The Jewish Experience in America

The Jewish Experience in America

Exodus Before and after the Holocaust

Sociology 320, Tom Siler

Kimberly Rae Cole

September 19, 2005

Photo: Schindler’s List Video Tape Box Art

Works Cited:

Alteras, Lea Ausch, “Three Generations of Jewish Women: Holocaust Survivors and Their Daughters and Granddaughters”, University Press of America, Lanham, MD. 2002.

Robinson, George; “Essential Judaism, A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals”. Pocket Books, NY, NY 2000

Sachar, Howard M., A History of the Jews in America. Vintage Books, NY, NY. 1993.

Sarna, Joseph; American Judaism, A History; Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2004.

The Tanakh, Hebrew Bible.

The year is 1933, and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the people, known as the Jews, begin what is known as the most tumultuous period in their lives. As if things weren’t already difficult, the world at this time was in the throes of the Great Depression; not only were the Jews dealing with the rise of Anti-Semitism, but the Jews were just fighting to survive in the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In Poland, Germany, and Russia, the exiled Jews are now overcrowded, starving, and to the native Eastern Europeans, becoming a great problem. The worldwide depression was making starvation and disease a pandemic in these countries, mainly effecting unsettled Jewish populations of Poland and Russia. (Sachar, p. 465).

By 1939, economic depression and government sponsored discrimination had reduced at least a third of Poland’s 3.2 million Jews to the narrowest margin of survival. Pogroms (a driving out of Jewish population in target areas by the Nazi “Ghestapo”) were becoming common occurrences. In 1937 some one hundred Jews were killed and thirteen hundred were wounded in Brest Litovsk, and violence spread as far out as Warsaw Poland. This provided a large push factor for those who were able to immigrate to the United States. (Sachar p.466)

Overall, America accepted over 200,000 Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945, more than any other country but still only a small fraction of those who could have been saved. (Sarna, p.258). By the time German and Austrian Jews reached the United States, moreover, they arrived with the clothes on their backs and little more. They were older and better educated, however pride held them back from asking for financial help.

Three fifths of the newcomers settled in New York State, primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Sachar p.485). As Adolf Hitler rose to power, the plague of Anti-Semitism began to spread in the United States.

Nazi’s stripped the immigrating Jews of their wealth, making it nearly impossible to make it to the US. America’s draconian immigration laws were stringently applied during the Depression. Consular officials were instructed to adhere closely to the ban on admitting persons “likely to become a public charge.” (Sarna, p. 259) It took floods of letters, telegrams, and pleas to high government officials, and signed affidavits saying that the immigrant would not become a “public charge”, in other words, a burden to the already depressed economy. In a survey, even the already immigrated Jews said that even they would vote against raising quotas to open the doors to even more European refugees. They already had it good, they didn’t want anyone else ruining the good thing they had going. (Sarna, p.260) Their own people saw them as competition, competition for the place in their world that they had fought so hard to obtain, but then they saw that it was their people, and the Jewish American community stepped up. Local rabbi’s began to offer their assistance in the preparation of affidavits as well as getting the new refugee settled into a job in a Jewish communal institution. The new immigrants got jobs in the kosher food industry, or in Jewish owned businesses. (Sarna, p. 260.) New York became flush with the rise of kosher delis, a flourishing garment district, and a very strong Jewish community that became a very persistent subculture.

However there were Jews that were not so quiet, and were very active, especially when it came to the shadow of Hitler and his “Third Reich”.

The Depression was a great diversion from the looming horror of Adolf Hitler and the surge of anti-Semitism that would settle into our nation. Jews turned primarily to each other during this time, relying on their ties to faith and fellowship to carry them through. The traditions of self-help and mutual aid overcame religious, ideological, and generational differences within the Jewish community. (Sarna, p.257). Along with the growing spiritual community, the change that produced the longest term impact on American Judaism during the Great Depression was the movement toward the five day work week.

This movement would allow the Jewish Americans the time to observe their Sabbath, which begins at sunset on Friday and ends at sunset on Saturday evening. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 made this a reality, supported by FDR himself as part of his “New Deal” (Sarna p.258). This movement was only a drop in the bucket to what lay ahead for American Jews and their former homelands in Eastern Europe that was now slowly being devoured by the darkness of Hitler.

One of the outspoken was Alfred M. Cohen, President of B’Nai Brith (Major American-Jewish communal organization), who established a joint conference committee to monitor the development of the Nazi State. They did not wish, however, to publicly protest, in fear of Anti-Semitic reprisal. However, there was a major protest held in Madison Square Garden, against the wishes of B’Nai Brith, by Rabbi and Scholar Stephen Wise. Wise stated “The time for caution and prudence is past. We must speak up like men. How can we ask our Christian friends to lift their voices in protest if we keep silent? It is not the German Jews being attacked, it is the Jews.” (Sachar, p. 469).

