Holocaust museums and Jewish leaders now recognizing 1943 rabbis’ march

Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky was among participants

Issue of Sept. 12, 2008

After years of appeals and petitions, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., recently installed materials acknowledging the wartime rescue activities of the Bergson Group, including its march by 400 rabbis to the White House in 1943.

The about-face by the Holocaust Museum comes at a time when a growing number of Jewish leaders and organizations are publicly recognizing the efforts by 1940s Jewish activists and others to bring about an American response to the Nazi genocide.

These new developments will be among the topics discussed at a conference in New York City next week organized by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

At last year’s conference, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, Jewish Community Relations Council Director Michael Miller and two-time Conference of Presidents Chairman Seymour Reich called on Holocaust museums to acknowledge the Bergson activists.

The Wyman Institute’s campaign for recognition of the activists received a major boost from Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, after Wyman researchers discovered documents showing that her father, then-Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., was a Bergson supporter. In a message to last year’s Wyman conference, Speaker Pelosi said she was “thrilled” and “deeply proud” to learn that her father “was one of those who stood up for what was right, at a time when too many people chose to look the other way.”

The Wyman Institute, which has been engaged in ongoing research on the 1943 rabbis’ march, recently uncovered documents demonstrating the impact of the march. One of the documents indicates the march may have inspired New Jersey Senator Warren Barbour to introduce his October 1943 resolution urging admission of 100,000 refugees to the United States, outside the quota system.

“Barbour’s resolution was part of the growing Congressional support for rescue in the autumn of 1943, which had an impact on President Roosevelt,” said Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff. “It contributed to FDR’s decision, in early 1944, to establish the War Refugee Board, which helped rescue more than 200,000 Jews.”

Until recently, “this was a totally neglected issue,” said Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky, 85, founder of the Yeshiva of South Shore and a participant in the 1943 march.

Rav Kamenetzky will be a featured speaker at the dedication of a Bergson Group memorial plaque at the Brooklyn Holocaust Memorial Park, in Sheepshead Bay, on Monday, Sept. 22, at 1:30 p.m. Other speakers will include former mayor Ed Koch; Bergson’s daughter, Dr. Rebecca Kook; and Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun and Ramaz School.

“We live in an era when protest rallies in Washington are commonplace, so it’s startling to realize that the rabbis’ march was the only rally for rescue that was held in Washington during the Holocaust,” said Dr. Medoff. “The U.S. Holocaust Museum is to be commended for recognizing the march and the Bergson Group’s other efforts, and we hope other museums will do likewise.”

One museum that is resisting requests to recognize the Bergson Group is Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center. This summer, the Wyman Institute presented Yad Vashem with two petitions urging the museum to install materials about the Bergson rescue campaign. One petition was signed by 130 Israeli political and cultural figures; 50 historians signed another.

Yad Vashem rejected the petitions on the grounds that the museum’s focus is on the Nazis and their Jewish victims, not the response of the Allies or Jewish communities abroad. The Wyman Institute argues that since Yad Vashem’s museum does have some panels and films about America’s failure to rescue European Jewry, those panels should be corrected to acknowledge that some Americans did speak out for rescue.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a play about the Bergson Group is attracting significant public attention. “The Accomplices,” written by former New York Times correspondent Bernard Weinraub, enjoyed an initial six-week run at the Fountain Theater in Hollywood in the early summer, and was then extended through the end of August.