5. STRUGGLE FOR ACTION
Almost none of the numerous opinion surveys conducted during World War II dealt with the impact that the mass killing of the European Jews had on the American public. But one Gallup poll (January 7, 1943) provided some information. It included the following inquiry: "It is said that two million Jews have been killed in Europe since the war began. Do you think this is true or just a rumor?" Forty-seven percent of the respondents considered it true, 29 percent thought it rumor, and 24 percent had no opinion. Unfortunately, this finding does not tell what proportion of Americans was aware of the extermination news. But it suggests that during the preceding six weeks Jewish organizations had made important strides in getting the information before the public. The plausibility of such a conclusion is strengthened when one considers the lack of cooperation from the State Department and the Office of War Information as well as the limited interest of most of the mass media. [1]
The American Jewish Congress hoped that public opinion had become sufficiently aroused to bring government action. Its representatives approached the State Department week after week in early 1943, but received, in the words of one Jewish leader, "nothing but a runaround." Discussions with Sumner Welles, Adolf Berle, Breckinridge Long, and officials in the Division of European Affairs were all to no avail. [2]
In contrast to December, during January and much of February Jewish organizations were relatively quiescent; the extermination issue received limited public attention. Outing those weeks, however, shocking news reports from Europe began to reactivate the campaign for rescue. A courier from the non-Jewish Polish underground reached England in December with further confirmation of the systematic murder of the Polish Jews. He also brought an account of the hideous conditions on the deportation trains bound for the Belzec killing center. It was based on his own observations, for he had infiltrated a Nazi-controlled Polish police force. In Warsaw, he had seen some of the few "fortunate" Jews, children who had escaped from the ghetto and were attempting to survive in the city streets. He described them:
I shall never forget them. They look less human than like monsters, dirty, ragged, with eyes that will haunt me forever -- eyes of little beasts in the last anguish of death. They trust no one and expect only the worst from human beings. They slide along the walls of houses looking about them in mortal fear. No one knows where they sleep. From time to time they knock at the door of a Pole and beg for something to eat. [3]
The greatest shock of early 1943 was another telegram from Gerhart Riegner in Switzerland, written in collaboration with Richard Lichtheim, an official of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. It disclosed an intensification of the systematic killing that Riegner had previously reported, Six thousand Jews were being killed per day at a single location in Poland. Vienna had been nearly emptied of Jews, and more deportations were going forward from Berlin and Prague. The condition of the Jews in Rumania was desperate. Of 130,000 Rumanian Jews deported to the Transnistria region in 1941, 60,000 were dead. The other 70,000 were destitute, sleeping in crowded, unheated rooms, prey to diseases, and dying of starvation. [4]
The State Department relayed a copy of the telegram to Stephen Wise on February 9, along with a letter signed by Welles which admonished that "the Department of State cannot assume any official responsibility for the information contained in these reports, since the data is not based on investigations conducted by any of its representatives abroad." The letter also applied the disclaimer retroactively to the documents given to Wise in November. [5]
The disavowal was undoubtedly engineered by the same group in the State Department's Division of European Affairs that had been trying for months to check the spread of information about the fate of the European Jews. For one thing, the Division of European Affairs had persistently sought to disassociate the State Department from Wise's public disclosures of mass murder. Furthermore, the day after forwarding the Riegner-Lichtheim telegram to Wise, the State Department dispatched the following instruction to its Bern legation. The obvious intent was to cut off such messages at their source.
Telegram 354, February 10
Your 482, January 21 [i]
In the future we would suggest that you do not accept reports submitted to you to be transmitted to private persons in the United States unless such action is advisable because of extraordinary circumstances. Such private messages circumvent neutral countries' censorship and it is felt that by sending them we risk the possibility that steps would necessarily be taken by the neutral countries to curtail or forbid our means of communication for confidential official matter. [ii]
HULL
(SW) [6]
As the signature indicated, Welles had approved the telegram. Almost certainly, however, he had simply initialed it in routine fashion. As the message crossed his desk, it would have attracted his attention only in the unlikely event that he had recalled what 482 from Bern actually was. The authors of the telegram undoubtedly assumed that he would not. Those responsible for telegram 354 were State Department adviser on political relations James C. Dunn and three officials from the Division of European Affairs-the acting chief, Ray Atherton, the assistant chief, John D. Hickerson, and Elbridge Durbrow. [8]
The ban on information from Switzerland ended two months later. as unforeseen developments upset the scheme. But that is part of another story, one that did not become clear until December 1943. [9]
Shortly after receiving the Riegner-Lichtheim message, Wise and his associates at the American Jewish Congress gave it to the press, along with three recently received eyewitness reports from Poland. The press release, timed to make the Sunday papers, had litde impact. The New York Times, for instance, reported it unobtrusively on page 37. [10]
On February 13, one day before the Riegner-Lichtheim information came out in the press, a report of great interest to those concerned about the European Jews appeared in the New York Times. By coincidence, it exactly meshed with the Riegner-Lichtheim description of the dreadful condition of the 70,000 Rumanian Jews still alive in Transnistria, and it threw a ray of hope into that darkness. A dispatch from C. 1. Sulzberger in London disclosed that the Rumanian government had offered to cooperate in moving 70,000 Jews from Transnistria to any place of refuge chosen by the Allies. The Rumanians suggested Palestine and offered to provide Rumanian ships for the voyage. In return, Rumania asked to be paid transportation and !dated expenses amounting to 20,000 Rumanian lei (about $130) per refugee, along with additional funds should Rumanian ships be utilized. [11]
An opportunity to rescue a large number of European Jews seemed to have materialized. Rumania's collaboration with the German war effort had been opportunistic. It now seemed unsure of an Axis victory and evidently was attempting a gradual shift into the good graces of the Allies in the hope of easing the coming terms of peace. If so, the Bucharest government was badly mistaken in assuming that the Allies would consider the release of 70,000 Jews an ingratiating gesture. In fact, as subsequent events showed, the American and British governments looked upon any release of large numbers of Jews as a threat, not an opportunity.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. immediately brought the Sulzberger article to Roosevelt's attention. The President said he knew nothing about the matter and suggested that Morgenthau see Welles. Welles, also unaware of the proposal, agreed to look into it. He learned from the British Foreign Office that a representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine had informed the British government a month earlier that Rumanian officials had made such an offer to the Jewish Agency. The Foreign Office characterized the plan as blackmail, though it did believe it might be an effort by "certain Rumanian circles" to show disapproval of the Nazi extermination of Jews. The Foreign Office also stated that weeks earlier it had asked the British embassy in Washington to inform the State Department of the proposal. Apparently, the State Department simply shelved the matter. [12]
An inquiry from Welles to the American embassy in Ankara brought some clarification. According to a representative of the Jewish Agency, a Dutch businessman, resident in Rumania, had called on him in Istanbul in early December carrying a proposal from top Rumanian officials. They were ready to permit the departure of the 72,000 Jews still alive in Transnistria and offered to provide ships to move them to Palestine or another Allied port. The Dutchman also stated that the Catholic bishop of Bucharest was prepared to permit the use of the Vatican flag on the ships. [13]
On February 24, Welles passed the information from London and Ankara on to Morgenthau, with a message that the investigation was continuing. But only two weeks later the State Department was responding to inquiries about the Rumanian proposal with stock letters signed by Welles. "This story," the letters asserted,
is without foundation. It originated from an unofficial non-Rumanian resident of Bucharest who was visiting Istanbul. The probable actual source is the German propaganda machine which is always ready to use the miseries of the people of occupied Europe in order to attempt to create confusion and doubt within the United Nations.' [14]
Clearly, the State Department's investigation had been superficial. Any careful consideration would have had to include inquiries sent to the Rumanian government through neutral governments or the Red Cross. Such indirect contacts with Axis governments were not uncommon during World War II; they were even made occasionally to protest persecution of European Jews. Instead of looking into it fully, the State Department had rejected the proposition out of hand. [15]
