Part I

There were a number of Orthodox Jewish leaders who played pivotal roles in trying to save the Jews of Europe during the Shoah, and in their rehabilitation after the war ended. One of the most prominent was Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz. During his youth, he had been a student of Rabbi Hayyim Ozer Grodzinski, one of the foremost European rabbinical leaders. In 1926, Rabbi Kalmanowitz was elected president of the Mir Yeshiva in Europe. Three years later, he became the rabbi of Tykocin, in northeastern Poland. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the rabbi immigrated to the U.S. in 1940.

A driven man, Rabbi Kalmanowitz always seemed breathless and pressed for time because he was consumed with the plight of the Jews in Europe. His briefcase always bulged with copies of letters and telegrams sent to government officials pleading for help in rescuing yeshiva students who were being murdered or left stranded and starving in the Soviet Union. The rabbi would go anywhere and meet anyone who would help Jews in distress.

Shlomo Mikhoels

Typical of his dedication was his response to the arrival in September 1943 of Shlomo Mikhoels, the actor and manager of the Moscow Jewish Theater, and Itzik Feffer, the Yiddish poet—both members of a Soviet-sponsored Anti-Fascist Committee—who were in America to enlist the financial support of American Jews in the fight against the Nazis, even though the Soviets had originally allied themselves with Hitler. With the assistance of Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, one of the most popular Yiddish novelists in the Jewish world and a darling of the left, Rabbi Kalmanowitz hoped to meet Mikhoels and Feffer to ask that they intervene with the Soviet authorities on behalf of these yeshiva students.

‘Zey Farbrennen Yidn’

Asch spent the summers in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Rabbis Kalmanowitz and Nathan Baruch, who was director of Vaad Hatzala in Germany from September 1946 to September 1949, went to see him. When Rabbi Kalmanowitz told Asch, “Zey farbrennen Yidn” (“They are burning Jews”), Asch revealed that he knew of the murders from anti-Nazi underground groups in Europe and from sources in France and other countries. He accused The New York Times and other publications in the West for refusing to publish this information without “sufficient proof,” making it extremely difficult for the general public to accept the truth. To emphasize the need for immediate action, Rabbi Kalmanowitz told Asch a well-known story from the Book of Kings (Kings II:30):

“There once was a wicked king in Israel. When he was told his subjects were dying of starvation, he bared his chest and screamed. Our sages considered this king an evil man, but he still reacted with pain to the terrible news about his people. You can imagine what our sages would say about a man who knows what is happening to his fellow Jews and does nothing to help them.”

Asch appeared so shaken by the power and force of the presentation that he pleaded, “Rebbe, Rebbe, hut rachmones” (“Rabbi, Rabbi, have pity on me!”). He suggested that the rabbi contact him through Alfred Knopf, his publisher in New York City, and he would arrange a meeting with Mikhoels and Feffer. Baruch took the phone number, but despite repeated efforts, they never succeeded in making contact.

Post-War Germany

From the first days of the American occupation of Germany, Rabbi Kalmanowitz understood the necessity of providing observant survivors with religious items, including religious texts. Observant Jewish survivors who were displaced persons (DPs) were in need of religious articles: fringed garments (tzitzit) prayer shawls, phylacteries (tefillin), candles for candle-lighting, daily and holiday prayer books, the Torah and religious texts. There were very few of these items available. In the late 1930s the Nazis began confiscating Jewish books and artifacts in Germany. During the war, the Nazis extended the operation, using German military forces and other Nazi agencies to seize Jewish books, archives and ritual objects wherever they went—from “occupied Ukraine to the French-Spanish border, and from Greece to the British Isle of Man,” according to Colonel Seymour J. Pomrenze, the first director of the Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD), the main Allied collection point for books and archival material looted by the Nazis.

Established on March 2, 1946, the OAD had 2,000,000 books and other “identifiable materials” that were returned and distributed to the survivors by August 1947. The American Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) received 24,000 volumes on loan, to distribute to the DPs, Pomrenze reported.

These “supplies” from the JDC in Europe and the US were insufficient to meet the needs of the observant survivors. Rabbi Kalmanowitz, president of the Mir Yeshiva in New York and a leader in Agudath Harabonim and in the Vaad Hatzala, tried to fill this vacuum. The Vaad Hatzala had been established in November 1939 to save rabbis and yeshiva students in Poland and Lithuania from the Nazis. After the war, the Vaad, with the financial backing of William Alpert, sent Rabbi Nathan Baruch, a newly minted rabbi, to direct their relief and spiritual rehabilitation program for observant Jews in Germany.

During the winter of 1945-1946, the Army, together with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, began to respond to requests for religious texts by a number of DP rabbis who were in contact with Rabbi Kalmanowitz. In February 1946, Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg, director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) religious activities for the American zone, who arrived in Germany in September 1945, reported to JDC headquarters in New York: “Three tractates of the Talmud, a prayer book, a Haggadah, a [B]ook of Esther, and a guide to religious marriage are either in the process of publication [by the JDC] or are already published.”

In November 1947, Rabbi Kalmanowitz approached General John Hilldring, assistant secretary of state for occupied areas, to help him publish “200,000 Bible and Prayer Books in the American Zone of Germany for use of Jewish children in Western Europe.” In 1945, when Hilldring was the director of the Civilian Affairs Department of (CAD) of the War Department, the rabbi had asked him to send religious articles to the Jewish DPs in Germany. A call by Hilldring to his friend General Lucius Clay ended three months of exhausting and fruitless attempts by Rabbi Kalmanowitz to convince the Army Service Forces to send these items.

When Rabbi Kalmanowitz asked Hilldring to help him again, the general wrote a note to Clay reminding him they had helped the rabbi in 1945. Hilldring noted that he was a “patient and appreciative old patriarch. … I think of no assistance I gave anyone in Washington … that gave me more satisfaction than the very little help I gave the old Rabbi.”

Rabbi Kalmanowitz now needed a permit for paper, priority for using electricity, an export license, and a permit to send his personal representatives to the U.S. Zone of Occupation to supervise the printing and distribution of the copies of the Bibles and prayer books. This time, Clay rejected his request, historian Gerd Korman said, because there was an acute shortage of paper in late 1947, and only vital government documents could be published.

Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI).