Explaining the Holocaust by Schreiber

Author:Schreiber [Schreiber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781498219938
Google: u5oWtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Cascade Books
Published: 2015-04-16T00:29:06+00:00

70. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 125.

71. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 125.

72. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 77.

73. Ibid. 128 (italics added).

74. Ibid., 129.

75. Ibid., 131.

76. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (italics added).

77. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 134.

78. Ibid., 134.

10

Jewish Inaction during the Holocaust

The largest and most politically influential Jewry outside Europe during the Holocaust was American Jewry. The most militant was the Yishuv, or the Jewish community in Palestine, backed by the Zionist organizations. Both communities consisted largely of Jewish immigrants from Europe or their offspring. Both had relatives in Europe. The plight of European Jewry deeply affected the Jews in America and Palestine. Yet neither one can lay claim to having played a significant role in rescuing Europe’s Jews. Here again, as I felt when I was writing the chapter titled “The Complicity of the World: A Tale of Two Conferences,” I feel deep pain as I am writing these lines. More could have been done, but the Jewish leadership did not rise up to the occasion.

It could be argued that during the war American Jewry was immobilized by an American administration that was supported by the great majority of American Jews, and that fought the Nazis, but that did not actively seek to rescue Hitler’s Jewish victims. The Yishuv, on the other hand, living under the British Mandate for Palestine, was immobilized by a British government that was headed by Winston Churchill who was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, and who also fought the Nazis, but whose administration did not consider allowing masses of Jews from Europe to enter Palestine a viable solution. The leadership of the Yishuv agreed during the war not to fight the British in the interest of winning the war. Only the small LEHI group (also known as the Stern Gang) that broke off from the Revisionist Zionist movement refused to cooperate, and its leader, Avraham (Yair) Stern, was assassinated by the British in his hideout in Tel Aviv. Stern sought to make an alliance with the Nazis against the British in return for having Germany enable the establishment of a Jewish state. It is hard to fault him for wanting to save Jews, but it is very doubtful that he would have succeeded.

When we look back on those years, we cannot help but ask ourselves whether, in spite of the conflict of interests with the British, the Jewish leadership in Palestine could have done more for the Jews of Europe. One major problem was the internal politics of the Yishuv. In her book about the leadership of the Yishuv during the Shoah, Entrapped Leadership (in Hebrew), Israeli Holocaust scholar Dina Porat writes:

The Jews of the free world did not look upon Zionism and the Yishuv as the address for the rescue operations, and there was no other address . . . [T]here were clashes within the Zionist movement; at the top, between Ben-Gurion and Weizmann; in the ranks, among the splinter groups of the Revisionists and between them and the Left;

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