When interests coincide even the oddest couples can find themselves as bedfellows, strange as it may seem. The greatest proof is that, when it served their interests, Hitler and Stalin jumped into the same bed together.

England and France were bitterly anti-communist. The speeches of Churchill in the 1930s against communism and Russia were no less vitriolic than the speeches made in Germany against communism. But with world tensions rising, England and France sent delegations to Russia to negotiate an alliance at the beginning of 1938. The negotiations got nowhere, however. They only convinced Stalin further that the West was very weak and would not resist Hitler.

The Russian foreign minister at the time was a Jew, Maksim Litvinov (1876–1951). There were many Jews in high offices in Russia, not the least of which was Stalin’s brother-in-law, Lazar Kaganovich. He fired Litvinov, because he knew that Germany could not make a deal with a Jew, and appointed in his place Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986), the consummate party man. Molotov even voted for sending his own wife to Siberia. That was exactly the type of man Stalin needed for the job. He was dour, humorless, cynical and cruel beyond words. He taught the world that “nyet” means “no.”

Hitler picked up on the signal immediately. In August 1939, he sent to Russia his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) – also an utterly cruel and heartless person. The bitter enemies, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, shocked the world and signed a non-aggression pact.

Hitler had spent most of his adult life ranting like a madman against Stalin and the Bolsheviks. To him, they were equal to the Jews. Yet, in one of the great acts of cynicism, in a history riddled with cynical politics, Hitler formed an alliance with Stalin. When interests coincide even the oddest couples can find themselves as bedfellows, strange as it may seem. That may be a cynical and Machiavellian view of politics, but it holds true all too often.

In The Siege by Conor Cruise O’Brien there is a photograph of the World Zionist Congress that took place in August 1939 on the eve of the war and showing the faces of David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weitzmann and other leaders when this pact between the Germans and the Russians was announced. The worry on their faces is so expressive that it is clear that they knew something terrible was about to happen; the world as they knew it was about to change irrevocably for the worse. In some ways that picture is scarier than pictures of the Holocaust itself.

The public agreement shook up the world badly enough. However, there was a secret addendum to the agreement which made it even worse than it looked, if that was possible. It detailed how Poland would be divided in the upcoming war. When the German army would reach a certain point, roughly 60% of Poland, it would stop and allow the Russian army to move in and take over the other 40%.

Poland would disappear.

In order to seal this deal, Stalin made sure that most of Polish Jewry would fall under the jurisdiction of the Nazis. He knew what Hitler was after. It allowed him to extract from Germany many concessions of territory that Hitler was not originally willing to grant.

The non-aggression pact between bitter enemies Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (referred to as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) was supposed to last 25 years. It lasted only two. However, in those two years it changed history. It effectively meant that Nazi Germany had a free hand to invade Poland and conduct the one-front war Hitler’s generals demanded.

On September 1, 1939, the war began when massed German forces crossed the border into Poland. England and France had pledged to come to Poland’s aid in such an event, and after in inexcusable delay declared war against Germany. A great wave a fear overcame the Germans, as Hitler’s generals recorded in their diaries which were made public after the war. Had England and France immediately invaded the western provinces of Germany the fate of the world could have been changed. However, they showed no such resolve.

While Germany’s bold actions and tactics became known as a blitzkrieg (“lightening war”), the actions of England and France were sarcastically referred to as a sitzkrieg (“sitting war”).

Their inaction gave Germany a free hand to overwhelm the Polish army. It also gave German’s generals tremendous experience employing their revolutionary new military tactics, experience they would use to devastating effect later against the Allies. Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, terrorized not only the Polish army, but defenseless civilians – both those fleeing the carnage and those in Poland’s cities and villages. They especially targeted Jewish sections of the cities and villages, including extra sorties on Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur.

As German forces overran Poland, the world stood aghast, but there was little anyone could do. The entire war was over in a month.

Hitler now turned his attention – and his army – west.

The Rise of Churchill

On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded Belgium, which crumbled in a matter of days. After subduing the Belgians faster than anyone believed possible, the Germans then did the unthinkable and attacked France through the Ardennes Forest, a supposedly impassable natural barrier. The panzers burst out of the forest and ripped through French lines. The mighty French army – the largest standing army in Europe — was completely broken in a week.

The French summoned one of their heroes in the First World War, General Philippe Petain, who said they had no choice but to surrender, and on June 22, 1940, the French officially surrendered. The new head of France was a right-wing, anti-Semitic fascist by the name of Pierre Laval. They moved the seat of government in Paris, which was occupied, to the unoccupied Vichy province. France was out of the war.

As the French fell apart, the British continued fighting, but their army was trapped and began a slow retreat to a port where they hoped to evacuate as many troops as possible: Dunkirk. In what would become known as “The Miracle of Dunkirk,” more than 300,000 soldiers were rescued in 10 days. Every imaginable boat that could float was used to cross the channel and pick up stranded troops 24 hours a day without let up. All the while they were fired upon and bombed from the air. Thousands were killed and drowned. Nevertheless, it was a miracle how many survived.

In hindsight, Dunkirk was the beginning of victory for the Allies. Had the British army not been rescued there its army would have been gone, its spirit crushed, and the British government may well have surrendered. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill got up in the House of Commons to speak about it he received a standing ovation. However, in his confident yet sober tone he informed the British people, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

Churchill, more than any individual, rallied the British to war. He could capture the hearts and minds of people with a word or a gesture. His gift for the turn of a phrase, his magnificent choice of words and his grand eloquence became legendary. “We shall fight on the beaches,” he thundered. “We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender….”

Churchill is an example of how the Almighty chooses a person and nurtures him for the right moment. For decades, Churchill had been in the “wilderness” of British politics. He was the odd man out, even as late as 1938. Incredibly, despite his success leading the nation during the war, he was voted out of office as soon as the war was over.

Roosevelt

In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt recognized Hitler for the threat he was and knew he needed to be stopped, but he could not express that openly because public sentiment was strongly opposed to war. Americans did not want to get involved in another war between Europeans, Churchill’s speeches notwithstanding. They refused to admit how global the conflict really was, and how it would come to their doorstep whether they liked it or not.

Politically, the Isolationists in America wielded great power. Their viewpoint was abetted by rampant anti-Semitism in the United States. Father Charles Coughlin was a popular radio host who ranted against the Jews and praised Hitler. The German-American Bund marched in the streets.

Roosevelt, nevertheless, positioned himself for war as much as possible. In his Lend-Lease program he gave England 50 American destroyers. It was not so much for the worth of the destroyers, which were old, but for the psychological message it sent.

Roosevelt also broke with tradition and ran for a third term. No president before or since has ever been elected for more than two terms. He felt that he was God’s instrument and was indispensable to the Western world.

The Battle of Britain

As Hitler considered plans for the invasion of England, the German air force tried to crush the British into submission through air power, what became known as the Battle of Britain. London was bombed heavily for months. The British sustained tremendous civilian casualties.

Despite that, it became a rallying point and only stiffened British resolve. Against all odds, the British air force decimated the German air force, which would never be the same. Once again the immortal words of Churchill summed it up best: “Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few.”

The British victory in the Battle of Britain meant that Germany’s plans for an invasion of England would have to be scrapped. Although isolated, the island nation now became a dangerous foe on the Nazi Empire’s western front.

