A Profile In Courage; The Necessity Of Dissenters

Now this is the Greatest Generation, and it will be a very long time before anything like this will be seen against. I'm afraid the era of the man of principle and action is long gone....

The FBI spied on him. The State Department wanted him deported. The British government sought to silence him. Prominent American Jewish leaders worked to obstruct his activities. Yet despite intense and sometimes frenzied opposition, firebrand activist Hillel Kook (known as Peter Bergson) succeeded in shattering the wall of silence that surrounded news about Hitler's annihilation of the Jews.

During World War II, Kook spearheaded an extraordinary campaign of public rallies, hard-hitting newspaper advertisements, and lobbying in Congress that forced America to confront the Holocaust. Whether by mobilizing hundreds of rabbis to march on Washington, or by recruiting Hollywood celebrities such as Edward G. Robinson and Eddie Cantor to support the Jewish cause, Kook displayed an uncanny ability to take a long-ignored issue and propel it to the forefront of public interest.

In this powerful book, Kook finally tells his side of this compelling story. Based on previously unpublished interviews, A Race Against Death explores, through Kook's eyes, the extraordinary events of an unforgettable period in recent American history. It is the true story of one man's appeal to the conscience of a generation, and his campaign for a moral reckoning in the face of the greatest tragedy mankind has ever known.

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A controversial figure, Bergson will be forever known to Jewish history as the Jew who wouldn't shut up during the Holocaust. During World War II, faced with an American Jewish establishment that was too docile to raise hell about the fate of doomed European Jews and too infatuated with Franklin Roosevelt to stand up to the president, Bergson, along with a few associates, refused to be silent.

Born in Lithuania in 1915, he came into the world as Hillel Kook, a scion of a great rabbinic dynasty. His uncle was, in fact, the revered Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who became the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of modern Israel, and whose belief in the synthesis of Zionism with Judaism helped revolutionize the thinking of the Orthodox and secular Jewish worlds. But Hillel Kook did not go into the family business. Instead, growing up in pre-World War II 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 right-of-center Revisionist movement was more militant in its attitude toward both the Arabs and the British rulers of Palestine than the Labor Zionist Party led by David Ben-Gurion.

In his youth, Kook became deeply involved with the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, a group that broke away from the labor-dominated Haganah defense force.

UNDERCOVER MISSION
As World War II approached, British restrictions had closed the gates of the one country that was willing to take in the endangered Jews of Europe. The Irgun sent Kook to Poland, where he helped organize illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. While working undercover, he operated under the name "Peter Bergson," so as not to involve his prominent rabbinic family who lived under British rule.

Fortuitously, Kook/Bergson was in Switzerland when the Germans invaded Poland. Eventually, he would make his way to New York, where he joined Jabotinsky, who was working to create a "Jewish army" to fight with the Allies against Adolf Hitler.

But in the spring of 1940, Jabotinsky died. Bergson continued Jabotinsky's agitation for a Jewish army (the campaign would eventually result in the creation of the "Jewish Brigade" of the British Army, whose veterans helped form the nucleus of Israel's forces during its War of Independence); then, in 1942, his focus changed.

While most American Zionists were still concentrating on the struggle to create a Jewish state in the aftermath of the war, Bergson realized that there was a more urgent priority: the rescue of Jews trapped in the clutches of the Nazis. By the end of 1942 (when the murder of Polish Jewry was itself largely accomplished), American Jewish leaders were no longer in doubt as to what was going on in Nazi Europe - the attempted extermination of the entire Jewish people.

Though leaders such as New York's Rabbi Stephen Wise were deeply troubled by this knowledge, they felt helpless to do anything about it. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews still alive in countries such as Hungary, where the Nazis and their collaborators had not yet started their grim deportation process. But the leaders of major Jewish organizations, such as Wise, were unable and/or unwilling to use whatever clout they possessed to challenge the Roosevelt administration to attempt to rescue as many Jews as could be saved. Bergson had no such inhibitions and was a master of public relations.

Mobilizing celebrities - such as journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht - Bergson 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 provocative newspaper ads, staged pageants written by Hecht to memorialize Jewish victims and held a rabbinic march on Washington to galvanize support for rescue.

Rather than joining in with Bergson's efforts, Wise and other Jewish leaders feared and despised him. They thought Bergson's campaign would arouse anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish pogroms in America. 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. Appealing to the instinctive American belief in fairness, the Irgunist'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 on behalf of rescue led to congressional pressure that resulted in the Roosevelt administration creating the War Refugee Board in 1944. The board's work was directly responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

To the end of his life, Bergson believed that despite its limited success, his work was a failure. Had his group been able to force the creation of the War Refugee Board earlier and if it were given more resources, even more Jews might have been saved.

That is an argument historians will continue to debate. But there is little doubt that Bergson's valiant efforts were a bright light of Jewish honor at a time when the counsels of despair governed the hearts of the men who were supposed to be American Jewry's leaders.

NO POSTWAR HONORS
Yet for the man known as Peter Bergson, there would be no postwar honors. As a political opponent of Ben-Gurion, Kook (who resumed his real name after the State of Israel was declared) 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 take up a successful career on Wall Street. He eventually returned to the Jewish state in 1975, where he lived in obscurity until his death.

