Remembering the Forgotten Czech Zionist Who Helped Save Hundreds of Jewish Children from Hitler

In December 1938, a British stockbroker of Jewish origins named Nicholas Winton devised a plan to bring Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to England; he succeeded in getting over 600 to safety. But the rescue might never have taken place without the efforts of local Jewish leaders in Prague, among them Marie Schmolka. Anna Hájková and Martin Šmok write:

It was Marie Schmolka’s appeal for help in December 1938 that brought the young Nicholas Winton to Prague. . . . Born to an assimilated Prague Jewish family, Schmolka married late and was widowed early. Quiet, warm, and with immense organizational talent, she became an avid Zionist following a trip to Palestine. . . . Schmolka was [also] the sole Czech representative on the League of Nations Commission for Refugees. . . .

Repeatedly warned by her friends [on the eve of World War II] and offered asylum while abroad, Schmolka insisted she must return home to do the work at hand. When Germany occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Marie Schmolka and her co-workers from the Committee for Refugees were among the first arrested. . . . Schmolka was imprisoned for two months in Pankrác prison, while the Gestapo subjected her, a diabetic, to eight-hour interrogations. In August, Adolf Eichmann sent her to Paris to demand more efficient Jewish emigration [from Germany]; stranded by the outbreak of war, Schmolka moved to London. Six months later she was dead at age forty-six, having worked herself to a heart attack.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: British Jewry, Czechoslovakia, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Kindertransport, Refugees

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society