Who Knew?
Page 18
All went well until a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis and their followers arrived in the camp. Seeing that the Mizrachi was in charge of the kitchen, they threatened to “tear the place down if we didn’t get those ‘Reform Jews’ out of the kitchen.”1 They insisted on setting up a “glatt kosher” kitchen to feed their members. “Glatt” kosher, derived from the Hebrew word glatt, meaning “smooth” (indicating that the lungs of kosher-slaughtered animals have been carefully inspected to ensure that they are unquestionably kosher, free from any blemish that could indicate the animal had been ill) is a system of food preparation that requires the most meticulous care. Those who are exacting in their observance of Jewish dietary laws only entrust food preparation to people who they are confident share their level of religious concern.
Thus we find that the Jewish organizations, attempting to rescue and resettle Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe, were beset with solving factional disputes between contending groups of Jews within their jurisdictions. The most remarkable thing is that they did!2
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1. Tad Szulc, The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews since World War II. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 162.
2. Ibid., 161–62.
...the Jews meant more to the German leader than to the American
After World War II, the West German Bundesrepublik began its road to recovery. Helped by the Marshall Plan, West Germany rapidly regained much of its economic strength. About this time, the victor nations began to speak of reparations from Germany for waging an aggressive war. East Germany, under Soviet domination, would not cooperate, so all attention focused on West Germany. The State of Israel put forth its claim to reparations due the Jewish people from all over Europe.1
German Chancellor Adenauer took a special interest in the question of reparations for Israel and individual Jewish survivors or their heirs and gave them priority over other claimants. Without undue haggling over amounts or arguments over methods of payment, a figure of one billion dollars for the State of Israel and half a billion for individuals was agreed to by Germany and Israel.2
During the Suez crisis of 1956, President Eisenhower invoked sanctions against England, France, and Israel. As part of the sanctions, Eisenhower demanded that Germany cease its reparations payments to Israel. Adenauer refused, saying that the reparations were not subject to political issues.3
An interesting sidelight to this story of Conrad Adenauer’s friendly overtures to Israel dates back to prewar Germany. After 1933, the Nazis drove Adenauer from his position as mayor of Cologne. Reduced to poverty, Adenauer had to rely on dollar remittances from two Jewish friends, Otto Kraus and Daniel Heinemann, who had emigrated from Germany to the United States.4
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1. Howard M. Sachar, Israel and Europe: An Appraisal in History (New York: Random House, 1996), 41.
2. Ibid., 45.
3. Ibid., 52.
4. Ibid., 37.
...Jews laundered money for the cardinal
In postwar Europe, two of the organizations helping resettle Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were the Mossad and Brichah. In order to finance their activities, they were given money by the Joint Distribution Committee. This money was used to buy local currency purchased at the legal exchange rate. Eventually, one of their members suggested using dollars instead in order to lessen the expense.
Once a month, a courier traveled to Switzerland from Budapest or Prague to smuggle in three or four hundred thousand dollars to pay for maintaining the displaced Jews in their care in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Austria. Since the smuggling was risky, they turned to the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary, Cardinal Mindszenty. The cardinal gave the Brichah the money in pengos (local Hungarian currency) and the Brichah deposited the dollars in the Church’s Swiss bank account less a 15 percent commission.
This enabled the Church to get their money out of Hungary before the Communist government could confiscate it and the Brichah to have the local currency to finance their operations. Thus it was that a cardinal laundered Church money using Jewish relief organizations as a conduit.1
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1. Tad Szulc, The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 135.
...anniversary flowers sealed Adolf Eichmann’s fate
After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, many Nazi war criminals went into hiding. Among these was Adolf Eichmann, the person in charge of the systematic annihilation of six million Jews. Eichmann’s first hideout was a German farm. From there he was smuggled out to Italy and then to Argentina, where he assumed the name of Ricardo Klement.
After two years, Eichmann sent for his family. His small children had been told that their father was dead. When the family arrived in Argentina, they met “Uncle Ricardo,” who subsequently “married” their mother.
