August 18 marks the passing in 2001 of Hillel Kook (also known as Peter Bergson), a man remembered for his controversial fight against mainstream Jewish organizations in his effort to get the U.S. administration to save Jews during World War II – a controversy that lasts to this day.
The 25 year old Hillel Kook accompanied Ze'ev Jabotinsky to the United States in 1940, and stayed on in America after Jabotinsky died in August. Kook had spent the previous months trying to organize the transfer of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland to British-ruled Palestine, but the British government had imposed strict restrictions on emigration by Jewish refugees to their historic homeland in an effort to appease Arab and Muslim sentiments.
As the Nazis conquered more and more of Europe, the fate of the Jews became an ever more pressing problem. Unfortunately, Jews could not escape Hitler’s inferno because countries all over the world were unwilling to accept them, and imposed strict immigration quotas.
The widely accepted solution to the Jewish refugee problem was the defeat of Nazi Germany, which would bring about an end to Jewish persecution and suffering. Hillel Kook was initially active in trying to get stateless Jewish volunteers accepted as soldiers in this fight in an independant Jewish unit.
However, as the war dragged on and increasingly alarming reports came to light of the mass genocide carried out by the Nazis against the Jews, Hillel Kook became increasingly vocal in demanding that Allied governments take immediate action to help Jewish refugees rather then ignore the problem.
Kook believed that relaxing immigration quotas would allow countless European Jews to escape the fate that awaited them, especially those Jews that were located in Axis countries not yet under the complete control of the Germans. Recognizing the strong resistance to accepting Jewish emigrants, Kook also sought temporary solutions, including internment camps in the USA similar to those the American government had placed Japanese-American citizens in for the duration of the war.
The young Hillel Kook undertook as his mission the raising of public awareness of the Nazi atrocities and the plight of the Jews in Europe in order to get some immediate concrete actions to save them. Despite his young age and lack of connections, he managed to enlist the support of numerous important people, both Jewish and Non-Jewish, to his cause.
Working under the name Peter Bergson in order to prevent political embarrassment for his prominent religious family, Kook took out advertisements in leading newspapers informing readers of news that their editors largely ignored: the systematic extermination of European Jews on an unimaginable scale, and the ability to save countless people that was being ignored by their government. The sensationalist format of these ads gained attention. One ad, referring to the offer by the Romanian government to deport 70,000 of the country’s Jews on condition that someone would accept them and pay their transportation fees, was headlined: FOR SALE to Humanity, 70,000 Jews, Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece.
One of the highlights of Kook's very public campaign was in organizing a huge pageant titled "We Will Never Die", which brought home to American viewers the horrors being unleashed in Europe and the fact that 2,000,000 innocent men, women and children had already been murdered, as confirmed by the State Department. Written by screenwriter and author Ben Hecht, with a music score composed by Kurt Weill, the pageant was organized by top producers and starred some of America’s most popular performers.
"We Will Never Die" debuted on March 1943 before 40,000 viewers in Madison Square Garden and then traveled to other key cities around the nation. In Washington, D.C., First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (along with hundreds of senators and congressmen) watched it, and was moved to write about it in her weekly syndicated column, the first time word of the Holocaust reached many of her readers. After speaking of the two million already murdered and the four million facing death, the speakers made the point that "this is not a Jewish problem. It is a problem that belongs to humanity and it is a challenge to the soul of man."
"We Will Never Die" closed with a mass recitation of the Kadish, the solemn Jewish prayer for the dead, by fifty Rabbis who had escaped from Europe. On October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement” (the holiest day in the Jewish Calendar), Hillel Kook brought over 400 Orthodox Rabbis to Washington in the “Rabbis’ March” to deliver a petition to President Roosevelt calling for action to stop the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
Unfortunately, the mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States were opposed to Kooks activism, for several reasons. Some truly believed that the only solution was a defeat of the Nazis, and accepted the reasoning that nothing should distract from this focus – reasoning that was used to explain why death camps like Auschwitz were not bombed by the Allied air forces. Others were afraid to be seen as unpatriotic and thus invite anti-Semitic reactions – proposals to send aid to the Jews in Europe were opposed by many Jewish leaders lest they be seen as giving aid to the enemy or be misrepresented as Jews having loyalties superseding their citizenship. Kook’s overt and very noisy appeals to the American public and to American politicians were also in direct contrast to the low key manner in which Jewish organizations, ever mindful of anti-Semitism, were accustomed to working. Last, but not least, Kook’s political affiliation with the right wing Revisionist movement and his membership in the IZL underground also raised serious animus towards his efforts from the liberal and more left wing Zionist leadership.
The end result was that Hillel Kook’s activities were condemned and actively opposed by the mainstream Jewish leadership. When the 400 Jewish Rabbis came to the White House to deliver their petition, President Roosevelt avoided meeting them - among his considerations in this move was the advice given to him by prominent Jewish leaders to ignore them. Jewish organizations and individual Jewish leaders repeatedly informed government institutions and decision makers that Hillel Kook did not represent American Jewry, and attempted to have him minimized or removed from the scene altogether (through accusations of wrongdoing to the IRS or requests that Kook be drafted for overseas service). They also pointed out that Kook was a foreigner, and that many of his supporters were either non-citizens or first-generation citizens.
Nevertheless, the very clear failure to prevent mass extermination aroused growing public pressure for a solution. In April 1943, U.S. and British officials met in Bermuda to find a solution to the Jewish refugee problem, but sessions lasting nearly two weeks only reaffirmed the U.S. administration’s refusal to take in more Jewish refugees and the British government’s refusal to allow them into Palestine. Large sections of the U.S. public, made aware of the plight of the Jews and now of the lack of allied action to save them, became increasingly unsatisfied with the administration’s “Rescue Through Victory” policy.
Kook established an "Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry" and his lobbying efforts in Washington resulted in a Congressional resolution in October of 1943 urging the creation of a U.S. government agency to rescue Jewish refugees. The resolution passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was the subject of hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where it was vehemently opposed by representatives of the State Department. However, it became known that the State Department had falsified data presented to the committee, and that its members had acted purposefully to prevent the emigration of even those few Jewish refugees allowed under the restrictive quotas and to prevent news of the Holocaust from reaching the USA, greatly enflaming the situation.
In January 1944 President Roosevelt pre-empted a likely Congressional reprimand to his administration by establishing the new agency that the resolution had sought: the War Refugee Board. This agency managed to get privately financed food shipments sent through the International Red Cross to Nazi concentration camps, and supported the work of Raoul Walenberg which saved the Jews of Budapest. It provided assistance to Jewish survivors in liberated parts of Europe, and arranged refugee camps for them in North Africa, Palestine, Switzerland, and Sweden, as well as at Oswego, New York, which housed nearly one thousand refugees permitted to enter the United States outside the immigration laws as ‘guests of the President’. The War Refugee Board is credited with saving at least 200,000 Jews.
Hillel Kook moved on. Towards the end of the World War he increasingly directed his efforts towards the next step in Jewish survival and recovery, the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. In coming years, he tangled with Ben-Gurion and the left-wing Zionist leadership in Palestine, as well as with his compatriots on the right. He served briefly as a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, before retiring from political life. Hillel Kook passed away on 18 August 2001, aged 86.
Today, the failure of the American Jewish leadership to take overt action on the Holocaust is generally seen to have prevented the rescue of countless lives that might have been saved. However, the contribution of the contrarian Hillel Kook to getting some late but priceless action is yet to be widely recognized (although efforts are underway to change this).
