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