In the 1930’s there was no internet, no satellite television, or television for that matter; at least in the common man’s home. The information that the general public got came from the radio and newspapers. The American Jewish Year Book in reference to the rise of the Nazi’s and the horrors of the Holocaust wrote this in 1931, “The Jews of the United States did not during the past years watch the situation of their overseas co-religionists with the same concentration as in the preceding twelve months.” It followed with the coverage of the “world shocking catastrophe”. Throughout the country, Jewish Americans were tuned in to newscasts relegating the tales of kidnappings, raping, murders, torture and forced imprisonment of their people. As Wise stated earlier, it wasn’t just German Jews, it was the Jews as a whole; and that’s the direction that the Jewish Americans began to take. They were not going to sit and watch their people being persecuted, but how were they going to do that?

The American Jewish community was awash in despair, the emotional toll the Depression and the War had taken a toll on them, and now the threat of Hitler’s plan of extermination seemed to be the last straw. Leaders, Rabbi’s, and all of the American Jewish community were plagued by the moral dilemmas of how they should “rescue” their people.

These dilemmas included:

• Ransom payments to the Nazi’s for release of prisoners
• Throwing the gates of Palestine open as to create a permanent home for the Jewish people
• Should they exert special efforts to save certain groups of Jews (rabbi’s, scholars, labor leaders), or should all lives be considered sacred and holy? (Sarna, p.262 - 263).
• Rising Anti-Semitism (in 1938, according to one poll, one-fifth of all Americans wanted to “Drive Jews out of the United States.”) So much for the melting pot and welcome wagon.

• The persistence at which Hitler pursued and attempted to exterminate the Jewish population.
• The rise of anti immigrant sentiment.
• Persistent isolationism.

This was a great moral and spiritual dilemma, but even in the midst of Hitler’s rise to power, the interfaith ties strengthened in the formation of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). They worked re-invigorate their faith almost in response to those who sought to undermine it. “Jews… who had abandoned their people were returning like prodigal sons because of the threat of annihilation, they were impelled to rise to new heights of spiritual achievement.” Mordecai Kaplan, a noted Reconstructionist Rabbi. (Sarna (p. 264)

Contrary to popular belief America wasn’t the warm fuzzy melting pot we learned about in grade school where children of all colors and races joined hands and sang. One of the biggest misconceptions is that the United States completely pulled out of the Olympic Games in 1933. Hitler had gained power and influence early on and also won the “privilege” of holding the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The Jewish community and their sympathizers saw this as a slap by the multinational Olympic Committee. The whole world knew what the Nazi’s were all about, and this Olympic fiasco wasn’t about world peace or diversity; this was one of the biggest stains on Olympic History. The Jewish communities throughout the world and in the United States were taken aback by the words of US. Olympic Committee Chair Avery Brundage, “Shall the American athlete be made a martyr to a cause not his own? Certain Jews must now understand that they must not use these games as a weapon in their boycott against the Nazis.” It was pretty much a slap in the face as far as they were concerned. There were American athletes that withdrew out of protest and principle; yet we did participate in Berlin, and the Jews formed their own games, overseen by former Olympic Committee member Charles Ornstein, held on New York’s Randall Island. (Sachar p. 470).

In 1942 the World Jewish Congress, led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, informed the United States as a whole, that two million Jews had been killed by the Nazi’s in an “extermination campaign”, U.S. State Department officials confirmed that.

Setting a historical precedent, the Jewish American community organized a day of mourning and prayer on December 2^nd which received wide attention. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was at the center of the day’s activities which were marked by special newspapers with black borders, moments of silence; it spread like wildfire, with NBC broadcasting special reports and holding moments of silence on their national radio broadcast.

In less than a week, leaders representing every faction in American Jewish life, religious and secular, met with Roosevelt and appealed to him with this news and asked for him to everything in his power to stop it. My question is, how could the President not know? (Sarna, p.262). The Holocaust was now overwhelming the world with it’s horrific images of Auschwitz and the hollow eyes of their prisoners, America could not stand aside any longer, and for principle, joined the campaign to end Hitler’s reign of terror on the people of Europe. The President’s insistence that the best way to save the Jews was to win the war; the question is, saving them by stopping the Holocaust, or save them by stopping the Holocaust by sending them back to their home land? (Sarna p.261).

In a series of interviews found in the book “Three Generations of Jewish Women: Holocaust Survivors and Their Daughters and Granddaughters”, Lea Alteras transcribes the stories of Holocaust survivors, and takes you to a place you can never come back from. Brenda, a Holocaust survivor was born in 1926 in Romania, just south of the Hungarian border near Transylvania. May of 1944 the Hungarians entered her village, and proceeded to prepare them for transportation to Auschwitz, home of the vilest and horrific crimes committed against the Jewish people. (Alteras, p. 49)

Brenda described her train ride as the “train going to hell for days.” Women held tight to their children, for fear they would be taken away. They were all cold and tired and hungry, and there was no relief in site and it wasn’t going to get any better. There, she was separated from her mother, who was then taken into a line and shot. Her life at the concentration camp was full of fear and despair. She was threatened by soldiers with words of “Do you see smoke coming from that building? Your families are burning there. Your families are all dead.” (Alteras, p. 50).