Over the years, Kook would periodically emerge to give testimony about the past and contribute to the fierce debates that raged about the failure of the leaders of the Jewish world to effectively aid the victims of the Holocaust.

Some, influenced by their dislike of Kook's politics, would denigrate him and seek to exonerate Wise. But with the publication of influential books such as Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died, David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews and Rafael Medoff's The Deafening Silence, recognition of the importance of Kook's work grew. Though the body of scholarship on this topic is increasing, to date, only one biography of Kook exists - a fine effort by the late Louis Rapaport, titled Shake Heaven & Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe .

In his refusal to be silent, Kook not only set in motion the chain of events that 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 largely unknown to most American Jews alive today. But he was, as much as anyone, the man who helped set in motion the activist identity of countless American Jews who grew up long after this hero left the stage.

As American Jewry marshals its considerable resources to support the embattled Israel of our own time, it is fitting that we remember the man who came from Palestine more than 60 years ago to show 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.

And yet more:

Mr. Bergson, who was known in Israel by his Hebrew name, Hillel Kook, was born in 1915 in Lithuania, and was the youngest of eight children. At age 10, amid widespread pogroms, he and his family fled to Palestine, where his uncle Avraham Yitzak Kook was the country's first Ashkenazi chief rabbi. One of Mr. Bergson's earliest friends there was David Raziel, who became the head of Irgun Zvai Leumi, the armed Jewish underground movement.

A member of Irgun from his early teens, Mr. Bergson adopted his new name to shield his family from his political activities after he was sent to Poland in 1937 to help the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky smuggle Jews into Palestine.

Mr. Bergson first came to the United States in June 1940 to help Mr. Jabotinsky set up a Jewish army to join the fight against Hitler.

But by late 1942, Mr. Bergson's mentor had died and his focus had shifted. On Nov. 25, 1942, a small article appeared on Page 10 of The New York Times with the first official news that, up to that point, two million Jews had been killed in Europe. From then on, Mr. Bergson's talents at fund-raising and garnering publicity were devoted to the campaign to rescue European Jews.

With his fellow campaigner, the writer Ben Hecht, Mr. Bergson set up the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews in Europe in 1943 in response to what he considered to be feeble official efforts to respond to the killings. To get attention for their cause, they held plays and mass pageants, including Mr. Hecht's ''A Flag Is Born'' and ''We Will Never Die,'' which toured the country after attracting 40,000 to Madison Square Garden in March 1943. Edward G. Robinson, Marlon Brando and Stella Adler were among those who took part.

Most controversial were the committee's full-page advertisements in major newspapers, including one that appeared in The Times and The Washington Post in February 1943. It said: ''For sale to humanity: 70,000 Rumanian Jews, Guaranteed Human beings at $50 a Piece.'' Jewish leaders were outraged. And Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, quickly condemned the advertisement as a hoax.

Charismatic, indefatigable and reviled in many quarters, Mr. Bergson was ''as persistent as a force of nature,'' Mr. Hecht later wrote. On one occasion, two days before Yom Kippur in October 1943, Mr. Bergson persuaded 400 orthodox rabbis to march on Washington to protest what they thought was the Roosevelt administration's indifference to the plight of European Jews. He later said that he had invited clergymen of all faiths to take part, but only the rabbis had agreed to come.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not receive the marchers, having been told by Jewish advisers that the committee did not represent the mainstream of American Jewish opinion. But the marchers met with others in the capital. To many historians, the event helped force Congress to hold its first hearings on the plight of Jews in Europe and contributed directly to the creation of a government rescue agency, the War Refugee Board, in January 1944.

''He was a master of public relations at a very young age,'' said his daughter Rebecca Kook, who teaches political science at Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, Israel. ''In many ways, he established what many consider to be the first example of a real political lobby in Washington.''

After the creation of the War Refugee Board, Mr. Bergson and his group shifted their focus back to events in Palestine, with the creation of the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. But this body, closely associated with Irgun, with its own ''Hebrew Embassy'' on Washington's Embassy Row, never gained widespread acceptance as a government in exile. David Ben-Gurion, later to become Israel's first prime minister, called it ''a group of self-appointed people who represent nobody but themselves.''

As Hillel Kook, Mr. Bergson returned home in May 1948 with Is rael's declaration of independence and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. But he later resigned his seat in protest when the Ben-Gurion government turned the assembly into the first Knesset before it had written a constitution.

In 1951, Mr. Bergson returned to the United States with his wife, Betty, a fellow wartime campaigner for refugees, whom he had married in Israel in 1950. He then withdrew from politics, successfully working as an independent stockbroker on Wall Street.

Betty Kook died of cancer in 1964, and in 1970 Mr. Bergson retired from business and returned to Israel. There he picked up some of his old causes, including his campaign for an Israeli constitution built on a strong division between synagogue and government.

''The bearded, impeccably dressed Kook looks every inch the elder statesman, a Trotsky in Mexico whose brilliant theories have been filed away,'' Louis Rapoport wrote of Mr. Bergson's retirement years in ''Shake Heaven & Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe'' (Gefen).

