Calling Rabbi Wise

Rabbi Avi Shafran names the people partially responsible for FDR ignoring Jewish requests for help during the Holocaust.

On October 6, 1943, more than 400 American rabbis made an unprecedented appearance at the White House, in the hope that they might help convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help rescue Jewish refugees during the final months of what, it had become clear, was the attempted annihilation of European Jews by the Nazis and their friends. Immigration of European Jews was at a trickle, and even permitted quotas were not being filled.

The march was the brainchild of Jewish activist Peter Bergson, the adopted name of Hillel Kook, the nephew of Rabbi Avrohom Yitzchok Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine (Bergson died in Israel in 2001). The marchers had been recruited, though, largely through the Va'ad HaHatzalah, an Orthodox group headed by European-born Torah scholars, the sort of people who, in normal circumstances, would never involve themselves in public affairs, and certainly not in any that might seem aggressive. But circumstances were anything but normal, and so the men -- who included rabbinic figures like Rabbi Eliezer Silver and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, as well as an array of Hassidic rebbes of the time, followed their religious consciences.

The "Rabbis' March" raised hackles, however, among some American Jewish groups, like the American Jewish Congress; and some legislators, like Representative Sol Bloom of New York, the chairman of the House International Affairs Committee. Early on, he reportedly tried to dissuade the march's organizers by telling them it would be undignified for a group of such un-American-looking people to appear in Washington, a comment that only served to nearly double the number of participants.

Arriving first at the Capitol, the rabbis were met by Vice President Henry Wallace, who, Time magazine reported, "squirmed through a diplomatically minimum answer" to their plea.

From there, the rabbis went to the Lincoln Memorial, where they offered prayers for the welfare of the President, America's soldiers and the Jews of Europe. After singing the national anthem, they proceeded to the White House where they hoped a small delegation from among them would be received by President Roosevelt himself.

They were destined for disappointment. Presidential secretary, Marvin McIntyre informed them that the President was unavailable "because of the pressure of other business."

According to the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, the President's schedule was, in fact, "remarkably open that afternoon." His daily calendar "listed nothing in between a 1:00 lunch with the Secretary of State and a 4:00 departure for a ceremony at an airfield outside Washington." The reason Mr. Roosevelt declined to meet any of the rabbis, the Wyman Institute's research revealed, was because his speechwriter and adviser Samuel Rosenman (a prominent member of the American Jewish Committee) and Dr. Stephen Wise (president of the American Jewish Congress, and the leading Reform rabbi of the time) had urged him to avoid the group. Mr. Rosenman, according to a presidential aide, characterized the marchers as "a group of rabbis who just recently left the darkest period of the medieval world"; Dr. Wise derided the "orthodox rabbinical parade" as offensive to "the dignity of [the Jewish] people." President Roosevelt left the White House through a rear door.