The Rumanian proposal might not have been workable. Quire likely it would have involved an element of bribery in addition to the actual costs of removing the imperiled Jews. But it most certainly was not a story ''without foundation." Nor had it "originated from an unofficial non-Rumanian resident of Bucharest." German Foreign Office correspondence assembled for the Nuremberg trials revealed that the proposal originated at the very top level of the Rumanian government and was seriously meant. The price asked may have been excessive, but it might have been reduced by negotiations. Even the problem of sending large amounts of money into an enemy nation had a solution. It was a procedure that the U.S. government agreed to many months later in connection with a program to buy food inside Rumania to send to the Jews in Transnistria. In that instance, Rumanian holders of Rumanian currency were willing to provide substantial funds in exchange for dollars or Swiss francs that would be kept in blocked bank accounts for them until the war ended. In that way, no foreign currency would have become available to the Axis. [16]
The main issue is not whether the plan might have worked. The crucial point is that, against a backdrop of full knowledge of the ongoing extermination program, the American and British governments almost cursorily dismissed this first major potential rescue opportunity. [17]
Not everyone, however, was willing to let the Rumanian proposal pass by in silence. On February 16, three days after it published Sulzberger's dispatch, the New York Times carried a three-quarter-page advertisement with the large headline "FOR SALE to Humanity 70,000 Jews." Its sponsor was the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, an organization formed in 1941 to exert pressure on the U.S. government, and through it on the British government, to permit the establishment of a separate Jewish army. According to the committee's plan, this independent force, based in Palestine, would fight side by side with the other Allied armies under the supreme Allied command. Its ranks would include Palestinian Jews, stateless Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, and Jews from nonbelligerent nations. Jews from America, Britain, or other Allied countries were expected to join the forces of their own nations. [iii] [18]
An independent Jewish army would offer Jews, the people most victimized by Hitler, an opportunity to fight back in their own units, under their own Bag and leadership. In late 1941 and for much of 1942, the threat of German North African forces to Suez and the nearby Jewish Palestine settlement underscored both the appeal and the logic of the proposal. Such a Jewish army would be immediately valuable in holding the Middle East; it could also permit transfer of some Allied troops from that region to other fronts. [iv]
The campaign mounted in 1941 and pressed through 1942 by the Committee for a Jewish Army (CJA) had attracted substantial support from several quarters, Jewish and non-Jewish. The driving force within the CJA was a group of ten young Palestinian Jews who had come to me United States in 1939 and 1940. They were Zionists, committed to a Jewish state in Palestine. But they were heavily influenced by the thought of Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose Revisionist Zionism called for a more militant policy toward British control in Palestine and aimed at the immediate establishment of a Jewish state there. [21]
These Palestinians were not associated with the New Zionist Organization of America, which was the Revisionist Zionist body in the United States. Most of them, in fact, were secretly members of the Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi), a Jewish armed underground in Palestine. While these men constituted a tiny, American-based wing of the Irgun, they did not conduct underground activities in the United States. During the war, they were almost completely isolated from the Irgun in Palestine. [22]
At the group's core were Hillel Kook and Samuel Merlin. Merlin, a journalist, had earlier served as Jabotinsky's personal secretary. Kook was descended from a noted rabbinical line. In the United States, he adopted the name Peter H. Bergson in order to keep his political activities from reflecting on the name of his late uncle, the former chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook. Quick and intense, Bergson was a dynamic speaker and the group's leader. Consequently, the Palestinians and the movements they initiated were referred to as the Bergsonites. [23]
The main Zionist movement harbored a deep-seated animosity toward the Irgun and thus the Bergsonites. At the root of this attitude were three factors. Regular Zionists viewed Jabotinsky and his followers as militaristic and virtually fascist. They strongly disagreed with the Irgun's use of violence in Palestine, in part because they believed it could damage the moral stature of Zionism and thus seriously hurt the Zionist cause. [v] Perhaps most important, they resented and feared the break in world Zionist discipline initiated by Jabotinsky and perpetuated by the lrgun. [24]
Operating first as American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, the young Palestinians' original purpose in the United States had been to raise money to supply arms to the Irgun and to finance its program of moving refugees from Europe to Palestine, in violation of British restrictions on Jewish immigration. In 1940, the expanding war had halted Irgun activities in Europe and severed communications between Palestine and the group in the United States. The Bergsonites had then shifted their focus to the Jewish army idea. [26]
In December 1941, American Friends of a Jewish Palestine was superseded by the newly organized Committee for a Jewish Army. The campaign for a Jewish army, which peaked in 1942, started to flag when the German threat to Suez and Palestine was broken later that year. When the news of systematic annihilation became known, in late November, the Army Committee changed its emphasis. [27]
