At a time when there was no organized Jewish lobby in Washington, D.C., pulpit rabbi-turned-Jewish activist Baruch Rabinowitz (1914-2003) fulfilled that role as the Bergson Group’s full-time representative on Capitol Hill.

Tearing Down the Swastika

Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Baruch Rabinowitz was the son of the “Brownsviller Rebbe,” Rabbi Samuel A. Rabinowitz, a sixth-generation direct descendant of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism. Raised in Canada and Bayonne, New Jersey, Rabinowitz traveled to Jerusalem in 1932 to study under Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, from whom he received rabbinical ordination.

Rabinowitz became a follower of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement. Shortly after the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933, Rabinowitz was part of a group of his activists who climbed atop the German Consulate in Jerusalem and tore down its swastika flag. The charred remains of that flag flag are today on display at the Jabotinsky Museum in Tel Aviv.

Returning to the United States in 1934, Rabinowitz earned his rabbinical ordination at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS)—today Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school. In 1938, Rabbi Rabinowitz assumed the pulpit of Congregation B’nai Abraham in Hagerstown, Maryland.

In late 1940, Rabinowitz resigned from B’nai Abraham and moved to New York City to work full time for the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, a Revisionist faction that advocated Jewish statehood and immigration. Among Rabbi Rabinowitz’s close colleagues in this effort was Rabbi Louis I. Newman of Temple Rodeph Shalom in New York City, one of the few Reform rabbis who supported Jabotinsky.

From New York to Washington

That same year, Jabotinskyite emissary Hillel Kook arrived in the United States and, using the pseudonym “Peter Bergson,” because active in the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine. Under Bergson’s leadership, the group in 1941 was transformed into the Committee for a Jewish Army, which campaigned for the creation of a Jewish armed force to fight alongside the Allies against the Nazis. The British rejected the proposal because of Arab opposition, and because they feared the Jews would eventually use such military force to help bring about the creation of a Jewish state.

In the autumn of 1941, Bergson sent Rabinowitz to press the case for a Jewish army full-time in the nation’s capital. Although Rabinowitz was a novice in the political world, he was an experienced public speaker and possessed good interpersonal skills.

“Day after day I visited members of Congress of both Houses,” he recalled. “I saw an average of six congressmen a day, five days a week.” His first and closest ally in Washington was an Irish-American congressman from New York, Andrew Somers, whose hostility to the British drew him to support Zionism.

Rabbi Rabinowitz worked out of Somers’s office and used his connection with him to cultivate ties with numerous other members of Congress. He built relations on both sides of the aisle, although Republicans were often more receptive to Rabbi Rabinowitz’s appeals, while many Democrats were reluctant to defy the Roosevelt administration’s line on Palestine or refugees. Among other things, Rabinowitz wrote pro-Zionist speeches for sympathetic congressmen.

The Jewish army idea was later taken up by mainstream American Jewish organizations, which lobbied Allied officials behind the scenes while the Bergson activists kept up the pressure in the media and on Capitol Hill. Eventually the British agreed to establish the Jewish Brigade, which fought with distinction against the Germans in the spring of 1945. Many of its veterans took part in the postwar smuggling of Holocaust survivors to Eretz Yisrael, and then put their military training to use in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

Lobbying for Rescue

In 1943, after reports of the Nazi genocide were confirmed by the Allies, Bergson established a new organization, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Rabbi Rabinowitz went door to door on Capitol Hill, pleading for US government action to save Jews from Hitler.

Rabinowitz helped organize a dramatic march of more than 400 rabbis to the White House just before Yom Kippur in 1943 to plead for US action to save Jewish refugees—the only such protest in Washington during the Holocaust.

According to Rabinowitz’s unpublished autobiography, the idea of the march came from Harold Young, an assistant to Vice President Henry Wallace, whom he and Bergson met in 1943. Young suggested to them that they bring huge numbers of Jewish demonstrators from New York to the White House. Bergson wondered aloud whether that many people could take up so much space on the trains, given restrictions on travel during the war. “That’s the trouble with you Jews,” Young said. “You always want to appear as gentlemen.”

The march, combined with numerous newspaper ads placed by the Bergson Group, galvanized members of Congress to introduce a resolution, in November 1943, urging the Roosevelt administration to establish a government agency to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. The hearings over the resolution exploded in controversy when it was revealed that the testimony against the resolution, delivered by Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, was based on false claims about immigration numbers.

The combination of public pressure, congressional controversy, and behind-the-scenes pressure from the Treasury Department persuaded President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board, the rescue agency Congress had been demanding.

Although Roosevelt intended the WRB as little more than an election-year gesture, and although it was underfunded and understaffed, the WRB managed to save some 200,000 Jews during the final fifteen months of the war. One of the WRB’s most notable accomplishments was its role in facilitating and financing the life-saving activities in Budapest of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

Support from Hollywood and Broadway

Towards the end of World War II, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe converted itself into the American League for a Free Palestine, and shifted the focus of its lobbying to the struggle for Jewish statehood. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s work on Capitol Hill now aimed to intensify the congressional pressure on the British to pull out of Palestine.

A number of celebrities, shocked by the Holocaust, lent their support to the American League for a Free Palestine. On a fundraising mission to California in 1946, Rabinowitz succeed in collection contributions from such diverse sources as the singer Frank Sinatra, actors Danny Thomas and Jimmy Durante and former boxing champion Barney Ross.