Operation Barbarossa

To this point, Hitler had led the Germans to victory, but now he would lead them – through his own conceit and madness – to defeat. Hitler convinced himself that he was a military genius and that he knew better than his generals. If he had listened to them, he reasoned, Germany would not have won decisive battles in Poland and France. He was the cause of victory.

Despite the danger of a two-front war, he was anxious to take over Russia in order to destroy the communists and annihilate its two to three million Jews. Therefore, he authorized Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the attack. It caught the Russians completely by surprise and was devastating. In a month some two million Russians were killed, wounded or captured! German troops pushed to the outskirts of Leningrad in the north, Smolensk (18 miles west of Moscow) in the center and Kiev in the south. Russia was prostrate. Everyone expected them to surrender. Stalin almost suffered a nervous breakdown. His ministers made plans to evacuate Moscow and move to the Ural Mountains.

But Hitler had overextended himself. The supply lines from Germany stretched more than 1500 miles. The roads and railways (where they existed) were bad – and then winter set in. It was the coldest, bitterest winter in a century. The German troops were caught with summer clothing. They never expected to fight into the winter.

Stalin, with brute force, was able to raise another two to three million men and throw them into the breach. The German offensive stalled.

Day of Infamy

At this time, the United States had economically provoked Japan in such a way that, frightened for its own interests, militarists came to power. On December 7, 1941, they attacked the American Pacific fleet stationed in Pearl Harbor. The news galvanized Americans of all types.

The United States immediately declared war on Japan — not Germany. There was still not much sentiment to declare war against Germany. However, Hitler could not control himself and declared war against America. Congress in turn declared war against Germany and the world war was on.

The United States would prove to be the weight that decided the war against Germany. Winston Churchill wrote in his memoirs that he went to sleep on December 7, 1941, for the first time in eight years knowing that the Western world was saved.

End of the Thousand Year Reich

In the summer of 1942, Hitler authorized an attack designed to deliver a killer blow to Russia. His forces would push all the way to Stalingrad, the key city to Russia’s natural resources in the south.

After a titanic struggle, in what would be the bloodiest battle in history, the Russians prevailed at Stalingrad. It marked the end of Germany’s domination of Russia. There would still be years of fighting and millions of casualties, but the fate of Germany was sealed.

By early 1944, the Russians reached the borders where they had been at the beginning of the war. As the German army was retreating in the east, the Allied launched the amphibious invasion of Normandy in the west on June 6, 1944, “D-Day.” It was the largest and most complicated sea to land invasion in history. After some staunch German resistance, they finally broke through and rampaged through the countryside until they recaptured Paris and liberated all of France.

At the end of 1944, Germany would mount a short-lived but successful surprise attack in what became known as The Battle of the Bulge, but strategically it was all over. The German army was decimated and running out of fuel. Its production centers and major cities were almost completely obliterated by Allied bombing. Germany was at its knees.

As the end approached, Hitler and other leading Nazis moved into a series of reinforced, underground bunkers in Berlin. They were living in a fantasy land, convinced that they would yet be saved by the United States who would see the inescapable logic of making peace with Germany and attacking Russia. Hitler never could understand how deep the hatred toward him and everything he stood for was. The Nazis never really appreciated the evil they had done. It is almost incredulous.

Hitler committed suicide at the end of April 1945 and Germany officially surrendered on May 7. The war in Europe was over.

Into the Atomic Age

In April, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died while still in office. Vice President Harry Truman took his place. Again, it was one of God’s “accidents.” One can see God’s hand in the promotion of this little known senator to the most powerful position in the world.

It was Truman who was bequeathed the terrible decision whether or not to drop the atom bomb on Japan. He decided that he was not going to risk a million American casualties and authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In August 1945 the war with Japan was over as well.

The world was a smoldering ruin. How it was reconstructed, especially the Jewish world, will be the topic of the next few articles.

In their attempt to mollify the Jews of their new communist utopia, the Soviets set up a Jewish state in Birobidzhan, a God-forsaken area of the Soviet empire near the Caucuses.

It is certainly one of the oddest twists in history that the Soviet Union created in effect a Jewish state for the Jews before the state of Israel.

For a short period of time toward the end of the First World War the Ukraine was an independent country. It happened when Imperial Germany made peace with Czarist Russia and the terms included making the Ukraine independent. The head of the country was a Cossack. However, a civil war between Communist Russians (the Red army) and anti-Bolshevik Russians (the White army) raged for four years between 1917 and 1921. When the Red army finally defeated the White army they ended the Ukrainian Republic, which had many Jews.

The Russians attempted to mollify the Jews by establishing an autonomous, independent Jewish republic. Their real goal was to drain off the Zionist movement of Jews.

Menachem Begin told the story about the time he was imprisoned in the Soviet Union and was interrogated by a Jewish member of the NKVD.

“Why are you so against us?” Begin, already a well-known Zionist-Revisionist, asked his interrogator.

Jewish workers in Birobidzhan fields – 1931

In one of the most telling insights, he responded, “Because you steal from us those young men who would make the best Communists. Zionism holds back the dawn of the future.” (Menachem Begin discusses this and other things in his short memoir called, White Knights.)

The communists feared that Zionism would steal the revolutionary thunder from the communists. Therefore, they thought that by creating a Jewish state anywhere other than Palestine they would solve their Jewish problem. The state or republic they created was set up in a God-forsaken area of the Soviet empire near the Caucuses called Birobidzhan.

The Bolsheviks banned Hebrew as a language but allowed Yiddish to continue as a language and subculture. The proposed Jewish homeland, the “paradise” of Stalin’s nightmare plans for his Jewish subjects in Birobidzhan, had Yiddish as its official language. However it was a phonetic Yiddish purged of its Hebrew origins, spellings and nuances and its biblical and Talmudic references.

The attempt to make Yiddish and its language and culture the basis for vibrant Jewish life and continuity failed completely. Despite Soviet efforts, at its height the Jewish population of Birobidzhan was never more than 20% of the overall population.

It was supposed to be the prime example of the success of the Communist Revolution. But Jews did not want to go there. In the final analysis, Birobidzhan was abject failure and became a matter of derision.

In America, equality before the law is almost complete. Overt government anti-Semitism is almost non-existent. Covert, snide, bigoted anti-Semitism – which exists, even very strongly in certain parts of the country – nevertheless is not comparable to what it once was. Through education and drive, Jews have been able to raise themselves in terms of wealth and influence in society. Even a religious Jew can function in American society almost at any position today. Generally speaking, observance of all the commandments of the Torah is not an impediment to success either as a professional or in a mercantile sense.

We tend to think that it was always this way. The truth is that this is a recent phenomenon.

Sabbath Observance

When Jews came to the United States in large numbers in the 1880s, and then in successive waves in the early 1900s through the 1920s, they found themselves at the bottom of the pile, so to speak. They came into a desperate economic situation. They came into a land with great bigotry and discrimination. It was not the overt anti-Semitism of the Russian czars nor of the Polish peasants, but it was open anti-Semitism in the form of jokes, slurs, name-calling, being beaten up on the street, not being able to get jobs, inability to enroll in certain universities, enter certain clubs or engage in certain types of businesses.