The new approach was evident ten days later in the committee's large advertisement in the New York Times, written by the popular author Piette van Paassen, Its first objective was to dramatize and spread as widely as possible the recently released extermination reports, The second was to press for rescue action. The seed of an important idea, a commission of military and government experts to try to help the European Jews, appeared along with other tentative proposals. [vi] [28]
By February, when the next advertisement appeared, the commission of experts had become "our primordial demand," Within a week, the CJA announced its decision to open a rescue campaign centered on pressure for an intergovernmental commission of experts to seek out ways to counter the Nazi program of genocide. Although the Jewish- army goal remained, the rescue issue now claimed top priority. [30]
The point was underscored again in the large advertisement of February 16: "The principal demand, . , is that the United Nations immediately appoint an inter-governmental committee" to formulate ways to stop the extermination. The call for a rescue agency was not, however, the most striking aspect of the advertisement. Under the startling head lines
FOR SALE TO HUMANITY
70,000 JEWS
GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS AT $50 A PIECE
the advertisement aimed to rivet attention on the disastrous situation of the Jews in Transnistria and build popular pressure for rapid government steps to save them. [vii] [31]
"Roumania is tired of killing Jews," announced Ben Hecht, whose signature appeared on the ad. "It has killed one hundred thousand of them in two years. Roumania will now give Jews away practically for nothing," Hecht then lashed out: "Seventy Thousand Jews Are Waiting Death In Roumanian Concentration Camps ... Roumania Offers to Deliver These 70,000 Alive to Palestine ... The Doors of Roumania Are Open! Act Now!"
The CJA, the advertisement continued, had launched an intensive drive "to demand that something be done NOW, WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME." It invited readers to join the fight by informing friends, by writing congressmen, and by sending contributions "for the further distribution of messages like these." "In this way," stated the CJA, "you can help save European Jewry!"
Immediately, a barrage of protest came from the established Jewish organizations and press. They angrily charged the CJA with deliberately and deceptively implying that each $50 contribution would save a Rumanian Jew. Jewish spokesmen' castigated the CJA as irresponsible, unethical, and willing to edge "very dose to fraud" in order to raise funds. [32]
Undaunted, the Committee for a Jewish Army pushed ahead with its publicity campaign. Six days after the Ben Hecht plea, an advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune signed by Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado repeated the demand for United Nations action on the Rumanian proposal. And it, too, called for an intergovernmental rescue commission. Both advertisements soon appeared in other major newspapers. [33]
Even before the February denunciations, much of the American Jewish leadership had decried the Committee for a Jewish Army, accusing it of recklessness and sensationalism as well as gross effrontery in presuming to speak for an American constituency. Concern now arose that the Bergsonites would seize the leadership of the languishing effort for rescue. The inertia of the preceding several weeks dissolved rapidly. Aware of the CJA's plan to hold a demonstration at Madison Square Garden on March 9, Wise and the American Jewish Congress scheduled a March 1 mass meeting at the same location. [viii] To complete this display of disunity and rivalry, the Jewish Labor Committee in late February held many smaller meetings of its own throughout the New York metropolitan area. [34]
The American Jewish Congress's "Stop Hitler Now" demonstration of March 1 set off another wave of publicity and activity on the rescue question. This mass meeting was co-sponsored by the two giants of the American trade union movement, the AFL and the CIO, and by two tiny voices of Christianity and liberalism, the Church Peace Union and the Free World Association. Nearly thirty other Jewish organizations also lent support. As the meeting date neared, a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urged the public to attend and to insist that "America Must Act Now!" [36]
The public did come, in the tens of thousands. Twenty thousand jammed Madison Square Garden, while 10,000 others milled around outside in the winter cold and listened to the speeches through amplifiers. Still thousands more had dispersed after being turned away from the Garden. Police estimates indicated that, in all, n ,000 had come to the rally. [37]
The meeting opened with brief patriotic and religious exercises. Under lowered lights and amid audible weeping, a cantor chanted El Mole Rachamim, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. AFL president William Green, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and several other prominent non-Jews addressed the meeting, as did Stephen Wise and world-famous scientist and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Messages were sent to the gathering by Wendell Willkie, by New York governor Thomas Dewey, and by England's foremost churchmen, the archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley. [38]
Indicative of the progress made since the December conference with Roosevelt was a comprehensive list of specific rescue proposals approved by the mass meeting and forwarded to the President. Because the question arose both then and afterward as to what practical rescue actions might have been undertaken during that time of total war, the proposals merit attention here. The eleven-point program called for:
1. Approaches through neutral channels to Germany and the satellite governments to secure agreement for the Jews to emigrate.