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, one of the agencies the new country established was the Mossad, an overseas network of agents assigned to carry out clandestine operations. One of their functions in the late 1950s was the search for escaped Nazis. A break in the Eichmann case came when an Austrian newspaper carried an obituary for Eichmann’s father; among the mourners listed was “Vera Eichmann, née Leibl.” She was still using her original married name!1
Then a tip in the form of a postcard from Argentina came from an associate of Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal: “I saw that dirty pig Eichmann.” It was now evident that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Then another bit of information surfaced. Lothar Hermann, a Jewish former inmate of Dachau concentration camp, had settled in Argentina, and incredibly, his daughter Sylvia became romantically involved with Klaus Klement, Eichmann’s son. Soon she informed her father that Klaus had boasted of his father’s Nazi party membership and participation in the Holocaust. Her father then sent her on a fact-finding mission. Sylvia knocked at the door of the Klement home asking for Klaus. The man who answered the door informed her that Klaus was not home. She then inquired whether Klement (Eichmann) was his father. The answer was affirmative. When she told her father what she had learned, Hermann informed West German authorities, who contacted the Israelis.2 Agents from the Mossad quickly located the “Klement” home and put it under surveillance.
A telephoto snapshot of Ricardo was taken and sent to Israel for comparison. It seemed to be a good likeness. The agents, however, did not make their move but continued their surveillance. Several weeks later, their patience was rewarded. On March 21, Ricardo was observed coming home carrying a bouquet of flowers. Ordinarily, this gesture would have had little significance. However, the Mossad knew that the Eichmanns had been married in Austria on March 21, 1935. They had their man!
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1. Howard M. Sachar, Israel and Europe: An Appraisal in History (New York: Random House, 1998) 120–21.
2. Zvi Aharoni and Wilhelm Dietl, Operation Eichmann: The Truth about the Pursuit, Capture and Trial(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 82.
AMERICA:
Finding a Home and Contributing
...Yuchi Indians celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot)
In his scholarly work entitled Before Columbus: Links between the Old World and Ancient America, Professor Cyrus H. Gordon presents a convincing case for there having been extensive interaction between Europe and America long before Columbus’s arrival. Citing archeological, artistic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, Professor Gordon documents a great deal of contact between Europe and America dating back more than a thousand years.
With this introduction in mind, we visit the Yuchi Indians of Georgia and more recently of Oklahoma. One of the Yuchi Indians’ agricultural festivals is highly reminiscent of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles as described in Leviticus 23.
Professor Gordon describes the similarities between the Yuchis’ festival and Sukkot: “The Y
uchis celebrate (1) an eight-day festival (2) that starts on the fifteenth day (or full moon) of the holy harvest month; throughout the holiday they (3) live in ‘booths.’”1
Is this a coincidence or is there a true historical link?
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1. Cyrus H. Gordon, Before Columbus: Links between the Old World and Ancient America (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 89.
...Puritans relived the Israelite experience
When the Puritans came to America, they brought with them their great attachment to the Hebrew Bible. They were noted for giving their children Pentateuchal names like Daniel, Jonathan, Rachel, Esther, Ezra, and Enoch. Towns were routinely given names like Canaan, Zion, Hebron, Jericho, Shiloh, Gilead, and Eden. However, the Puritans’ attachment to Israelites and the Hebrew Bible went far deeper.
King James I was their Pharaoh and England was their house of bondage. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean was crossing the Red Sea and America was the New Canaan.1 When it came time to establish laws for the colonies, the Mosaic Law was adopted in the Connecticut Code of 1650. While half the statutes in the Code of 1655 for the colony of New Haven contain references to the Hebrew Bible, only 3 percent refer to the latter part of the Christian Bible.2 During the battle for independence, the Puritans saw the British as Amalekites and Philistines.3
Washington and Adams were Moses and Joshua,4 to whom others were likened as well. Prominent New England Puritan minister John Cotton, who expended great effort in defending the government’s right to enforce religious rules, has the following inscription on his tombstone:
But let his mourning flock be comforted,
Though Moses be, yet Joshua is not dead;
I mean renowned Norton; worthy he
Successor to our Moses is to be,
O happy Israel in America,
In such a Moses, such a Joshua.5
And in exhorting his Puritan flock to obey the laws of God, John Winthrop stated, “If wee keep this covenant, wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, but if wee deal falsely with our God...wee are consumed out of the good land wither wee are goeing.”6
So overt were the Puritans in modeling their lives on the story of the Israelites that a man named Peter Folger was moved to write,
New England they are like the Jews
As like, as like can be.7
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1. Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 16.
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Ibid., 16.
5. Ibid., 17.
6. Ibid., 15.
7. Ibid.
...a doctor healed the colony and the Jews could stay
In 1733 the William and Sarah set sail from England bound for the colony of Georgia in America. Aboard were forty-two Jews, most of them refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition. One of these Jews was Dr. Nunez-Ribeiro, formerly a physician at the Portuguese court.