This is vital in order to understand the reaction of American Jews to many things that went on in world Jewry, even until the 1950s. It was shaped by the circumstances of the society in which they lived as much as how they wanted to be. The microcosm of this metamorphosis from a Jewry that was traditional if not fully committed to full observance is the institution of the Sabbath.

When Jews came to the United States, a six day workweek, if not a seven day workweek, was mandatory. Therefore, when Jews who had been Sabbath-observant in the Old Country came to New York they came under tremendous pressure to give it up.

There were many, many Jews who could not withstand that pressure. They had families to feed and literally nothing to eat. Therefore, the Sabbath-observing Jew rapidly became a minority among American Jews.

The progression that began with Sabbath disloyalty easily and almost invariably led to disloyalty to Judaism in general. It did not happen overnight. But eventually that is what happened — and happens. The Sabbath is the cornerstone of the Jewish faith. That is why we measure a Jew’s level of religious observance first and foremost by whether or not his is a Sabbath observer.

The vast majority of Jews that came from Europe had been observant Jews with a rich Jewish tradition. How did it all fall apart – and fall apart so quickly and dramatically? The first factor was the economic issue. The economic pressures were so severe and enormous that the vast majority of immigrants could not resist them.

The Melting Pot

A second factor was the Melting Pot principle that the United States was built upon. In that model a person would come as a German, Irish, Italian, Pole, Jew, etc. but leave as an American. And being American meant that everything else would be discarded.

For decades, the public school system was built on the Melting Pot principle. The job of the public school teacher was to take the immigrant child or the child of immigrants and detach that child from his culture, from his home — and make him an American. Even in public schools with an almost total Jewish population, where practically all the teachers were Jewish, the children were required to do things like sing Christmas carols and participate in Halloween. Failure to do so was un-American, and the teachers bought into that.

The pressure of the Melting Pot caused the children of immigrants to discard, to a great extent, any reservoir of attachment that they may have had left to the Jewish religion and customs. Old-time Jews with European accents were viewed as anachronisms, out of step with reality, never amounting to anything, etc. The children were embarrassed that they had such “greeners” as their fathers and mothers. That embarrassment was what the public school system accomplished. “You don’t want to be like your father, a common laborer who can’t speak proper English. You want to go to college and make something of yourself.”

Under this pressure, Jews threw out the baby with the bathwater. Everything about their Jewishness went. They were able to realize the assimilatory dream of the Melting Pot. Of course, it was not only this way with Jews but other ethnicities and cultures as well.

The public school system firmly believed that the key to the solution of all personal and national problems lay in education. The problems of society resulted from the fact that it was not educated. Education was the panacea. With a college degree a person could become a professor or a professional. It was the stepping stone to making it in the American society.

No group embraced that idea to the extent that the Jewish community did. That was based, naturally, on the history of the Jewish people – “the people of the book” — and their dedication to learning and respect for knowledge.

Of course, part of the shock of the Holocaust is that the Germans were the most educated people. To happen from the people of Goethe and Schiller and in the country epitomizing the highest standards of culture and art was hard to digest. It still is hard to digest. It knocks a tremendous hole in the theory that if only people were educated the world would be at peace; that our problems stem from ignorance and lack of education. Before the Holocaust, it was a much more convincing argument.

Insecurity in a Strange Land

Another major factor in Jewish American history is the insecurity Jews felt in the New World. Most Jews today feel very secure in the United States. They are American through and through – from the sports pages to the financial pages. They feel so secure in their American identity that they don’t feel the need to hide their Jewishness. It is a state of mind.

But that is not the way Jews felt even into the 1930s and 1940s. They did not want to appear too Jewish or advocate too loudly for Jewish issues. Even in the midst of the Holocaust, American Jewry did not pursue an agenda that was Jewish; it pursued an agenda that was American. The most visible Jewish Americans, such as reform leader Stephen Wise, were not willing to insist that the United States do anything active to save Jews or even take a stand regarding the extermination of European Jews. Wise and others accepted the rather bland statements of a basically anti-Semitic State Department and president that there was not much to do but continue with the war effort.

Samuel Rosenman, a judge, was Roosevelt’s speechwriter during the war years. When a group of Orthodox Jews approached him about the Holocaust he told them that not only would he not help them get an appointment with Roosevelt, but they shouldn’t even dare bring up the matter with him, saying, “The president is busy with important war matters. We cannot foist this upon him.”

Until the 1940s Jews in office kept a very low profile and were expected not to pursue any Jewish agendas. The non-Jews who sought the Jewish vote got it not based on advocating any Jewish agenda but a socialist one. The change came after the Holocaust.

The Conservative Movement

The Conservative Movement is an exclusively American phenomenon. It is a perfect example of Jews in the American culture adapting to what they saw the American future to be.

It began in1898 in the United States with Solomon Schechter, an Eastern European Jew and Talmudic scholar who went to university and became an expert in Semitics. He decided to make a modern rabbinic seminary in the United States that would combine within it the best of Western culture and skills of the secular world together with a traditional understanding of Jewish sources. He was going to make the all-American rabbi.

The term “Conservative” comes from the movement’s objective to “conserve” Judaism. It believed that traditional Judaism, as it existed throughout the ages, could not exist on the American continent. Indeed, who then could imagine that there would one day be entire communities such as Lakewood, New Jersey, supporting armies of married young men learning Torah full time at the highest levels? Who could imagine that there would be fully Sabbath-observing doctors, lawyers and businessmen? It was unimaginable back then. The only choice then was Reform or nothing. The Conservative movement came to offer an option better than nothing, to “conserve” or “save” whatever could be conserved/saved.

The problem with that is it created a slippery slope. In its first form, the movement conserved 99% of Judaism. As time went on, it compromised more and more.

For a long time it looked like the Conservative Movement was going to completely take over American Jewry. Its central body, the United Synagogue, probably became the leading Jewish body in terms of wealth and power. It had a very popular radio program, publications, large synagogues and even great scholars in its seminary, including the likes of Saul Lieberman and Abraham Joshua Heschel, people who themselves were tradition-oriented and observant.

In the two decades following the Second World War, the Conservative Movement took over perhaps as much as 30% of the Orthodox synagogues in the United States. The Conservative Movement became so strong that its leaders and social scientists predicted that Orthodoxy would disappear in 15 to 20 years, leaving on only the Conservative and Reform movements in the United States – with the Conservative absorbing any lagging traditionalists. Today, social scientists predict just the opposite. The Conservative will disappear – with the Reform absorbing any lagging Conservatives.

Among other things, this demonstrates how the Conservative Movement has moved farther and farther away from tradition. Adapting to the cultural fads of the times has its limits.

All of this together helps explain why American Jewry did very little regarding the situation in Europe as the Second World War approached; why it did not play the role it could possibly have played; why it almost committed suicide religiously in the decades between the wars. It’s as though the Second World War, and the terrible things that happened in it, came to reawaken within American Jewry its personality that it had somehow lost.

The history of American Jewry from 1948 onward is a different history. In some respects it is worse. The rate of intermarriage beforehand was far less than today. Nonetheless, in terms of a vibrant Jewish identity and solidarity with Jews facing persecution across the world it is far stronger than anyone imagined it ever would be.