He married Nili Haskell in Israel in 1975. She survives him, as do two daughters, Rebecca Kook of Israel and Astra Zemko of London; two granddaughters; and a grandson.
Correction: August 23, 2001, Thursday An obituary on Monday about Peter Bergson, a Zionist who crusaded in the United States during World War II on behalf of Jews in Europe, misspelled the surname of a surviving daughter. She is Astra Temko, not Zemko.

And then there's this; Kook was supported by Nancy Pelosi's father:

When Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, stepped to the podium at a Knesset dinner during her visit earlier this month, she made history in more ways than one.
Not only was she the first woman Speaker of the House to address Israel's lawmakers, Pelosi was also addressing the parliament of a country whose creation her own father championed, at the risk of his career - and perhaps her career, as well.

Speaker Pelosi's father, the late US congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., of Maryland, was known as a Roosevelt Democrat. What is not widely known is that D'Alesandro broke ranks with president Franklin D. Roosevelt on the issues of rescuing Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish State.

D'Alesandro was one of the congressional supporters of the Bergson Group, a maverick Jewish political action committee that challenged the Roosevelt administration's policies on the Jewish refugee issue during the Holocaust, and later lobbied against British control of Palestine.

The Bergson activists used unconventional tactics to draw attention to the plight of Europe's Jews, including staging theatrical pageants, organizing a march by 400 rabbis to the White House, and placing more than 200 full-page advertisements in newspapers around the country. Some of those ads featured lists of celebrities, prominent intellectuals, and members of Congress who supported the group - including D'Alesandro.

D'Alesandro's involvement with the Bergson Group was remarkable because he was a Democrat who was choosing to support a group that was publicly challenging a Democratic president. And D'Alesandro was not one of the conservative Southern "Dixiecrat" Democrats who sometimes tangled with FDR over various issues; he was a staunch supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal. He even named his first son Franklin Roosevelt D'Alesandro.

UNTIL LATE in the Holocaust, the Roosevelt administration's position was that nothing could be done to rescue Jews from the Nazis except to win the war. The Bergson Group was convinced that there were many steps the US could take to rescue refugees, without impeding the war effort.

Bergson's strategy for changing US policy was anchored in the hope that humanitarian-minded Democrats like D'Alesandro would break ranks with the White House over the plight of the Jews. Rallying Congress was a way to put pressure on the president.

The Bergson Group's Holocaust campaign culminated in the introduction of a Congressional resolution, in late 1943, urging creation of a government agency to rescue refugees. Senator Tom Connally of Texas, a loyal FDR supporter and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blocked the committee's consideration of the resolution. But when Connally was out sick one day, his replacement, Senator Elbert Thomas (D-Utah) quickly ushered the resolution through. In the House of Representatives, too, there was growing support for the rescue resolution.

This Congressional pressure helped influence President Roosevelt to do what the resolution urged - in early 1944, he established the War Refugee Board. Despite its small staff and meager funding, the Board played a key role in the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust. Its many accomplishments included sponsoring the heroic life-saving activities of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

AFTER THE war, D'Alesandro continued supporting the Bergson Group as it campaigned for the establishment of a Jewish State in Mandatory Palestine. That sometimes meant clashing with the Truman administration, which wavered back and forth on the issue of Jewish statehood.

Every member of Congress who supported the Bergson Group had his own particular reasons for doing so. Senator Thomas, for example, was a Mormon, and his kinship with the Jewish people had been forged by both his community's experiences as a mistreated minority and his religious convictions about the Jews and the Holy Land. Rep. Andrew Somers (D-NY) was of Irish descent, and his resentment of British rule in Ireland strengthened his support for Bergson's campaigns against the British shutdown of Palestine to Jewish refugees. Another important Bergson supporter, Rep. Will Rogers, Jr. (D-CA), son of the famous entertainer, was part Native American, and he attributed his interest in the plight of the Jews to his general concern for minorities.

Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr. was a Catholic and the son of Italian immigrants. Perhaps those factors fueled his sympathy for religious minorities and refugees. Or perhaps it was just the simple humanitarian instinct of every sensitive person who hears of innocents being persecuted and wants to help, regardless of political considerations.

Whatever his motives, D'Alesandro was taking a big risk. He knew that by defying Roosevelt and Truman, he might be making enemies in the White House. In 1947, at the very moment he was breaking ranks with Truman over Palestine, D'Alesandro decided to run for mayor of Baltimore. If the White House had chosen to retaliate against him for his dissent on Palestine, he might never have been elected.

And if that had happened, his daughter Nancy might never have embarked on a political career of her own.

The 12 years that D'Alesandro served as mayor of Baltimore were the crucial formative years of Nancy's political education. She "learned her politics at the elbow of her father," a recent Washington Post profile of the House speaker noted. Throughout high school and into her college years, Nancy was at the center of her father's intense political world. As a result, she was a political veteran long before she even entered politics. And she was fortunate to have as her role model a man who courageously put his humanitarian principles above his narrow political needs.