The Ross connection proved fortuitous when a group of St. Louis Jewish gangsters, associated with the reputed mobster Mickey Cohen, offered to hold a fundraising event for the League on condition that Rabbi Rabinowitz produce the Jewish boxer as their keynote speaker. The gathering raised over $100,000.

Cohen himself organized a fundraiser at Slapsie Maxie’s nightclub in Hollywood. According to Bergson activist Ben Hecht, the audience consisted of “a thousand bookies, ex-prize fighters, gamblers, jockeys, touts and all sorts of lawless and semi-lawless characters—and their womenfolk.” An estimated $200,000 was raised that night.

In a 2003 interview, Rabinowitz recalled that he was once summoned to a middle-of-the night meeting with Cohen, but overslept and missed the appointment. That turned out to be fortuitous, because as Cohen was exiting the house that night, he was ambushed by gunmen sent by a rival gangster and nearly killed.

Vincent Price chaired the League’s 1947 dinner in Los Angeles. Marlon Brando spoke at its rallies around the country. Harpo Marx, Carl Reiner, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein and Canada Lee endorsed the League’s work. Sinatra in particular was “very helpful,” Rabinowitz said in a 2003 interview. He recalled an occasion on which he was meeting Sinatra in a bar, and one of the patrons called them “Jew bastards”; Sinatra “turned around and punched him out.”

Perhaps Rabbi Rabinowitz’s biggest coup in the recruitment of VIPs was his success in persuading Colonel James Roosevelt, son of the late president, to serve as chair of the League’s West Coast division.

Finding Support South of the Border

The Bergson group sent Rabbi Rabinowitz to Mexico in 1947, together with Congressman Somers and Stella Adler. The ostensible purpose of the mission was to set up a south-of-the-border branch of the American League for a Free Palestine. But while Somers and Adler were addressing rallies and giving interviews to the local media, Rabbi Rabinowitz slipped away for secret talks with Mexican government officials to seek weapons for the Jewish revolt against the British.

Rabbi Rabinowitz was also sent to the Dominican Republic, where he brokered a deal with President Rafael Trujillo who was then under criticism in the US for his harsh domestic policies.

Rabinowitz agreed to praise the Trujillo administration in his meetings with congressmen, in exchange for false passports to help Irgun fighters escape from a British detention camp in Eritrea, East Africa. Four future Israeli leaders owed their freedom to Rabbi Rabinowitz’s efforts: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir, Finance Minister Yaacov Meridor and Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Arieh Ben-Eliezer.

Breaking Down Barriers

During his years on Capitol Hill, Rabbi Rabinowitz also played a role in an important civil rights battle. The incident centered around A Flag is Born, a Ben Hecht play about elderly Holocaust survivors who encounter a young Zionist on his way to the Holy Land to fight for Jewish statehood. Paul Muni and Celia Adler starred alongside twenty-two-year-old Marlon Brando, a protégé of Stella Adler who, in addition to her work as an actress and as a renowned acting coach, was a central activist in the Bergson group.

Brando recalled in his memoirs how his character’s lines criticizing American Jewish apathy during the Holocaust “sent chills through the audience,” and at some performances, “Jewish girls got out of their seats and screamed and cried from the aisles in sadness.” Rabinowitz took the stage during the intermission of each performance and delivered pro-Zionist speeches.

After a successful ten-week run on Broadway, Flag was supposed to be staged at the National Theater in Washington, DC. But Hecht and thirty-two other playwrights had just announced they would not permit their works to be performed there because the National barred African-American theatergoers. The Washington performance was rescheduled for Baltimore’s Maryland Theater, and Rabbi Rabinowitz organized a group of eighteen US senators to travel to Baltimore for the event.

But on the eve of the performance, the NAACP alerted the Bergson group that the Maryland Theater, while not barring African-Americans, restricted them to the balcony. Using the NAACP’s threat to picket as leverage, Rabbi Rabinowitz and his colleagues successfully pressured the theater management to rescind the seating discrimination. Twelve African-Americans attended the opening night performance of A Flag Is Born and sat where they chose. Exuberant NAACP leaders hailed the “tradition-shattering victory” won by the alliance of Black and Zionist activists against theater discrimination. That triumph was subsequently used by Baltimore civil rights activists to help bring about the desegregation of other theaters in the city.

Paving the Way

Baruch Rabinowitz was part of a generation of immigrants and children of immigrants, many of whom did not yet feel fully secure in American society and were reluctant to press Jewish issues in the public arena. In aggressively pleading their people’s cause on Capitol Hill and in the news media, Rabinowitz and his Bergson Group colleagues thus were defying the norm.

Rabinowitz’s activities also were unusual for an Orthodox rabbi at that time. In the 1940s, Orthodox rabbis typically focused their energies on maintaining traditional observance in the face of social and economic pressure on their congregants to assimilate. Rabinowitz, by contrast, forsook the pulpit and focused his attention on the national struggles of the Jewish people. His work arguably contributed to the process by which Jews gradually became accustomed to full participation in post-WWII American political life.

Sources:
Wyman and Medoff, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, pp.26, 87.
Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948, pp. 42-43, 151-153.
Rabinowitz interview with Medoff, April 8, 2003.