By David Bedien, BEHIND THE NEWS IN ISRAEL
One of the drawbacks of longevity is that when that person dies, his impact on history may be lost on a new generation who did not know who he was. Such is the case with Hillel Kook, who died on August 18, 2001, at the age of 87.
On my 37th birthday, on August 31st, 1987, the day that I initiated a news agency, “Israel Resource”, I interviewed and consulted with Hillel Kook, an older maverick who had made an imprint on Jewish and Zionist history. Hillel was introduced to me by the Jerusalem Post’s late Louis Rappaport, whose book, published posthumously, “Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and The Struggle to Rescue The Jews of Europe”, by Gefen Publishers in Jerusalem, chronciled the amazing feats of this man.
At a time when so many books and museums have emerged of late concerning the destruction of European Jewry and its aftermath, Hillel Kook was one person which epitomized the question of that era: Could more have been done to save Jewry from the inferno of the death camps?
Hillel was the scion of the great Rabbinic Kook family. He made his mark on history when he arrived in the US in the late 1930’s, to eventually assume the name of Peter Bergson, with the initial task of organizing a Jewish army for Palestine, in coordination with Z’ev Jabotinsky.
With the outbreak of the war and the gradual strangulation of the Jews under Nazi conquest in Europe, Kook/Bergson changed his goal to galvanzing a rescue and relief operation for Jews, to use any means possible to save Jews from Hitler’s clutches.
The late Louis Rapaport, a journalist who spent more than 18 years with the Jerusalem Post until his untimely passing in 1991, spent many years chronicalling the untold efforts made by Bergson, whom Rapaport rightfully descibed as a man of with tremendous organizational agility, who operated under the worst of hostile circumstances.
The strains on Bergson were not only because of Hitler and the reports that streamed across the Atlantic about the mass murder of Jews. ( Bergson never liked to use the term “holocaust”, which connoted a Greek perception of sacrfice on an alter. Bergson preferred to simple describe what happened as “mass murder”)
In his book, Rapaport published previously unseen documentation which showed how Bergson’s self-appointed task of organizing rescue efforts for Jews in Europe were hampered and almost crippled by Jewish organizations in the US, by Jewish officials in the US government and even in the Zionist leadership of the time. US titular leader Rabbi Stephen Wise and the pre-eminent Zionist of the time, Nahum Goldman, joined forces with US congressman Sol Bloom and FDR confidante Felix Frankfurter to carry out a campaign to besmirch and denigrade Bergson’s efforts, which all four thought to be counterproductive to the two goals at hand: the defeat of Nazi Germany and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Rapaport obtained previously classified testimony which Bergson gave to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by New York Jewish congressman Sol Bloom, in which Bloom grilled Bergson and intimated that Bergson’s activities were both un-American and anti-Zionist.
Undaunted, Bergson’s tenacity of purpose led him to form an effective non-Jewish coalition in the US Congress that kept the issue of the Jewish plight in Europe on the agenda of the US media and constantly in front of world opinion.
The concrete accomplishment of what came to be known as the “Bergsonite lobby” in the US congress was the creation, in 1944, of the WRB, the War Refugee Board, which was credited with saving thousands of Jews in the waning days of World War II.
In a special citation from the US congress that Rapaport uncovered, both houses of congress gave direct and deserved credit to the activities of Peter Bergson which resulted in the creation of the War Refugee Board.
The work of Hillel Kook, operating under the name of Peter Bergson, remained virtually unknown and unrecognized for a full generation.
Jewish and Zionist organizations who had turned their backs on his efforts never wanted to admit that they had made an error in judgment.
Yet when I met Hillel he felt vindicated, with a good sense of humor.
The question that Goldberg and Hertzberg posed and the question that those who take a moment to remember Hillel Kook will ask:
How many more Jews could have been rescued if a War Refugee Board had been established in 1942, instead of 1944. After all, Jewish organizations and the US state department had already been officially informed by mid-1942 that two million Jews had already been murdered.