2. Swift establishment of havens of refuge by Allied and neutral nations.
3. Revision of U.S. immigration procedures to permit full use of the quotas.
4. Agreement by Great Britain to take in a reasonable proportion of Jewish refugees.
5. Agreement by the Latin American nations to modify their extremely high, immigration regulations and provide temporary havens of refuge.
6. Consent by England to open the gates of Palestine to Jews.
7. A United Nations program to transfer Jewish refugees rapidly out of neutral countries bordering Nazi territory and to encourage those countries to accept additional refugees by guaranteeing financial support and eventual evacuation.
8. Organization by the United Nations, through neutral agencies such as the International Red Cross, of a system for feeding Jews remaining in Axis territory.
9. Provision by the United Nations of the financial guarantees required to implement this rescue program.
10. Formation by the United Nations of an agency empowered to carry out the program.
11. Appointment, without further delay, of a commission to assemble evidence for war-crimes trials and to determine the procedures for them. [39]
New York newspapers were impressed by the demonstration. Columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote in the Times that "the shame of the world filled the Garden Monday night." If the non-Jewish community did not support the rescue proposals "to the utmost," she declared, they would forever compromise "the principles for which we are pouring out blood and wealth and toil." [40]
The mass meeting modified the Times's earlier editorial view that the world was helpless "to stop the honor while the war is going on." A new Times editorial commended the rescue plans and asserted that "the United Nations governments have no right to spare any efforts that will save lives." Editorial support for the proposals also appeared in the New York Post, the Sun, and the Herald Tribune. [41]
The mass meeting and the favorable press response that followed forced a reaction of sons from the Roosevelt administration. Two days after the demonstration, the State Department released previously secret information disclosing that the United States and Britain were planning a diplomatic conference to deal with the refugee problem. A close reading of the State Department release, however, revealed that conference plans called only for a "preliminary exploration" of the question. [42]
Seeking to utilize the momentum generated by the mass meeting, Wise sent letters to President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hull, all members of the House and the Senate, and many newspaper editors. These letters described the proceedings at the rally and listed the eleven rescue proposals. The White House simply shunted Wise's letter over to the State Department, where a reply was prepared. Signed by the President, it vaguely asserted that "this Government has moved and continues to move, so far as the burden of the war permits, to help the victims of the Nazi doctrines of racial, religious and political oppression." [43]
Meanwhile, in a biting editorial entitled "While the Jews Die," the Nation reminded readers that Hitler was carrying out a program of total extermination of Europe's Jews and charged that "in this country, you and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt." "What," asked the Nation, "has come over the minds of ordinary men and women that makes it seem normal and indeed inevitable that this country should stolidly stand by and do nothing in the face of one of the world's greatest tragedies?" The editorial printed and strongly endorsed the eleven-point rescue program. [44]
On the evening of March 9, another outpouring of concern and anguish over the European Jewish catastrophe occurred at Madison Square Garden. That night the Committee for a Jewish Army presented a pageant called "We Will Never Die," a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It drew on some of the nation's foremost theatrical talent. Ben Hecht wrote the script, Billy Rose produced and Moss Hart directed the drama, and Kurt Weill created an original score for it. The large cast included Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, who occupied center stage, as the narrators. [45]
Two weeks prior to the pageant, Billy Rose sought a brief statement of encouragement from President Roosevelt that could be read at the meeting. The White House staff was in a quandary; it did not like to turn down Billy Rose, because of his frequent cooperation with some of Roosevelt's pet charitable projects, but neither did it want to issue any such statement from the President. On request from the White House, the OWI produced an innocuous reply regarding the savage tyranny of the Nazi regime. It did not mention the extermination of the Jews; it did not even mention Jews. Yet, apparently, the statement was still too strong for David Niles and Stephen Early of the White House staff. They decided that no message be sent. [46]
The Committee for a Jewish Army had equally scant success in its attempts to attract unified Jewish support for the pageant. Meeting in January with representatives of several Jewish organizations, Hecht and Bergson volunteered to withdraw the CJA's formal sponsorship of the project if that would bring about its endorsement by the established Jewish organizations. The CJA, however, would quietly contribute to the work involved. The plan was not accepted. [47]
Later, when the American Jewish Congress announced its Madison Square Garden rally for the week before the presentation of "We Will Never Die," the CJA offered to stage the pageant as a joint project and to cooperate with the congress in its mass demonstration. The pageant's script was delivered to the congress to be examined for possibly unacceptable material. The congress rejected the proposal. [48]
"We Will Never Die" drew an audience of 40,000, setting an attendance record for Madison Square Garden. The record was the result of a decision to repeat the performance late that same night. Other thousands remained in the chilly streets hoping that a third showing might take place. The event was also broadcast by radio. [49]
The pageant was performed against a background dominated by two forty-foot tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. Suspended over them was an illuminated Star of David. In the darkened hall, the stark scenes, dramatized by sharp beams of light and contrasting shadows, concentrated on three themes: Jewish contributions to civilization from Moses to Einstein; the role Jews in the Allied armed forces; and a vision of the postwar peace conference at which groups of Jewish dead told of their extinction at. the hands of the Nazis and pleaded, "Remember us." [50]
No formal addresses were made, but the pageant's final passages dealt pointedly with the inertia and silence of the non-Jewish world:
The corpse of a people lies on the steps of civilization. Behold it. Here it is! And no voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end.
