Remarks delivered at the Fifth National Conference of

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

Sunday, June 17, 2007 - Fordham University School of Law

Dr. Isaac Lewin - The Young Polish Refugee Rabbit Who Demanded That Rescue of Jews Be the Priority

Nathan Lewin

My father was a young man 37 years old in January 1943, when B'nai B'rith held a conference in Pittsburgh to which it invited 34 national Jewish organizations. It announced that the purpose of the meeting was “to consider what steps should be taken to bring about some agreement on the part of the American Jewish community with respect to the post-war status of Jews and the upbuilding of a Jewish Palestine.” Isaac Lewin had arrived in the United States less than two years earlier and, despite being amazingly proficient with foreign languages, was struggling to learn English. In Poland, before September 1939, he had written articles in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and he could converse comfortably in German and French, but the English language was a daunting challenge.

My father undertook to speak at that national meeting in January 1943. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein reports in “Were We Our Brothers' Keepers?” (p. 133): “The letter inviting thirty-four organizations to the Pittsburgh meeting made no mention of rescuing European Jews or alleviating their plight. These matters were not on the agenda of the preliminary meeting, nor were they touched upon in any of the first twenty-three speeches delivered at the meeting. It remained for Isaac Lewin, representing Agudat Israel of America but speaking also in behalf of Polish Jewry, to urge that 'within two weeks another conference [be called] for the purpose of finding steps to save Jews not only in Poland but in the whole of Europe.'”

In an emotional appeal to the gathering, my father said that it was meaningless to speak of the “post-war status of Jewry” without first ensuring “that there will be Jews left in Europe after the war.” He alone reminded the delegates whose priority was post-war Zionism that their efforts should be directed “not alone to save the object [that is, the Jewish homeland], but also the subject: the people who will benefit from all these rights after the war and who will be able to help build the Land of Israel.”

Rabbi Lookstein reports (p. 134) that the Pittsburgh meeting produced proposals that “contained no reference to rescue or to providing immediate aid to European Jewry.” The delegates agreed only to call for action “on problems relating to the rights and status of Jews in the post-war world” and to “implementation of the rights of the Jewish people with respect to Palestine.”

My father began crying out for rescue long before the Pittsburgh conference. He supported our family after we arrived in the United States by becoming a regular columnist for the Orthodox Yiddish-language newspaper - Der Morgen Journal. In a column in the newspaper's February 6, 1942, issue, he described the suffering of Jews in the ghettos that the Nazis had established in Polish cities and asked whether American Jewry was going to allow them to perish from hunger and cold. “It may be,” he said in terms that were grimly prophetic, “that all that will be left of our brothers and sisters will be graves - and maybe not even that much.”

He sounded an “alarm,” pleading, on behalf of the Jews in Polish ghettoes, “Do not abandon us, do not allow us to perish.” Food, he said, could be delivered through the International Red Cross, which had volunteered to deliver food and medicines to the ghettoes. He concluded with a call to action: “First of all, let us do what is possible to save millions of innocent victims in the gehenna of the ghettoes from death by starvation. There is a way. It is not easy. It requires labor, it requires exertion. But can that be a deterrence? Nisht varten! Nisht shvaigen! Do not wait! Do not remain silent!”

Because of his mastery of Polish and the official positions he had held in the pre-war Polish government (having been elected as the youngest member of the City Council of Lodz), my father arranged with the embassy of the Polish Government in Exile to receive reports from key Jewish personnel in Switzerland through international cables and the diplomatic pouch. On September 3, 1942, he was called to receive a report from Yitzchok Sternbuch, the Agudath Israel representative in Switzerland, that the Nazis were evacuating the Warsaw Ghetto, that they had “bestially murdered about one hundred thousand Jews,” and that “mass murders are continuing” with the bodies of the victims being used for the manufacture of soap and artificial fertilizers.

Rabbi Stephen Wise promptly called it an exaggerated “atrocity tale.” Franklin Roosevelt's White House did nothing about the report although it was promptly transmitted by Agudath Israel to the State Department.

My father waited two months - until November 1942 - hoping that there would be action from the American government or, at least, from American Jewish organizations. He then published a bitter attack against the leadership of American Jewry in Der Yiddishe Shtime (“The Jewish Voice”). He reported that a cherem (a ban) had been placed on publicizing the report that had been received on September 3. And even after later telegraphic reports had confirmed what was reported on September 3 and “Jewish blood continued flowing,” Rabbi Wise had ordered that there be delay and silence.