In my last conversation with Louis Rapaport, shortly before his untimely death in 1991, Rapaport emotionally expressed to me his worry that his chronicle of Hillel Kook’s life would not come out during Kook’s lifetime, and may never ever be published, leaving another generation with little knowledge of the exploits of Peter Bergson.
Well, the book came out during Kook’s lifetime, but not during the life of Rapaport.
Hillel Kook had a message: learn from history and what one man can do to affect it. He had specific advice about the attitude of Jewish organizations to issues of consequence and crisis in the Jewish people: Basically, not to trust them, because their survival as organizations always comes before the survival of far-away Jews.
@ ArnoldHarris:
http://forward.com/opinion/348039/monica-lewinsky-and-the-trope-of-the-jewish-temptress-in-the-trump-age/?utm_content=daily_Newsletter_MainList_Title_Position-1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Daily%202016-08-20&utm_term=The%20Forward%20Today%20Monday-Friday
ArnoldHarris Said:
If it works, pinch it, don’t knock it.
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/89/cf/42/89cf42d1e0c5dbaec28df40f3c442aa9.jpg
My wife and I, along with our eldest son, reside and rule over our own very private Chelm, located halfway up the side of one of the very high and very pretty wooded bluffs in southwestern Wisconsin.
All three of us do our very own Jewish thing out here and up here, all in accordance with our copy of the Soncino Chumash and a most useful book, “To Be A Jew”. Which means that we make our very own Shabat observance every Friday at sundown, with blessings for the two lighted candles, a cup of Manishevits wine for each of us, a n’tilat yadaiim, at the bathroom sink, and the blessing for the two identical loaves of bread baked by either or both my wife and our son. both of whom are excellent cooks and bakers. Followed by the Shabat dinner. And some readings from the Chumash.
By the way. We celebrate the eight days of Chanuka, but scorn the single day of Purim. Why? Because Chanuka to us represents a victory of the independent Jewish nation earned by authentic Jewish warriors, whereas Purim represents little more than the conniving of a pretty Jewish girl who successfully shook her ass in the face of the Persian emperor, so that Haman and his sons could be hanged and Mardchai saved. By the way. I never could understand why Haman’s wife, who caused all that, wasn’t hanged along with her husband and their sons.
I have no idea how many other American Jews do all that once each week. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t really care what they do. Because I regard most of them as worthless shit, and I’m too old to waste what’s left of my life looking for authentic Jewish exceptions to the above described.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
@ honeybee:
L’Chaim, shalom
@ bernard ross:
L’Chaim !!!!!!!!!!
honeybee Said:
very well said.
@ bernard ross:
Jews are never attacked in Chelm !!!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
I didnt mean it to be disrespectful, I forgot, of course you are right….. but as rabbi’s you would think they would have noticed all those Jews being attacked as opposed to the muslim
@ honeybee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE6EP3Z0PSU
@ bernard ross:
Oy, Yankee Boy, her son died in the Benghazi disaster.
@ honeybee:
which pamela smith?
bernard ross Said:
Bernard they surely are talking about Pamela Smith.
Listening to Trump as I write.
Jews are being attacked, libeled, slandered and slaughtered all over the world and these worthless so called rabbis rush to the defense of a sharia law follower who teaches his children that Jews are sons of apes and pigs. I would like to call these self appointed “sages” low life pieces of shite for doing NOTHING for jews under attack even in their own country of residence but in the end I see that they are plagued with an ignorance so deep that they have cut themselves off from the suffering of their own tribe. they are enablers of the wave of muslims that ALWAYS ends in sorrow, suffering and death of Jews but their vanity is so great that they see nothing. They display the incomprehensibly vast ignorance of their fellow american Jews when it comes to the history of the Jewish people and any first hand knowledge of jewish disaster. they are the same as the american jews during the shoah who did nothing for their fellow jews being slaughtered. Whatever they are teaching, no jew should follow it.
A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust
Highly recommended.