Activist’s Daughter Accuses U.S. Jewish Community of Failing European Jews
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More than 60 years after the Holocaust, the American Jewish community has yet to own up to its lack of advocacy and action on behalf of European Jews during the Nazi era, the daughter of a Jewish activist told about 200 theatergoers yesterday.
Participating in a Holocaust Remembrance Day panel discussion that followed a matinee performance of “The Accomplices,” political scientist Rebecca Kook said “the abandonment of the Jews by the Jews” remains a little-known chapter of American history.
Ms. Kook is a daughter of Peter Bergson, the fiery activist who led a campaign to convince President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and the American Jewish community to do more to rescue Jews from almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis. Bergson, the pseudonym of Hillel Kook, is the protagonist in “The Accomplices,” a new play that accuses the American government and the American Jewish community of turning their backs on European Jewry.
During World War II, many Jewish leaders dismissed Bergson as a renegade and worried that his shrill tactics would stir up anti-Jewish sentiment. “They were very frightened that making noise and making waves would bring about anti-Semitism,” Ms. Kook said of some American Jewish leaders.
Still, the so-called Bergson Group is credited with helping to persuade the president in 1944 to establish the War Refugee Board, which ultimately saved 200,000 Jewish lives.
Yesterday’s post-performance discussion, which also included the playwright and former New York Times reporter, Bernard Weinraub, and director Ian Morgan, was organized by the David S. Wymann Institute for Holocaust Studies. The institute’s director, Rafael Medoff, who moderated the panel, said that while “The Accomplices” includes some fictional scenes and dialogue, it is essentially a historically accurate depiction of Bergson’s efforts — and the antagonistic response it elicited.
A theatergoer who lives in New York, Judith Rappaport, said yesterday that her grandfather, Rabbi Israel Rosenberg, was among the Jewish leaders to meet with and lobby Roosevelt on behalf of Jewish refugees. “I remember my grandfather coming home and saying, ‘We tried the best we could, but he’s not going to do much for us,'” she said.