The turning points were events of the Second World War and the founding of the State of Israel. But the important thing to realize is that Jewish life in today’s United States is not the way it looked into the 1940s. We need to understand that in order to appreciate the lessons involved in this history.

When the Alter of Slobodka, Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, moved his famous yeshiva from Europe to the Land of Israel it sent ripples throughout the Jewish world. Other great rabbis wanted to take their yeshivas and leave anti-Semitic ridden pre-Hitler Europe, but in many cases they were afraid it would start an avalanche and so decided against it.

The Versailles Treaty created a number of small countries, many of whom had sizable Jewish populations. These countries guaranteed rights to their minorities, and to a certain extent they guaranteed the right to autonomy: to their own systems of education, language, representation in Parliament, etc. However, all of these rights were very quickly undone in most of these new countries. In effect, the country came to be dominated by a majority that oppressed the minority.

For Jews that meant anti-Semitism.

In Russia, a large element of Jews had believed that with the revolution they now could assimilate and become Russians. In fact, in their minds, that was the purpose of the revolution. In places like Lithuania it was not so. The Jewish parties in Lithuania were openly Jewish, Zionist or Jewish-socialist. At the same time, they were never a real factor in Lithuanian life. As a result, the government sponsored anti-Semitism which took a tremendous toll on Lithuanian Jewry.

It was so strong that the Slobodka yeshiva, which was located in a suburb of the capital city of Kovno, moved to Palestine. The head of the yeshiva, Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel (known lovingly as the Alter of Slobodka, the Elder of Slododka), and his other rabbinic administrators, moved it purely for religious reasons. They were not Zionists, at least in the political sense. But they had a great love of the Land of Israel and felt that the future of the Jewish people lay there. They wanted to move not only for their own purposes, but to start a movement which other yeshivas would follow to replant themselves in Israel. Lithuania was a “motherland” of yeshivas, so a move by arguably the leading yeshiva made quite an impression.

The Hebron Yeshiva, originally called Knesses Yisrael, 1911. After the Arab riot of 1929 the Yeshiva moved to Jerusalem and changed its name to Hebron Yeshiva in honor of its roots in the Holy Israel.

However, only part of the yeshiva moved — about 60%, while 40% remained in Slobodka. The result was two Slodobka yeshivas. The one that moved to Israel settled in the city of Hebron. And for a while it thrived there, boasting numerous great scholars.

There had been a Jewish population in Hebron for centuries. It was one of the Jewish people’s traditional four holy cities — along with Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberius — and had a recorded Jewish presence since at least the time of Nachmanides, 700 years earlier. Then in 1929, the Arabs made a pogrom and many students of the yeshiva were murdered or wounded. More than 40 of its young, unarmed students, women and children were brutally murdered and the rest of the population was driven out of Hebron.

) In 1929, the Arabs made a pogrom and many students of the yeshiva were murdered or wounded. More than 40 of its young, unarmed students, women and children were brutally murdered and the rest of the population was driven out of Hebron.

The Yeshiva resettled in Jerusalem. At the same time, they renamed the yeshiva from Knesses Yisrael to the Yeshiva of Hebron, in honor of its roots in the Holy Israel.

In either event, the Slobodka yeshiva was a pioneer among yeshivas by moving from Lithuania. One of the grandsons of Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel reportedly once heard him say, “The ground is burning underneath my feet.” He could not get out of Lithuania fast enough.

Other great rabbis wanted to leave, but in many cases they were afraid it would start an avalanche. The most prominent among them was the saintly Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim. When he considered also transplanting his yeshiva to Israel the other rabbis and leaders would not let him. He was too important to Jewish morale in Europe.

That was the situation of Jews between the wars: they couldn’t stay but they couldn’t go.

By all accounts, from his earliest years Hitler was strange and a loner. He wanted to be a painter, even though he was not very good at it. The realization that the world did not agree with his assessment of his artistic talents only served to frustrate him.

His anti-Semitic leanings were evident early on, but it is not clear what his reasons were, if there were any reasons. Life, and certainly anti-Semitism, is not always explicable. At 16, Hitler moved to Vienna. He was a young man alone. During this period, he began to develop his theories of race, which were not original to him but which had existed in Germany the previous century.

In Vienna, Hitler’s Jew-hatred became an obsession – the obsession of his life. Almost his entire war strategy was based upon the Jews. Even as the end of Nazi Germany became obvious, Hitler and other Nazis felt they had accomplished some measure of victory because they had destroyed European Jewry. Eichmann said that he would go to his grave happy in the knowledge that he helped destroy millions of Jews. That was not bravado; it was a viewpoint.

It was also the viewpoint of Hitler, whose last statement of his political last will and testament was that the war against the Jews had to be continued despite his death and Germany’s demise.

Escaping Death Time and Again

Hitler was born in the small town of Linz, Austria. However, he joined the German army in World War I, because to his mind the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was hopelessly decrepit, corrupt and a hollow shell. Germany, on the other hand in his mind, was representative of the Aryan race.

He served as a runner in the German army during the First World War. The life expectancy of runners in the First World War was many times measured in hours or days. It was a job no one wanted. Often it was a method by which commander officers got rid of soldiers they didn’t like rather than formally executing them. Yet, Hitler served and survived as a runner in the German army almost four years!

In October 1918, a month before the war ended, Hitler was wounded in a gas attack. His recovery took two years. In Mein Kampf he pointed out that the wounded soldiers lying next to him on the bed kept dying even though their wounds were far less severe than his. But he survived, eventually regained his health and was discharged from the hospital.

All these brushes with death convinced Hitler that he was chosen by Providence for a special mission. Indeed, throughout his entire life he experienced what can be called miraculous salvations from all sorts of dangerous situations and attempts on his life. Historians record at least 18 known assassination attempts, including those orchestrated by his generals and high ranking officers with direct access to him, some of whom left bombs to explode within inches of him. Yet none of them succeeded. Each time Hitler survived it not only led him to conclude more strongly that Divine Providence had chosen him for a special mission, but to publicly proclaim it.

The Nazi Party

Amid the turmoil after the war, there arose in Germany many nationalist parties called the Folk Parties. Each shared two or three common themes.

First, they said, Germany did not lose the war, but was betrayed into losing the war. Usually, the corollary to that was that the leftists and Jews betrayed them.

Second, the parliamentary democracy set up after the war to run Germany, the Weimar Republic, was hopelessly unwieldy and inefficient.

Third was a call to law and order. German culture abhors chaos and if nothing else post-war Germany was chaotic. Therefore, the Folk Parties appealed to the German peoples’ sense of law and order. Better to have an autocratic regime than allowing the chaos to continue.

Hitler was the 55^th member of a Folk Party founded in 1921 called the National Socialist Party, the Nazi Party for short. Ironically, it was not socialist at all. There was a period of time when it seemed that a political party had to have “socialist” in its name if it wanted any popular appeal. The Nationalist Socialist Party was not going anywhere and there was no reason for it to go anywhere. It was only because Hitler galvanized the party, imbuing it with a platform and spirit, that it turned into a political force.

