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

Robert Weintraub speaking at the Wyman Institute conference.

The Bergson Group: Forgotten Heroes
by Robert Weintraub

Remarks by Robert Weintraub, veteran pro-Israel activist and Bergson Group advocate, at the Fifth National Conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, June 17, 2007:

In the years just before Pearl Harbor, several young Palestinian Jews came to the United States. They have come to be known as the Bergson Group, named for their leader, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook). They were mostly Irgun officers accompanying Ze’ev Jabotinsky on a mission to advocate for a Jewish army based in the Middle East. Jabotinsky hoped to build a force of 200,000 Jews to fight as part of the anti-Hitler coalition. In August of 1940, Jabotinsky died of a heart attack. His young helpers were now without a leader. Yet they decided to continue with the Jewish army project.

The group called itself the Committee for a Jewish Army, and placed its first full-page ad in the New York Times in late 1941. In inch-high letters, the headline read: "Jews Fight for the Right to Fight." The gist of the ad was that tens of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews were ready to fight Hitler but the British were preventing them from serving for fear of alienating the Arabs. German troops were at the Egyptian border. Beyond Egypt lay Jewish Palestine.

Reading ads like these, I was thrilled. The message the ads delivered was in sharp contrast to the prevailing mood of America's Jews. The Jews of America had been worn down by a decade of German anti-Semitic propaganda, echoed in this country by local anti-Semites, together with the seeming inability of anyone to come up with a program to help the Jews of Europe. The Jewish leaders had grown dispirited and incapable of offering anything positive. The Bergsonites provided an alternative leadership,

The ads were exciting in other ways. Supporters included congressmen, cabinet officers, Christian clergy, retired generals and admirals, and celebrities from the intellectual and arts world. These were not people usually attracted to Jewish causes.

The group kept up the Jewish Army campaign for more than a year. In December 1942, the governments in the anti-Hitler coalition announced that the Germans had murdered two million Jews, and millions more were in danger of suffering a like fate. The Bergsonites changed their mission from Jewish Army to Jewish rescue.

Their full-page ads appeared in leading newspapers throughout the country. The ads were unique in that they told about the German massacres as they were happening. The ads presented ideas for rescue. They were also unique in that they directly criticized the president--something traditional Jewish leaders would not do.

The group pushed for the creation of a rescue agency. Congressional friends of the committee introduced resolutions to that effect. The resolutions brought support from both parties. For several months, President Franklin Roosevelt took no action--but finally he relented and established the War Refugee Board in early 1944. Although the Board was poorly funded with inadequate staff, it succeeded in an estimated 200,000 Jews in Hungary, Rumania, and elsewhere.

American Jewish leaders were incensed by the publicity generated by the Bergson activists and the favorable attention the group was getting. Instead of viewing the young Jews as allies in a common cause, they saw them as interlopers endangering the Jews of America by their unconventional tactics. The leadership declared all-out war against the Bergson Group.

One of the leadership’s targets was a pageant that Ben Hecht wrote for the Bergson Group in 1943, which he called "We Will Never Die." It told, in dramatic form,. the story of the murdered Jews of Europe. It played in Madison Square Garden to record crowds. It also played in Washington. Many notables attended including Eleanor Roosevelt, and numerous Members of Congress. The play began a nationwide tour. The leadership made great efforts to sabotage the play. Calls were made to theater owners to cancel the engagements. Pressure was applied on sponsors in different cities to stop supporting the play. In some instances, these efforts were successful.

It didn't stop there. Stephen Wise, head of a coalition of Jewish organizations, and his aides urged the government to deport Bergson or draft him into the U.S. army. Wise demanded that the Bergson Group’s finances be investigated and in other ways tried to shut them down. Fortunately, the Bergson Group had won friends in Congress who were able to protect them from their attackers.

Following Israel's declaration of independence in 1948, the Bergson Group’s leaders returned to the Holy Land. The Jewish leadership, now unchallenged, wrote its version of the American Jewish response to the Holocaust. To further this aim, Jewish leaders conducted a sixty year campaign to keep the Bergson Group’s accomplishments out of history books. They are omitted from Holocaust museums and from textbooks used in Jewish day schools.

To date, the Jewish leadership has neither apologized nor explained its behavior during the war years. Information seeking questions have been met with hostility. It is time for today's Jewish leadership to admit past mistakes and to honor those, like the Bergson Group, who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the task of rescue

Thank you.