divided Poland with Germany so that Jewish towns fell to the Nazi regime, whose pattern of anti-Semitic repression was well-established by then. When some Polish Jews managed to flee the Nazis, the Russians interned them in Central Asia; ironically, most internees survived in that area, free of German occupation, which gave birth to a persistent canard that Soviet Jews sat out the war in safety.
Stalin allowed a considerable number of Jews to survive, but those were largely the families of ranking communists. About a million such Jews, mostly from Eastern Ukraine and Russia, fled before the advancing German troops. After the war, they changed the face of East European Jewry: it was transformed into a mass of hardcore communists.
Soviet policy explicitly aided theNaziextermination efforts. Though information on mass murders became available from the first day of the war, it was deliberately suppressed. Given the variety of information sources and Soviet media, it took an order from the highest level to quash all the information on Jewish massacres. Even in the occupied territories, Soviet propaganda remained present through radio broadcasts, leaflets, and rumors—but the Jews were left unaware of their fate, and didn’t flee. This is not an issue of a state’s responsibility to its citizens: perhaps the trains were lacking, but Jews could still be told to flee on foot, and many might have escaped. The logistics bottleneck is over-touted: the retreating Soviets evacuated millions of communist activists’ family members, and the space could have been found for Jews. In many instances, Soviet authorities dissuaded and prohibited Jews from fleeing. The Red Army cordons turned away scores of Jewish refugees, notably from Latvia.
The Soviet establishment facilitated the Holocaust by passing to Germans the housing data on Jews. Most Soviet offices destroyed their documents before Germans took the cities: burning all papers was a standard practice. But housing and registration documents were left to Germans intact in every town, and allowed them to identify Jews, many of whom were assimilated and could not be identified in any other way.
Soviet propagandists made a great effort to counter the German propaganda. Soviet broadcasts dispelled every other German allegation, but were consistently silent on a single one: that Jews provoked the war. The population hated Jews and Jewish Bolsheviks anyway (half a million Russians served in the German army), and took the Soviet silence for tacit confirmation of German anti-Semitic propaganda. Common Soviet people collaborated with Germans in identifying the Jews.
The Holocaust enterprise was directed by Germans but manned by Slavs. Death squads and camps employed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Croats—but also many Russians.
The Soviets were careful not to obstruct the Holocaust. In their tens of thousands of bombing raids through Poland into Germany, Russian aircraft commonly overflew the death camps—but not a single bomb was ever dropped on them. The Russians bombed targets just miles away from the death camps, but not the camps themselves. Soviet partisan guerrillas waged a full-scale war on Germans in Byelorussia, sabotaging railroads and installations – but there was no concerted effort to stop the ongoing massacres, arm the ghetto inhabitants, or even inform them of the danger.
The Russians reconfirmed their policy toward Jews in 1953, when the entire country lauded the anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leadership. The intended relocation of Jews to Siberia, stopped by Stalin’s death, was unlike any other ethnic relocation, except the Poles’. Jews were herded specifically for death: pressed into cattle cars as during the Nazi massacres, transported to the coldest place in Siberia, where the only housing waiting for them was the shacks made of roofing felt, which allowed them no chance to survive the winter.
After the war, the Soviets covered German massacres of Jews while trumpeting and inflating other atrocities. The word “Jewish” was excised from reports and commemorations: rather, vague “Soviet citizens” were murdered. That policy cannot be explained by the state’s pandering to popular anti-Semitism; the state was unconcerned with popular feelings, and experience suggests that anti-Semites are not at all uncomfortable with Jews being mentioned in Holocaust accounts. The government suppressed the Jewish massacres for the same reason it suppressed many other wartime accounts, such as the massive collaboration with Nazis: shameful events that implicated the communist regime were stricken from the annals. The regime did not want questions about its own complacency and explicit aid to the murderers.
The Soviet Union didn’t actually save Jews. The Germans killed just everyone whom they could find, almost 100 percent of the Jews in the German-occupied Soviet territory. No statistically significant additional numbers of Jews would have been killed if the war had lasted for another few years. The Soviet Union nurtured the Nazi regime, provoked the war, and—regardless of the eventual victory—is responsible for Holocaust.
Mr. Harris your knowledge about Stalin and “great Russia”
does not match with reality. Stalin would not lift a finger to save the Jews. He, intentionally, completely suppressed the information about Hitler intention before the war and Jew decided to stay and died because of it. Few years after the war he organized vicious anti-Semitic company to finish that Hitler did not accomplish and only his death in 1953 saved Soviet Jews from total destruction.
The leaders of the western allies in World War 2 assigned a relatively low priority to saving the European Jews already put to death or scheduled for death in the various German Nazi extermination camps or regular concentration camps where Jews were routinely starved to death.
And as much as some Israpundit readers with tender and liberal sensitivities would like to ignore such facts, the silently grim, utterly logical, and unarguably merciless leader of the Soviet Union put into Red Army uniforms and supplied weapons of modern war to more than 500,000 Jews who took part in the epic struggle that saved great Russia, saved most of Russia’s Jews, and made it possible for the US and British armies that landed along the Calvados coast beaches of Normandy in northwestern France, just seven months following the Teheran Conference of Stalin.Roosevelt, and Churchill in November 1943.
And along with Stalin’s actions to let the Jews have a fighting chance to live, is the fact that he permitted and facilitated the eastward evacuation out of reach of the Nazi murderers, of as many Jews who could be saved in time. The ones too old to fight were put to work in the USSR’s vast production lines in the military armaments factories that were relocated to the Ural Mountains area in some seven hectic months of late 1941 and still more from southeastern Russia in the summer of 1942.
And by the way, recorded history shows that more than 100 of those 500,000 Jewish Red Army men were elevated to the rank of general officers. In contrast, here in the USA, the only Jewish general, Maurice Rose, who led an armored division under overall command of Jew-hater George Patton, felt compelled to convert to Christianity in order to spare the sensitivities of his fellow Regular Army officers.
For any of you who are fully acquainted with all the facts cited above, but still insist on treating Stalin’s memory in the same league as that of Hitler, you are not worthy of my time and effort to argue with you.
I never was a fan of Roosevelt, who, if anything, was even more cold-blooded than Stalin, if not as crude-tempered. He tampered with the constitutional rights of Americans on the same grand scale as his 21st century successor, Barack Hussein Obama. in any case, I never in my long life have voted for any Democrat in a presidential election. It’s just too damned bad, both for America, the Jewish nation, and the Jewish state, that more American Jews haven’t taken their imbecilic heads out of the sands of leftist liberalism to think more rationally and carefully about what such politicians end up doing to decay and destroy this country and to betray their own Jewish brothers and sisters.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
It was a different time and setting. Israel is here and if well led, is very strong on its own.
Apparently the Galut Jews and renegades have not changed though. Nor has the virulently anti-Semitic State Department led by a obviously Islamic committed WH.
The State Department and others in the US high echelons were adamantly opposed to the re creating of Israel in 1948.
Europe was and remains the most violent core of the Nazi cult. Their new aktion squads are now formed with sand Nazis. Islamic murderous beasts.
The readers are reminded that since 1290, England has in place still an expulsion order under penalty of death against all Jews. All left or were murdered. Not long ago 7 remains of Jews then murdered were found in a water well in England. The law set in place by King Edward I is applicable in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Again. The law is still in place.
Oliver Cromwell in 1656 waived around the Law but did not rescind it. Jews went back to the UK under that setting.
Not different than their idiotic equals that went back to Germany, Poland, Hungary, France and Spain, etc, after the Holocaust…