Putsch, Imprisonment and Mein Kampf

In 1923, Hitler tried to overthrow the German government. His party was built upon German veterans who were committed to the Folk Party ideas, including its anti-Semitism. Lending legitimacy to Nazi ideas, Hitler conscripted the backing of one of Germany’s most decorated military heroes, Erich von Ludendorff. However, the attempted coup – known in history as the Beer Hall Putsch — failed miserably and Hitler was arrested.

His prison stay was more like a house arrest and became a media event that, incredibly, earned him the sympathy of the masses. It was during this incarceration that he wrote Mein Kampf, his rambling, anti-Semitic, semi-autobiographical political testament, outlining what Germany had to do to regain its superior, dominant and domineering place on the world stage. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spelled out that he was going to:

• unify Germany with Austria and all German-speaking people in Europe,
• abrogate the treaty of Versailles,
• take back territory that was taken from Germany, including dismantling Czechoslovakia, and taking back the port of Danzig which was given to Poland,
• destroy the virus known as the Jewish people,
• destroy Bolshevism in Russia, and
• expand German borders under the pretense of Lebensraum, “living room” for the German people, which Germany was entitled to by right.

To most people at the time, Mein Kampf was a long-winded tome filled with absolute nonsense. However, most if not all of the “nonsense” became true. In hindsight, it is stunning how the rest of the world – including the democracies in the West and Stalin in the East – misjudged him. Everyone thought it was just the ranting of racist demagogue. Few believed he would ever come to power, and everybody believed that in the remote possibility he ever came to power he would be controllable. Now we know they were dead wrong. Things unfolded exactly the way Hitler said they would unfold.

Fears of Communist Takeover

Hitler was abetted by the tremendous fear of communism taking over Germany.

The communist party in Germany was led by a woman of Jewish birth, Rosa Luxemburg, also known as “Red Rose.” The Jews were prominent in the communist party in Germany, which had a firm control on the labor unions. Strikes in Germany were not countenanced very easily. Yet, at one of the things that sped the end of the First World War was the fact that the German labor force was no longer loyal to the Kaiser. They went on strikes and German war production faltered. It was the fissure that cracked the German war machine.

After the war, and into the 1920s, Germany experienced violent strikes. There was fighting, rioting and deaths. Communism in Germany was abetted by its international stature; it saw Germany as the next country after Russia most likely to turn communist. Trotsky, Lenin and others put effort into mobilizing their forces to expand their revolution into Germany.

Hitler capitalized upon that fear. He found a ready response in the German people, who were more afraid of communism than what he stood for.

Gifted Orator

Hitler was a gifted orator. He would go on for hours at a time and mesmerize his audience. Eye witness accounts talk about his hypnotic stare that could ensnare a person just with a glance. The psychology of domination was an essential ingredient of Hitler’s talent and rise to power.

Hitler also learned to use the radio, which was a revolutionary media in its time. It was a window to the outside world like never before. People did not merely listen but became drawn into the voice emanating from the box. This is true whether the broadcast was a ball game, a dramatic recreation or a leader speaking to his people. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” moved a generation. People felt their president came into their house to speak to them.

Hitler captured the effect too. When he became leader of Germany his speeches were broadcast all over the world. Even Americans in the United States who did not understand German felt something when a speech of his was broadcast into their home. The intense, animalistic-quality dynamism somehow came through.

Winning the German Street

Hitler was able to mobilize criminal elements into street thugs who literally beat up his enemies. These became a paramilitary organization, the “brown shirts,” named after their uniforms. Hitler took unemployed people off the street, gave them a brown shirt with an armband sporting a swastika, taught them the Nazi salute and handed them a stick to beat others. Suddenly, these powerless people had power.

None of this could have come about without financial backing and Hitler found ready financial support among the German industrialists. They were uneasy with him, but at least he wasn’t a communist calling for the seizure and nationalization of their businesses. They were confident that their financial power would control him – but, in the end, it would be he who would manipulate them to do his bidding.

Despite Nazi gains, it was by no means certain that Hitler would achieve his goals and rule Germany. Although the Nazi party seemed to be gaining in popularity it was not considered a major force even into the late 1920s. Then, fate, so to speak, intervened in 1929 and the world economy collapsed. It began in the United States and spread throughout the industrialized world. When it reached Germany it wreaked havoc. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people were unemployed and the government was not dealing effectively with the problem.

Germans were looking for a savior and a scapegoat. Hitler provided them with both: he was the savior and the Jews were the scapegoat.

More than anything else, the Great Depression helped boost Hitler. In the election after the Depression first struck the Nazis doubled their seats in the Reichstag, the German Parliament, going from 7% to 13.5% of the vote. And in the ensuing election they reached 21%. At their height they would reach about 40%.

At that point, he felt victory was in his grasp and let loose the brown shirts more than ever before. Pitched battles were fought with his political enemies – not only metaphorically but literally. German politicians engaged in fist fights on the floor of the Reichstag. The Nazis terrorized the opposition. It was open hooliganism.

The Weimar Republic had to make a hard choice between taking strong measures to stop Hitler or face the prospect of civil war. They chose the former. What they found – as the Western powers found later — was that the more they appeased Hitler the more powerless they were to stop him from taking even bolder steps.

The president of the Weimar Republic was the elderly war hero General Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler wanted to be appointed chancellor, which was the second most powerful position to president, and only the president could grant that. Von Hindenburg had resisted the Nazis all along and disparagingly called Hitler the “Bohemian corporal.” Now, however, he felt he had to give in, hoping that being second-in-command would mollify Hitler and he would stop there.

Once Hitler got power, however, no one controlled him. He increased the activities of his brown shirts, even beating to death opposing politicians. Then he presented the Reichstag with the Enabling Act, a bill that would give him absolute powers, in effect making the Reichstag powerless. Although it was political suicide to vote for it, no one dared vote against Hitler and it was passed into law.

When the almost senile President Hindenburg died that summer Hitler had complete control of Germany.

The Third Reich

Hitler was now free to implement policies that he had only spoken about. These policies were based upon three principles.

First, he was going to abrogate the treaty of Versailles. He was convinced he could bluff the entire world and get it done without war. Indeed, almost all of his initial victories were achieved without firing a shot.

The second policy was the destruction of the Jews: first their elimination from Germany and then from Europe. For almost six years Germany encouraged Jewish emigration, persecuting them so severely through government-sanctioned laws and raising the volume of anti-Semitism that most Jews left even when it meant leaving behind their wealth and the land they had lived in and died for for generations.

The third policy was that he was going to achieve full employment and a resilient German economy – and accomplish it through clandestinely putting the Germany economy on wartime footing. By doing so he would unite the labor forces and industrialists and earn the everlasting gratitude of the military.

Hitler declared that his Third Reich would last “a thousand years.” In actuality, it only last 12 years. But in those dozen years more harm would be done to civilization than in all of history until then.

The destruction of European Jewry really began with the First World War: the uprooting of millions of Jews, the destruction of old communities, the breakdown of religious infrastructure, habits and social observances, etc. All of that was accelerated by what happened after the war.

Russia

The Russian Revolution in 1917 changed all the foundations upon which Jewish Russia was built. In fact, the revolution proved to be one of the great disasters in Jewish history, even though the full impact of the disaster did not become apparent until decades later, and is perhaps still not fully known.