When the ship arrived in what is now Savannah, Georgia, the newcomers found that a yellow fever epidemic was raging in the colony. When the colonists learned that there was a Jewish physician among the newcomers, the doctor was pressed into service. The epidemic was quelled and the colony was saved.
James Oglethorpe, the head of the colony, suggested to the colonial directors that the usual Jewish disabilities to settlement be waived. All the Jews were admitted, and they were granted full rights as citizens of the colony. Families of the original settlers continue to live in Savannah to this day.1
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1. Aaron Lichtenstein, “Nunez-Rubiero,” Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM Edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997).
...a Revolutionary War pirate was president of his synagogue
Isaac Moses was an immigrant who fled persecution of Jews in Germany in 1764. He succeeded in almost every commercial endeavor in which he was involved. During the Revolutionary War, Moses, unlike many other men of means, threw in his lot with the patriot cause. At that time, Robert Morris was in charge of financing the Continental Congress. Moses helped finance the French army fighting for the colonies and was one of the underwriters for a proposed bank to establish the necessary credits for carrying on the war. Moses also crossed paths with another famous Jewish fund-raising patriot, Haym Solomon.
In addition to his other enterprises, Moses was outright owner or partner with Robert Morris in eight ships. As the war dragged on, it became obvious to the Continental Congress that the fight must be waged on the sea as well as on land. In order to disrupt British shipping, Moses put his ships into the fray as pirates against the British. We do not know how many ships Moses’ little flotilla captured, but we do know that the British had about seven hundred of their ships taken at a loss of some eighteen million dollars. This caused the English merchants to pressure their government to end the war.
Besides giving assistance to the fledgling United States government, Isaac Moses was also involved in Jewish affairs. While he was on the run from the British, he helped found the Mikveh Israel Synagogue in New York and served as its president. When he returned to Philadelphia, he also served as parnass (president) of the famous Shearith Yisrael Synagogue in Philadelphia, probably the only pirate in Jewish history to claim the title of president of two synagogues.1
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Jewish Notables in America, 1776–1865: Links of an Endless Chain (New York: Greenberg, 1956), 121–24.
...a Jew helped the American revolutionaries defeat the British
Haym Salomon was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who had many linguistic and financial talents. Although coming from a largely Yiddish-speaking background, he was somehow able to acquire a knowledge of French, German, Dutch, Russian, Italian, and Polish. He made his success in Colonial America as a merchant, and when the Revolutionary War started, he joined a patriotic group called the Sons of Liberty and was soon arrested by the British. He was released when the British found out he could act as an interpreter for the German-speaking Hessian mercenaries fighting in the British army.
This did not last long, because some of the Hessians began to desert the army, and suspicion was centered on Salomon. He was tried and sentenced to be executed, but was apparently rescued by the Minutemen and fled to Philadelphia.
There he became a broker to the Continental Congress and is best remembered as having been instrumental in raising money to keep Washington’s army well supplied in the field.
During this time in Philadelphia, a young man serving in Congress was hard pressed for expense money and confided his needs to a colleague. The colleague told him of “a certain Haym Salomon on Front Street who often helped out a fellow in distress.”1
The delegate to the Continental Congress wrote home saying, “I have been for some time a pensioner of Haym Solomon, a Jew broker.” He later wrote a letter to John Randolph expressing “his annoyance at the Jew moneylender who refused to take interest.”2
The needy letter writer was James Madison, destined to become the fourth president of the United States.
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Jewish Notables in America, 1776–1865: Links of an Endless Chain (New York: Greenberg, 1956), 23.
2. Ibid.
...a famous quote of George Washington’s came from a rabbi
As George Washington was approaching his inauguration as the first president of the United States, representatives of various minority groups took a keen interest. At the time, each colony had an established church, and Jews, Catholics, and dissenting Protestants did not enjoy equal rights.
When the Jews representing six synagogues got together to draft a congratulatory message to Washington, there was a disagreement between New York and Rhode Island, and Rabbi Moses Mendes Seixas decided to write his own letter representing the Newport Congregation.
The Seixas letter reads in part,
Deprived as we hitherto have been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, w
e now – with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty Disposer of all events – behold a government erected by the majesty of the people – a government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, but generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, deeming every one of whatever nation, tongue or language, equal parts of the great governmental machine.1
Washington replied to the letter:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.2 [Italics added]
It is significant to note that Washington, in his reply, chose to incorporate Seixas’s phrase “which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” This phrase can be found in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations under the heading of quotations of George Washington, labeled “Letter to the Jewish Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.”3