Philadelphia — On Aug. 18, the Jewish world lost one of its great heroes. Not much fuss marked his passing. But the man most of the world once knew as Peter Bergson had a profound influence on American Jewish life.
Bergson will be forever known to history as the Jew who wouldn’t shut up during the Holocaust. He faced an American Jewish establishment too docile to raise hell about the fate of European Jews and too infatuated with President Franklin Roosevelt to stand up to him. But Bergson, with a few associates, was among the few Jews who refused to remain silent.
He was born in Lithuania in 1915 as Hillel Kook, a scion of a great rabbinical dynasty. His uncle was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), the great Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of pre-Israel Palestine.
But Hillel Kook did not go into the family business. After growing up in Palestine (after his family had made aliyah), he chose to devote himself to the battle to create a Jewish state.
Kook was a follower of Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose Revisionist movement was more militant in its attitude toward the Arabs and the British rulers of Palestine than the Labor Zionists led by David Ben-Gurion. In his youth, Kook became involved with the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, which broke away from the Labor-dominated Haganah defense force.
Undercover mission
As World War II approached, the British closed the gates of the one country willing to take in the endangered Jews of Europe. The Irgun sent Kook to Poland, where he helped organize illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. He operated under the name “Peter Bergson,” so as not to involve his rabbinical family, who lived under British rule.
Fortuitously, Kook/Bergson was in Switzerland when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. He made his way to New York, where he joined Jabotinsky in working to create a “Jewish army” to fight with the Allies.
In the spring of 1940, Jabotinsky died. Bergson continued the agitation for a Jewish army. The campaign resulted in creation of the “Jewish Brigade” of the British Army, whose veterans helped form the nucleus of Israel’s forces during its War of Independence.
In 1942, Bergson’s focus changed. While most U.S. Zionists concentrated on the struggle to create a Jewish state after the war, Bergson realized a more urgent priority was the rescue of Jews in the clutches of the Nazis.
By the end of 1942 (when the murder of Polish Jewry was itself largely accomplished), American Jewish leaders knew the German Nazis were attempting to exterminate the entire Jewish people. Though leaders such as New York’s Rabbi Stephen Wise were deeply troubled by this knowledge, they felt helpless.
Thousands of Jews were still alive in countries like Hungary, where the Nazis and their collaborators had not yet started deportations. But leaders of major Jewish organizations were unable or unwilling to use whatever clout they possessed to urge the Roosevelt administration to attempt to rescue as many Jews as possible.
Bergson had no such inhibitions and was a master of public relations. He began a flamboyant campaign to bring the fate of European Jews to the forefront of the American consciousness. His Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe published newspaper ads, staged pageants to memorialize Jewish victims and held a rabbinical march on Washington.
Rather than joining Bergson’s efforts, Wise and other Jewish leaders feared and despised him. They thought Bergson’s campaign would arouse anti-Semitism.
But the foreign-born Bergson understood America better than natives like Wise, who was too close to Roosevelt to see that he was being used. Bergson’s campaign was able to tap into powerful feelings of sympathy for Jewish victims and for Zionism among ordinary Americans, as well as many non-Jewish politicians.
Fortunately, the establishment failed to stop him. Bergson’s agitation led to congressional pressure that resulted in the Roosevelt administration creating the War Refugee Board in 1944. The board’s work saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
To the end of his life, Bergson believed that his work was a failure. Had his group been able to force creation of the War Refugee Board earlier and if it were given more resources, even more Jews might have been saved.
Historians will continue to debate that issue. But there is little doubt Bergson’s valiant efforts were a bright light of Jewish honor at a time when the counsels of despair governed the men who were supposed to be American Jewry’s leaders.
Post-war obscurity
Yet there were no postwar honors for him. As a political opponent of Ben-Gurion, Kook (who resumed his real name after Israel was created) was elected to the first Knesset along with Menachem Begin.
But Kook was no politician. He soon quarreled with Begin and, disillusioned, left Israeli public life, and then Israel itself, to build a successful career on Wall Street. He returned to Israel in 1975, where he lived in obscurity until his death.
Kook would periodically emerge to testify about the past and contribute to the fierce debates over the failure of the leaders of the Jewish world to aid the victims of the Shoah. Some, influenced by their dislike of Kook’s politics, would denigrate him and seek to exonerate Wise.
But with publication of books like Arthur Morse’s “While Six Million Died,” David Wyman’s “The Abandonment of the Jews” and Rafael Medoff’s “The Deafening Silence,” recognition grew of the importance of Kook’s work.
Though the scholarship on this topic is increasing, to date only one biography of Kook exists, a fine effort by the late Louis Rapaport, “Shake Heaven & Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe” (Gefen Books, 1999).
In his refusal to be silent, Kook not only helped save many Jewish lives, but also created the paradigm for a half-century of unapologetic Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry and the State of Israel.
Bergson is unknown to most American Jews today. But he, as much as anyone, helped create the activist identity of countless American Jews who grew up long after this hero left the stage.
As American Jewry marshals its resources to support the embattled Israel of our own time, it is fitting that we remember the man who more than 60 years ago showed us how to stand up and speak truth to power. Let his memory be for a blessing, and let his legacy inspire us to act with honor, as he did so long ago.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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