Help from the New World

Help from the New World
Painting (2006) Copyright © by Hanalisa Omer hanalisa@gmail.com

Image Background: Washington D.C.

illel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) was a young emissary to the USA from the Yishuv (then part of Palestine) sent by Ze'ev Jabotinsky to help set up a Jewish Army. He was joined by Samuel Merlin and Eri Jabotinsky and others from the Yishuv. After learning about the tragedy in Europe they set up “The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe”. Its vigorous activism made America aware of the Holocaust through creative, high impact public relations campaigns. The “Bergson Group” had dedicated supporters in Congress and leading Broadway and Hollywood talent. Hillel Kook led a spectacular march of 400 Orthodox rabbis to Congress and the White House on October 6, 1943 calling for immediate rescue action. Despite obstruction by some of America's progressive Jewish leadership the Bergon Group's persistent lobbying and positive intervention by Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his staff at the US Treausury the unprecedented activism broke through apathy and forced America to finally face the tragedy of European Jewry. President Roosevelt was forced to act and created the War Refugee Board in January 1944, which is estimated by highly respected historian Professor David Wyman to have helped rescue over 200,000, in part through the Wallenberg mission to Budapest.

Image Foreground: Budapest during Winter 1944

Under the late 1944 pro-Nazi Szálasi Arrow Cross murder regime the remnants of Hungarian Jewry struggled to survive Eichmann’s intense efforts to complete the Final Solution in Hungary. Despite great personal danger Raoul Wallenberg (Swedish diplomat, right center) and Carl Lutz (Swiss Consul, left center), each of whom saved probably tens of thousands of Jews, other diplomats, the Zionist youth rescue underground and some brave Hungarians valiantly acted to protect the remnants of Hungary’s Jewry. Recha Sternbuch (mid center), Swiss representative of the New York-based Orthodox Rabbis’ Rescue Committee (Va'ad Hatzalah), distributed protective papers to Nazi occupied countries via couriers, smuggled Jews to safety across the Austrian-Swiss border and conducted late-1944 ransom negotiations with SS commander Himmler to save the lives of concentration camp inmates as Germany retreated.