The ninety-minute memorial closed with the choir and twenty aged refugee rabbis singing the Kaddish for the dead Jews of Europe. [51]
Press and newsreel coverage in New York and across the nation was extensive. With hopes of awakening America to the European Jewish tragedy, the Committee for a Jewish Army pressed forward with plans to present "We Will Never Die" in dozens of other cities. Highly successful performances took place in Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood. Over 100,000 Americans witnessed the drama. Present at the Washington performance were Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court justices, members of the Cabinet, some 300 senators and congressmen, numerous military officials, and foreign diplomats. All in New York, the event was broadcast by radio in the other live cities where it played. Each performance set off a new ground swell of publicity. [52]
In her "My Day" column, Eleanor Roosevelt described "We Will Never Die" as
one of the most impressive and moving pageants I have ever seen. No one who heard each group come forward and give the story of what had happened to it at the hands of a ruthless German military, will ever forget those haunting words: "Remember us."
Mrs. Roosevelt pointed to the great dangers of intolerance and cruelty, but as to the need for action to help the trapped Jews of Europe she wrote nothing. [53]
"We Will Never Die" had won acclaim throughout the United States. Yet it had drawn almost no support from the established Jewish leadership. Coverage of the pageant in Anglo-Jewish weekly newspapers was widespread but generally less enthusiastic than in the regular daily press. The New Yolk Yiddish newspapers tended to be critical. Most English-language Jewish magazines failed even to report the event. [54]
Far more devastating were steps taken by some Jewish groups to prevent further presentations of the pageant. Because the CJA had little money, it had to depend on ticket sales in order to pay the heavy expenses involved. (The New York showing cost $25,000.) But since a considerable pan of the expenses had to be met before the performances occurred, sizable advances of money were needed. To obtain such funds, the CJA organized local sponsoring committees in each city. [55]
This system worked effectively in the first six cities. After that, however, the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations managed to block the Bergsonites. Pressures on prominent sponsors and telephone and letter campaigns vilifying the CJA led many, if not most, local backers to withdraw their support. In Baltimore, Buffalo, Kingston (New Yolk), and Gary (Indiana), the CJA was arranging to present the pageant when the American Jewish Congress and allied groups intervened locally and brought the process to a halt. Plans to take "We Will Never Die" to several other cities similarly came to nothing. The consequence of this bitter conflict, as one observer pointed out, was that "the most powerful single weapon yet produced to awaken the conscience of America" was stopped in its tracks. [56]
What lay behind this strife? The Bergson group was anathema to most of the established American Jewish leadership. The Bergson organizations, opponents insisted, had no legitimate mandate to speak for American Jews, since they represented no constituency in American Jewish life. They were interlopers who had intruded into areas of action that were the province of the established Jewish organizations. Opponents also accused the Bergsonites of irresponsibility, both in their sensational methods (such as the Hecht advertisement) and in their use of the sizable amounts of money they solicited. They were charged, in addition, with injecting into already complicated Jewish issues an dement of confusion that made understanding not only more difficult for many Jews but neatly impossible for most non-Jews. [57]
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