The Bolsheviks – the Russian communists – were disproportionately Jewish by birth. Jews were committed to the revolution because they thought it would solve all the problems of humanity, as well as all the problems of the Jews. Although they dropped and vehemently repudiated their Judaism in actuality they transmuted a latent religious fervor into fervor for communist ideals. Centuries of energy and genius that had been funneled into the study of Torah and the Jewish religion was now transferred to and infused into pursuit of the communist utopia.

A civil war between Communist Russians (the Red army) and anti-Bolshevik Russians (the White army) raged for four years between 1917 and 1921. The average Jew was caught in between. To the Reds he was “White” and to the Whites he was “Red.” The anti-Bolsheviks saw communism as the Judaization of their country. It was taking holy mother Russian – Russian Orthodoxy – and making it Jewish. Therefore, the White army perpetrated terrible atrocities upon the Jewish communities they encountered. It is estimated that 75,000-100,000 Jews were slaughtered by them. Jewish villages were decimated, Jewish property taken and hundreds of thousands of Jews became refugees.

It was little better when the Red army regained the territory. Its policy was that anyone who was around where the Whites had been was automatically assumed to be infected by their anti-revolutionary ideas. And the best way to deal with such hopelessly deluded people was to kill them.

Jews quickly had to choose sides. Most chose the side of the Reds. If they could have really chosen sides they probably would have left. But they couldn’t leave. Neither side would let them, and there was no place to go to. They were trapped.

When the Reds finally gained the upper hand they set about with a vengeance to make sure the surviving Jews were going to be Bolsheviks like them. To do so they established a bureau of the Communist Party devoted to Jewish affairs. This section became known as Yevsektsia (alternative spelling: Yevsektsiya — the acronym of the department name in Russian) and was run by Jews.

These Jewish communists were incredibly ruthless in stamping out any type of religious activity by fellow Jews. They killed rabbis, closed the yeshivos and synagogues, banned all religious practices, and enforced it by getting friends to turn in neighbors, children to turn in parents and send them to Siberia for observing the religion. It was the Yevsektsia more than anything else that destroyed the Jewish community in Russia.

At the same time, the Jewish socialists in Russia, especially those members of the Bund, came to a sad and appropriate end. The Yevsektsia said they did not need a second organization to help them in their “sacred” task and forced the Bund into the communist party. Then, to insure that it would not continue, they killed its leaders, thereby guaranteeing the subservience of the Jewish people to the Soviet regime.

As time went on, Jewish communists themselves were slowly crowded out of all of the offices in the communist party and Russian government. The infamous purges of Stalin tended to target Jews more than others. Therefore, from the time of the Second World War onward, with few exceptions, there were no Jews in any sort of influential position in the Soviet Union. This represented a major shift, because at the beginning of the movement, during Lenin’s time and the beginning of Stalin’s, Jews occupied positions of high influence and power.

Jews invested an incredible religious-like fervor in the communist revolution, and would get nothing in return.

Poland

In Poland, the Jews counted between 10-12% of the population, the largest proportion of Jews to non-Jews in any European country. This visibility did not bode well for them.

Poland had been recreated after the war as an independent republic. But it soon turned into a dictatorship. Marshal Pilsudski, the military leader who won the wars for them, became the political leader. He was a nationalistic, right wing, Roman Catholic anti-Semite who had a false vision about the greatness of Poland. This false vision pervaded the Polish army for a long time. Based on their victory of Lithuania the Poles really thought that they could hold off Hitler in 1939.

Poland was living in a bubble on many levels. The president of Poland was a renowned pianist. As such, arguably more than anything else, he symbolized Poland’s flight from reality. Poland did not need piano music. It needed sober leadership. It had a sick economy and was surrounded by very powerful enemies who would not long suffer its existence. Instead of dealing with their problems the Poles they were convinced that their problems were because of the Jews, and as time went on anti-Semitism grew.

The Jews were prominent in three industries: liquor, textile and tobacco. All of those industries were taken away from the Jews by the government with little or no compensation. They did so in many ways, including passing laws forbidding retail establishments from being open on Sunday or Christian holidays, which in effect decimated the Jewish shops, most of which were closed on Saturday. Thousands and thousands of Jews found themselves on the streets unemployed.

The laws legislated by the Polish government to destroy Jewish economic life grew itself laws against the Jewish religion. For instance, the Polish government passed a law against kosher meat. The attack against kosher laws is one of the oldest anti-Semitic attacks in history. It is the foot in the door to anti-Semitism.

And it did not stop with kosher meat. They levied special taxes against Jews. Similarly, there were all sorts of laws meant to stunt the Jewish religion, including one that made it forbidden to build a sukkah (booth for the festival of Sukkos). They levied special taxes and/or fines on lulavs and esrogs, the species needed for the festival of Sukkos. These and other laws were passed expressly to diminish Jewish life.

Worse than the laws themselves was the climate of anti-Semitism they bred. When Hitler came he found a ready climate of anti-Semitism that made it easy for the Nazis to disenfranchise the Jews.

Jews in Western Europe

Jews in Germany between the wars were in turmoil. A great section of the German people refused to admit that they had been defeated in the First World War. They said the only reason they lost was because someone sold them out. The “someone” who sold them out was of course the Jews. One of the men who signed the armistice was a Jew and he was soon assassinated. Even though his assassins were known they were never arrested.

The Weimar Republic, which was the new democratic government set up after the war, was very weak and ineffective. Germany was wracked by tremendous inflation. There are famous photographs of Germans going to shop with wheelbarrows full of cash. A person needed millions and millions of marks just to buy a loaf of bread.

The general German culture in the 1920s was strongly anti-Semitic, but the Jews nevertheless lived there with a false sense of security, believing that nothing would ever come of it. They did not realize the potential for disaster that was just under the surface.

During the 1920s, until the time of Hitler, intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews reached new heights. Combined with Jewish deaths in the First World War and a steep decline in the Jewish birth rate, Jewish life weakened markedly.

There was also a large defection of Jews from the Jewish religion. It is hard to know why it happened. On one hand, it could have been because of persecution and anti-Semitism, and on the other hand it was because of assimilation. But, whatever the cause, there was a flood of defections.

The Closing Door

It would be incorrect to say that the Jews did not want to leave Europe. They did. However, there was virtually nowhere to go and no way to get there.

From 1920 to 1926 almost a million Jews left Europe. About 60% came to the United States, 25% went to Palestine and the rest to various places all over the world. In 1926, the United States closed its doors and made it much more difficult for Jews from Eastern Europe to enter. As a result the percentages flip-flopped. From 1926 to 1929 about two out of every three Jews who emigrated went to Palestine (about 350,000, compared to 185,000 to the United States).

By 1929, Jews could not get into Palestine either. Then from 1933 onward, when Jews really needed a place to go, their access to places of refuge was almost completely cut off. There was no place to go.

The frustration of the European Jew was quickly reaching a boiling point. He could not stay but he could not go. He had very little hope that his personal goals would be realized or that the goals of the Jewish people, religiously or nationally, would be realized. He was besieged from all sides.

At the same time, he couldn’t see clearly what was coming; he wouldn’t let himself believe it.

One of the great scholars and mystics of the Jewish people, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is credited with starting the Chief Rabbinate in the modern State of Israel -- but even in his lifetime he knew it did not turn out the way he envisioned it would be.

