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

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023