How Orthodox Jews Escaped from, and Fought, the Nazis

During World War II, Orthodox Jews in America—and Hasidim especially—undertook intensive efforts to rescue leading rabbis as well as yeshiva students, often with remarkable success. Glenn Dynner documents some of these efforts, which got hundreds if not thousands of Jews out of Europe before the slaughter began in earnest. For instance, there is the story of the escape of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, which, in Dynner’s words, is “stranger than fiction.”

To rescue their rebbe, American Lubavitchers activated a remarkable network of political connections that included the New York state senator and judge Philip Kleinfeld, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Representative Adolph J. Sabath, Representative Sol Bloom, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Roosevelt’s adviser Benjamin V. Cohen, and Robert T. Pell, assistant chief of the State Department’s European Affairs Division.

Pell managed to convince Helmuth Wohlthat, the chief administrator of Hermann Göring’s Four-Year Plan, that helping Schneersohn leave Poland would restore some goodwill between Germany and the United States. (The two countries were not yet at war.) A part-Jewish Nazi officer named Ernst Bloch was chosen to spearhead the rescue mission.

Dynner also tells a story that gives the lie to the stereotype of the timid and unwarlike yeshiva student, and of Jewish passivity in the face of the Nazis:

In Lublin, 45 remaining Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin students were arrested or shot as early as November 1939. They did not go quietly: a Nazi officer admitted to having met “unexpected and stubborn resistance by a large group of Jewish youths with beards and sidelocks clad in long clothing [who] fortified themselves in the large building of the yeshiva where they studied and shot at German soldiers from the windows and holes in the walls.”

Read more at Tablet

More about: Chabad, East European Jewry, Hasidim, Holocaust, Holocaust rescue

How Senator Schumer Put Short-Sighted Partisan Interest over Jewish Concerns

Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce reported on its investigation into anti-Semitism on college campuses. Among the revelations therein is information about the role played behind the scenes by the Senatate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who often touts his own role as “protector” (in Hebrew, shomer) of his fellow Jews in the halls of power. Seth Mandel comments:

The leaders of Columbia, where the anti-Semitism was and is among the worst in the country, eventually came before Congress in April. Three months earlier, President Minouche Shafik met with Schumer, and the supposed shomer told her that Democrats had no problem with her and that only Republicans cared about the anti-Semitism crisis on campus. His office advised Shafik not to meet with Republicans on the Hill. When the Columbia Trustees co-chair David Greenwald texted the previous co-chair Jonathan Lavine about the situation, Lavine responded by saying, “Let’s hope the Dems win the house back.” Greenwald wrote back: “Absolutely.”

This is the message that Schumer had sent about anti-Semitism on campus and that message came through loud and clear: investigations into Jew-hatred would only occur under a Republican majority. Putting Democrats in charge would put a stop to the government’s efforts to help Jews on campus.

Though the Jewish vote is, as always, unlikely to cost Democrats the election, it is simply undeniable that non-Republicans and non-conservatives are fairly disgusted with the type of behavior displayed by Schumer.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, Chuck Schumer, Israel on campus, U.S. Politics