The inventor of the institution of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel today was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who was one of the great scholars and visionaries of the Jewish people, as well as a very spiritual man and holy man in every sense of the word. He had come to Palestine in the early 1900s as chief rabbi in the city of Jaffa. Together with other rabbis he traveled throughout the country to try to bring to the new settlers the spirit of the Jewish people and its Torah.

A mystic, he saw the return of the Jewish people to its ancient homeland as the beginning of the long-predicted Messianic Era and the redemption of the Jewish people. He saw in the Balfour Declaration and a religious revelation, not just a political statement.  Rabbi Kook was also very active in Zionist circles and was famously tolerant of the secular and even irreligious elements.

When the First World War broke out he was traveling through Europe to attend a major rabbinic convention. The Turks tightened their grip on Palestine and did not let Jews return there, so Rabbi Kook stayed in Switzerland for the first two years of the war. He had a great influence on Jews there and then moved to London, where he put together an organization called, The Flag of Jerusalem. It was his attempt to support the Jewish community in the Land of Israel and give it the stamp of traditional Jewish values.

At the end of 1919, he returned to Palestine and was elected as the Rabbi of Jerusalem. Even though he enjoyed an overwhelming majority of the vote, his election was contested by various groups; they never stopped referring to him as the Rabbi of Jaffa rather than the Rabbi of Jerusalem. On a personal basis, Rabbi Kook was on friendly terms with all of his opponents. They recognized him as a person of remarkable stature and holiness. However, they considered his politics controversial.

Besides establishing a Torah academy in Jerusalem, he was also a poetic and prolific writer. The very broad range of topics included Jewish law, the intricacies of observing the Sabbatical year (shemitta); Jewish thought, philosophy and mysticism; he even penned a long article on the Theory of Evolution and its relationship to Jewish ideas.

One of the pursuits that he considered very important was the creation of the Chief Rabbinate. He intended it to be the moral voice of the Jewish people in Palestine, not a political rabbinic organization. However, the British already had the concept of a Chief Rabbi for the British Empire and got involved. They took Rabbi Kook’s idea and made it conform to theirs by turning the Chief Rabbinate into a legal entity subject to election by delegates. After a long period of politicking the delegates included not only Jews who were not religious, but even those who were avowed atheists. And this system of delegates remains in place today in the selection of the Chief Rabbi. It is a strange system.

Despite Rabbi Kook’s desire for the rabbinate to be a moral voice, already from the outset it was a highly politicized position influenced greatly by secular and irreligious Jews. They did not mind rabbis making decisions in purely religious spheres, to which many of them no longer subscribed. However, by politicizing the rabbinate they hoped to control the influence of rabbis on politics.

This in effect crippled the institution from the onset. However, the personality of Rabbi Kook was so great that as long as he was the leading rabbi he was able to hold all the diverse parties and their politics together. Even his successor, Rabbi Herzog whom we will discuss later, was able to do the same. Nevertheless, the institution of the Chief Rabbinate could not fulfill Rabbi Kook’s lofty goal, and he realized that in his lifetime. He did not want it to be a grand rabbinic organization, but a moral influence on the Jewish people developing in Palestine. Unfortunately, as great as he was it never really panned out his way.

Signing of the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The treaty not only failed to solve the problems that caused the war but ensured their perpetuation, and even created new problems. For European Jewry, it set up and unleashed devastating anti-Semitism.

By recognizing certain boundaries and establishing certain political realities in Europe after the First World War the Treaty of Versailles in effect created a large number of new countries. This also had a monumental effect on the Jewish people.

The ethnic groups of all of these countries bore histories of tremendous hatred toward each other. And in all of these countries, the Jew was viewed as an outsider. For example, in Hungary the Jews were viewed as Austrians; in Austria they were Hungarians. In Romania, the Jews were Hungarians; in Hungary the Jews were Romanians. The fact is that the Jews cut across all these political lines. Hassidic rabbis in Romania had followers in Hungary, and vice versa.

There is a story told about a soccer championship game that was supposed to take place in Hungary. In honor of the game, the Hungarian border was opened with its neighbors, including Romania. The borders had always been closed because they were essentially in an ongoing state of war with each other. Nevertheless, for this one event the borders were opened. This created a unique opportunity for the followers of the Hassidim in Romania to see their spiritual leader in Hungary, whom they would not see ordinarily – at least in large numbers.

Hassidim with their Rebbe, or spiritual leader. When the borders between Hungary and Romania were temporarily opened in the 1920s for a soccer match between the countries, the Hassidim used the opportunity to visit the Rebbe’s whom they had been cut off from.

There were special sports trains that had been chartered. The Hassidim joined one of these trains to and fro. On the way back they happened to be in the train of the national team and fans who had lost. When the train crossed the border the fans were so incensed at their team that they pelted the train with stones and tomatoes. The Hassidim thought they it was meant for them. When the train finally arrived at the station there was a howling mob waiting for the team to vent their anger. They thought it was a pogrom. And they couldn’t understand why the police intervened to stop it! They were used to the police letting the pogroms happen! They didn’t realize that the police were there to protect the team.

The truth is that Jews did not care much whether they were Hungarian or Romanian. As far as the Jews were concerned, the more borders the better. It gave them spiritual opportunities, such as visiting their rabbis, and material opportunities, such as engaging in international trade. Therefore, the nationals in the country looked at the Jews as being foreigners.

When the Versailles Treaty put its stamp of approval on these new countries it unleashed a wave of bitter nationalism that easily turned into virulent anti-Semitism. The Jews had hoped for just the opposite: they hoped that the freedom would be better for them. But, in the end, it turned out very badly. The anti-Semitism became part of the government, part of the public policy. Jews had nowhere to hide. That was true in almost all of the new countries that were created.

There was one thing missing from the Jewish state that it needed to have a chance to come into being was Jews. The population of the Land of Israel was relatively small, almost insignificant in comparison to the Arab majority. In order for there to be a possibility for the country to take on a Jewish character the minimum requirement was the presence of a substantial Jewish population, if not a majority.

The Zionist movement always believed – somewhat naively – that the Jewish people would come to the Land of Israel if the passage of immigration was free and open. Unfortunately, this was never the case. Even after the establishment of an independent Jewish state David Ben-Gurion expected a wave of immigration from the Western, developed countries. Instead he got it from the Eastern, Arab countries which drove their Jewish population out. A voluntary wave of immigration never took place.

The decade of the 1920s, however, saw increased Jewish immigration. It never equaled what the Zionists wanted, but in raw numbers it was impressive. During the decade about 160,000 Jews came to Israel. Approximately 85% of them came from Eastern Europe. The numbers were impressive even though about 25% went back.

The reasons varied. Many religious people left because they found an atmosphere antithetical to their beliefs. There were socialists and communists that left because it was not socialist and communist enough. A group of ultra-leftists calling themselves the Labor Battalion (Gedud Ha-Avodah) stayed about six years and then moved their kibbutz en masse to Crimea in order to be under the protection of the great and glorious Joseph Stalin. They called their new kibbutz New Life (Via Nova), because there they were going to achieve utopia. Of course, neither the place nor the people survived….

That illustrates the problem. Not many Jews came and of those who came very few found satisfaction. There were many reasons for that, as well, but perhaps chief among them is that the Land of Israel somehow elicits the dream of perfection; of a perfect state or of a spiritually and morally elevated state of being. All of these things are extremely difficult to achieve and thus the holders of such a dream are bound to be disappointed.

The New Jew

The people who came in the Third Aliyah were the people who later founded the State of Israel, including David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. They came with a firm commitment to build a Jewish state. But there were different ideas as to how the state should look.

Most of those who came were socialist-oriented. They came not just to build the Jewish state, but a socialist state — the perfect socialist state. They were imbued with the ideas and ideals of Marxism, including communal living without oppression or exploitation and the sanctity of human labor, especially of Jewish labor. They wanted to establish the “New Jew” and create a new society in its image.

Therefore, the vast majority of the people of the Third Aliyah were secular, even anti-religious. In the casting off of traditional Judaism they cast off the traditional image of the Jew. The secular nature of the state that they created, and the struggle for the soul of the people – which still is waged today – is a reflection of the attitudes they harbored and nurtured almost a century ago.

The Kibbutz Movement

There were a number of groups that came and imposed these ideas. One was called HaShomer HaTzair (“The Youth Guard”), which was a socialist, left wing group devoted to the idea of communal settlements, later called kibbutzim (singular: kibbutz). Their slogans included ideals such as everyone being equal, the ownership of property was the root of all evil, and that everyone should contribute according to his abilities and take according to his needs.

In sounded good and ultimately it was the enormous idealism of the kibbutz movement that made it work for many decades. However, it quickly became frayed around the edges simply because the idealism wore thin. A person who can contribute so much and yet needs so little finds it hard to stand idly by and watch his friend, who contributes so little, need so much. Practically speaking, the idea of building a society based on such idealism and altruism has never worked for a long period of time for a great number of people.

HaShomer HaTzair was the most idealistic of these groups. Their devotion led them to the idealism that the only type of valuable labor was working the land. They objected, for instance, to any kibbutz that was geared to pursue even small industry. To them, the ideal was pure agricultural settlement. The New Jew was a farmer. He was going to be close to the land. Working by the sweat of one’s brow was not a curse, as characterized in the Bible, but a blessing.

Therefore, from 1920 to 1929, the kibbutz movement brought in about 37,000 new Jewish farmers who worked approximately 700,000 dunam of land (approximately 180,000 acres). The number of agricultural settlements rose from 50 in 1920 to over 110 three years later. The main thrust of the people in the Third Aliyah was this type of single-minded sacrifice and idealism.

In 1923, the largest real estate deal of its kind in the history of Palestine was the purchase of Valley of Jezreel by the Jewish National Fund. That valley, which is the most fertile in the Land of Israel, became the symbol of Jewish agriculture and what could be accomplished by Jewish labor. It was developed in the 1920s and made into the “Garden of the Galilee.”

It is nothing short of miraculous that Jews who had not been farmers, who knew nothing about it, turned a rocky, parched, barren desert into a Garden of Eden. A country that had lain fallow for more than 1800s years, without any cultivation, sudden blossomed before everyone’s eyes. Today we take it for granted. But it is an extremely remarkable occurrence.

The Revisionist Movement

In the Third Aliyah there arose a great split over Zionist policy.

The control of the Zionist movement lay in the hands of Chaim Weitzman and the Labor Party, two groups that were often at odds with each other. Nevertheless, their program to achieve the Jewish state was moderate and based upon the simple understanding that whatever would happen would only happen with the cooperation of Britain; that the only way the Jewish state would come into being was through the Balfour Declaration. Therefore, all of their policy was British-oriented. They did not want to rock the boat. They were eager to forgive them for any mishaps and work with them.

This attitude was opposed by many. The main leader of the opposition was Vladimir Jabotinsky. In Russia he had been one of the leaders of the Zionist movement. He had come with the Third Aliyah.

A great orator with great charisma, he created a new Zionist party and called it the Revisionist Party. He wanted to revise Zionism; to get away from Weitzman’s type of Zionism. He was viewed by the left as a right-wing agitator. They looked down at him for wanting a Jewish state, not a Jewish socialist state.

The dispute over how to deal with England would rage until the State of Israel was founded. Was it a friend or foe? There was no clear decision on it; the Jewish yishuv was split sharply on the matter… almost to the point of civil war.

Haj Amin al-Husseini

Until 1920, the Arabs had not mounted any strong objections to the Balfour Declaration. Now, led by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, they organized a system of terror and pogroms, including kidnappings, murders and bombings.

That sent a tremendous shockwave through the Jewish population. It was one thing to have to bring in money and immigrants who would pour asphalt and plant orange trees. It was a categorically more difficult task to realize that even if you did that it would only be the prelude to armed conflict. And there was no Jewish defense infrastructure. Therefore, this came as a terrible awakening to them.

The basis for what would later become the Haganah and other Jewish militia was laid in response to these first modern day Arab terrorist attacks.

Economic Downturn

In 1925, all of a sudden the economy in Israel died and there was a great deal of unemployment. Various factors contributed to it, including a loss of investor confidence and land scandals (e.g. people selling plots of land that they had no authority to sell).

A feeling of depression overcame the Zionist movement in the middle of the 1920s. Jews weren’t coming; the country wasn’t developing the way they wanted it; England was not cooperating; they were frightened by the Arabs, etc.

Nevertheless, by the beginning in 1929, as the rest of the world stood unaware on the precipice of the Great Depression, the Jews in Palestine all of a sudden found that immigration started to pick up, new jobs were created and new projects were on the drawing board. Things would have ostensibly worked out if not for the fact that 1929 also marked the beginning of a new relationship between England and Jews who lived in Palestine. England would no longer appear as the “Great White Father” that was supporting the Jews.

The Hebron Pogrom of 1929

A combination of many things caused England to turn. One of the main things was renewed Arab violence. In August 1929, a major Arab pogrom, again staged by Haj Amin al-Husseini, broke out in several places including the Old City of Jerusalem. But the brunt of the attack took place in Hebron.

There had been a Jewish population in Hebron for centuries. It was one of the Jewish peoples’ traditional four holy cities — along with Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberius — and had a recorded Jewish presence since at least the time of Nachmanides, 700 years earlier. Now, the Arabs wiped it out in one day. There had been a renowned Torah academy (yeshiva) in Hebron, which the Arab mob obliterated. More than 40 of its young, unarmed students were brutally murdered and the rest of the population was driven out of Hebron.

Rather than crack down on the Arabs the British caved in. Their attitude became that the Jews had to listen to the Arabs, because they could not guarantee their safety. Hebron in fact remained without Jews from 1929 to 1967, until a group of Jews established a Jewish quarter in the city in what had been the old Jewish neighborhood before 1929.

This major pogrom frightened not only the Jews but the British. The government issued a white paper (Passfield White Paper, issued October 20, 1930), which in effect said that it was impossible for the British to help make a Jewish national home in Palestine. It did not officially rescind the Balfour Declaration, but it pointed in that direction. Therefore, it struck terror into the hearts of Weitzman and the Zionist movement. They had banked all their hopes upon England, who was going to give them a state. Now, the British were backing out of it completely.