Brenda’s father had told her to volunteer; the volunteers are treated better and fed better because they are working for the Nazi’s. May 10^th, 1945 they were liberated from the camp. Brenda stated “What a day that was in my life. Both the Americans and Russians came. They gave us food and clothing and they were freed.” But she had nowhere to go, her parents and her brother and sister had died while they were there, either executed, or fell victim to the hellish climate of Auschwitz. She was alone. Months later she met her husband where they had two daughters, and then in 1962 they finally immigrated to the United States. Arriving in New York with their two daughters, Miriam and Clara she was finally at a place where she felt she could rebuild her life after the horror of the Holocaust. Like many Jews, Brenda felt it was difficult to speak of it in later years. (Alteras, p. 50 and 51). This is one of many stories told by survivors.

Because of the Holocaust, and that time of horror, the interviewees have referred back to their lives as Pre-War and Post-War years. It’s almost as if it separates them as two different people; which make sense in so many ways. These women endured atrocities beyond comprehension. Alteras states that the memories of the Survivors have naturally focused on the horrors experienced in the Holocaust and have tended not to concentrate on their childhood years, and some even tried to romanticize those years. Many times their childhood experiences and their young adult lives were completely disconnected from each other. (Alteras, p. 88)

That kind of horror just doesn’t go away, especially if you’ve lived in it, ate in it, slept in it; it gets ingrained in your soul, the faces of the enemies, and the faces of those you love and share spiritual kinship with taken away to be slaughtered like animals.

To the new Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors the reality of New York was not pretty. It was not paved with gold, and families had to make tough decisions in order to survive. They did not take the easy way, instead they took tough jobs in order to ensure a better life and education for their children. Education was top priority. Alteras states “ The traditional family-oriented values, and the strong love for learning shared by our mother’s generation of women may have aided my generation of women to reconcile our European background with America and to bridge our transition from childhood into young adulthood” (Alteras, p. 89). The mother was instrumental in shaping the life of a post-Holocaust daughter. Alteras relates her Jewish cultural education in as absorbing it from her mother; watching her prepare the Sabbath meals, and the Seder, observing her decorating the home for the Shabbat, and setting the table for the meal with special dishes and table linens. After the war there were very few synagogues left after the occupation of the Nazis, so the place of spiritual education was the home.

The women of the Holocaust did not easily assimilate into the American society. Settling into Brooklyn and the Upper East Side, many still only speak Hungarian or Yiddish (a dialect form of German Hebrew). They don’t speak English very well, and have settled into their own little world filled with Old World customs and continue to cook Jewish or Hungarian ethnic foods. They are somewhat ethnocentric, and feel more at ease with people of their own kind. Their closest friends primarily consist of Holocaust survivors and other Jews. They also have a very strong connection with the Jewish Orthodox community, which is very representative of what they were used to as children, before the war. (Alteras, p. 90-92)

Life in the U.S. was something completely different than any other Jew had experienced before. Their freedom as well as their material belongings had been stripped from them as prisoners of the Holocaust; America was the land of opportunity for them; but it was not easy. Jews rose to political and social power; they took Hollywood by storm (Goldwyn Mayer), yet there was a negative aspect. The assimilation into American culture started to erode the timeless culture and spiritual foundation that had been around since the beginning of Biblical time. Along with the assimilation came the fading out by inter-faith and inter-racial marriages, which in Orthodox and Conservative circles is strictly forbidden. The Jews became highly urbanized, especially those who settled in the large cities of New York and Boston.

After WW II the socioeconomic profile of the Jews was transformed into the “American Dream”. There children of the Holocaust were having children, mostly born in New York City, they lived in the suburbs, fewer spoke Yiddish, and most of either owned their own business or worked in the garment district. (Alteras p. 120) Nearly sixty percent of the Jewish population came from immigration during the time frame from 1947 until 1956, most of them being refugees displaced by the war. By the year 1990, the survivors of the Holocaust and their children constituted eight percent of American Jewry and their influence was greater than their numbers. They were driven to rebuild the Jewish tradition and culture that they thought had been wiped out in the 1940’s.

These traditions include the celebrations of Shabbat on Friday evening, usually followed by an evening at Temple or Synagogue. The Jewish faith is strongly rooted in communal worship, and to those who survived the Holocaust, the blessing of being able to worship together takes special importance. I believe Sociologist William Helmreich sums up the settling and reconciliation of the Jewish people in America by reflecting his Brooklyn upbringing, “Although I may be nothing more than a speck on the map of Jewish history, the shape and location of that map were clear in my mind. I belonged – and every ceremony we performed, every prayer I said strengthened that image. When I went to a friends house for Shabbos [the Sabbath] and heard the same melodies, uttered the same benedictions and even ate the same foods, I felt a bond that tied me inseparably to my people” (Robinson, p. 13 [Wake Up, Wake Up, to Do the Work of the Creator, New York, 1976).