This, said my father, is a shreklich farbrechen -- a terrible crime. From the moment the September 3 report arrived, Jewish delegations should have been traveling to Washington. This total commitment, insisted the young Polish refugee, is how Jewish leaders acted on Jews' behalf throughout Jewish history. Not enough, he declared, that two influential men like Dr. Stephen Wise and Dr. Nahum Goldmann made bi-weekly visits to Washington. On an issue involving millions of Jews, these personalities had the obligation to bring other Jewish leaders and representatives to Washington, und dort permanent arbeiten far dem dozigen inyan (and work permanently on this subject) - “the most important for the Jewish people at this moment because it concerns kiyum ha-uma (the survival of the nation).”

“There are Jews who remain alive in Poland! We don't know where, and we don't know how many there are. But it is a crime to abandon them. Every day makes a difference. Every minute is precious.”

He ended this dramatic call with the following question addressed to Jewish organizations in America: “How will you respond on the day of reckoning? What will you answer if one day you are called to account and asked what did you do while the blood of your brothers hot zich gegosen in shtramen (was being spilled in streams)?”

On February 2, 1943, following his participation in B'nai B'rith's Pittsburgh conference, his column in the Morgen Journal was captioned: “Not Enough To Provide for the Jews After the War!” Now, he said, is a time unparalleled in the Jewish people's 2000 years of “martyrology,” and it calls for a united front of American Jewry - all its political strength, all its influential resources - to prevent the destruction of European Jewry.

The anguish in the Yiddish articles he published in the months preceding the rabbis' now-famous trip to Washington on October 6, 1943, tears at one's heart. What do I personally recall of that terrible time? We were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and I - a 7-year-old -- slept on a convertible sofa in the living room. I became accustomed to hearing the clackety-clack of my father's Hebrew typewriter. He hunt-and-pecked his articles with two fingers at the dining-area table as I was falling asleep - and I would hear that sound again as dawn's light came through the window and I awoke to see him still working. The telephone was in that room, and it would ring incessantly through the night. Strange names - rabbis involved in the rescue effort such as Kalmanovitch and Schenkolewski - identified themselves on occasions when, because my father grabbed a few winks in the bedroom, the telephone's ring pulled me from sleep and I asked who was calling.

I don't personally remember my father's trip to Washington in the company of the country's leading Orthodox rabbis and scholars a few days before Yom Kippur. But I am certain that he was involved in recruiting participants and encouraging them to protest in the Nation's Capitol. It seemed like an initial step to implement his public call for incessant lobbying in Washington.

Regrettably often in Jewish history - and particularly in Twentieth Century America - our Torah-observant leaders and scholars have been mocked for their religiosity. So was it with the rabbis who marched on Washington. A column of my father's in the Morgen Journal of November 26, 1943 - almost two months after the march - decried the disunity of American Jews in the effort to save European Jewry. My father quoted an article that had just been published in the Hebrew-language monthly Bitzaron (“Fortress”) titled “The Assault on Washington.” Its pseudonymous author (“Bar Bei Rav”) ridiculed the rabbis of the delegation for their appearance - peyos, beards, kapotes, shtreimlech, and gartelen. President Roosevelt, said the taunting author, shut the rabbis out of the White House because he was not interested in discussing minutiae of Halacha (Jewish ritual law), but Vice-President Henry Wallace conversed with them, he said caustically, about the honor due to Torah.

“I was in Washington and participated in the 'March,'” wrote my father. “The calm and respectful demonstration reflected Jewish suffering and our terrible churban (destruction).” How sad it was that a Jewish journal - particularly one directed to intellectuals - could so callously demean the event. Zenen mir take in ganzen hefker? Are we truly so totally irresponsible? “Jews are murdered in cold blood and rabbis join together to travel to Washington before Yom Kippur, and one makes them objects of ridicule!”

My father would have been dismayed to learn that the views expressed in Bitzaron were also the views of Samuel Rosenman, the President's closest Jewish adviser. He told Roosevelt that the delegation was “a group of rabbis who just recently left the darkest period of the medieval world.” In fact, history has judged them to be spiritual leaders protesting the darkest period of the modern world.