by Debra Rubin
NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex

April 28, 2009

While much of the American-Jewish establishment remained passive and the government seemed indifferent to the plight of European Jewry during the Holocaust, a group of 400 Orthodox rabbis dared to march on Washington in 1943.

The march, held three days before Yom Kippur to demonstrate the urgency of the message, drew national coverage and support from Congress.

And while President Franklin Roosevelt declined to meet with the somber, black-clad clergymen, the event became a milestone in the history of American-Jewish activism – and, in the words of Rafael Medoff, an “extraordinary achievement” that may have saved the lives of 200,000 Jews.

Medoff, director of the Washington-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, spoke about the march and its legacy at Congregation Ahavas Achim in Highland Park on April 19.

He also touched on the special significance the event holds for the shul: Among the marchers was Rabbi Pesach Raymon, who led the congregation from 1938 to 1984 and for whom the local yeshiva is named.

The bold action of the Agudath Harabonim, said Medoff, was held over the protests of such mainstream organizations as B’nai B’rith, American Jewish Congress, and American Jewish Committee. They feared an anti-Semitic backlash and supported Roosevelt’s stance that the best way to save the Jews was to win the war.

“The rabbis I have talked to who took part, to a man said the march was a failure because the president failed to meet with them,” said Medoff.

However, the action would ultimately prove to be galvanizing. It helped move the Holocaust off the back pages of newspapers, threatened the Roosevelt administration with political scandal, gained sympathy in unlikely quarters, and catalyzed the formation of the War Refugee Rescue Board in the waning months of World War II, which ultimately saved the lives of 200,000 Jews.

“A lot of things happened that historians would call coincidences, but Orthodox Jews would call beshert,” or fated, said Medoff, the author of eight books on the Holocaust, Zionism, and the history of American Jewry.

The groundwork for the march was laid by Hillel Kook (known in the United States as Peter Bergson), the nephew of the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook.

At the time, Medoff said, the Jewish community had “a love affair” with FDR, who had received more than 90 percent of the Jewish vote in his last election.

With staunch Jewish support, reluctance to anger the British by supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine, and concerns about stirring up anti-Semitism that could cost him votes, Roosevelt and the State Department slowed legal Jewish immigration to the United States. Only 10,000 of the 200,000 quota slots set aside for refugees were filled between 1933 and ’45.

When Romania offered the United States the chance to “ransom” 70,000 Jews for $50 each, the offer was refused.

The Bergson Group, as Kook’s committee became known, used “outside the box” ideas, including full-page ads in such newspapers as The New York Times, which had relegated the Holocaust to its inside pages. “Kook was not interested in being part of American society; he was not an American citizen,” said Medoff. “He did things other Jews were afraid to do.”

Medoff said the Bergson Group became the nation’s first Jewish lobbyists, going “door to door in Congress,” receiving a surprisingly warm reception even from representatives of states with few Jews.

“Congressmen from states like New York and New Jersey with large Jewish populations had to deal with chapters of major Jewish organizations first,” explained Medoff. “Congressmen from Utah or North Dakota didn’t have these organizations to ask. They went on the merits of it. They said, ‘This can save lives. Let’s do it.’”

Stopping the genocide

Then Kook had the “radical” idea to have prominent rabbis march on Washington. The group was met on the steps of the Capitol by Vice President Henry Wallace and many members of Congress. However, Roosevelt was urged by Jewish leaders not to meet the group and was “spirited” out of the White House before their arrival.

The event — including complaints from some rabbis about Roosevelt’s snubbing them — received extensive press coverage. Medoff showed a contemporary newsreel clip that was seen in theaters across the country.

The public criticism of the president “shocked” the Jewish community, Medoff said, but it kept the issue in the limelight. As support among members swelled, Congress began hearings on the refugee board, stirring up more controversy and bringing the issue to the forefront.

The refugee board proposal happened to land for review on the desk of an attorney at the Department of the Treasury. That attorney was Camden native Josiah DuBois, who risked his career in a relentless pursuit of the truth about the State Department’s deliberate suppression of news about the Holocaust and obstruction of rescue attempts. He titled his “explosive” report The Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews.

The titled was changed to The Plight of the Jews in Europe by Jewish Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau before it was sent to Roosevelt. Roosevelt, now fearing a scandal on the eve of a presidential election, approved formation of the board.

DuBois, who also lobbied unsuccessfully for the American bombing of Auschwitz to halt the killings, is the subject of Medoff’s latest book, Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois Jr. and the Struggle for a U.S. Response to the Holocaust.

“DuBois also felt his efforts had been a failure,” said Medoff. “If only he had been able to get the board started a year, six months earlier, how many more could he have saved? By January 1944 there was only 15 months left in the war. Most of the six million were already gone.

“But saving 200,000 lives is an extraordinary achievement.”

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