Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘What Did We Learn?’
Kudos to The New York Sun on its fifth anniversary, and for choosing to write an editorial on that auspicious day that directs peoples’ attention to a critically important question regarding the Holocaust, “What Did We Learn?” [Editorial, April 16, 2007].
In discussing Bernard Weinraub’s play, “The Accomplices,” a brilliant telling of the desperate efforts of Hillel Kook, aka Peter Bergson, to save the Jews of Europe from extermination at the hands of the Nazis, the Sun sees the timeliness of the story “as the world wrestles with a regime that is vowing to attack the millions of Jews now living in the land in which they or their parents sought redemption after the Holocaust.”
At the conclusion of the play, Bergson declares that the Germans won because of the fear and silence of the Jews who “should have run amok outside the White House.”
The Sun reporter, Gabrielle Birkner, tells us that Rebecca Kook, Hillel Kook’s daughter, spoke about “the abandonment of the Jews by the Jews” [New York, “Activist’s Daughter Accuses U.S. Jewish Community of Failing European Jews,” April 16, 2007]. Bergson asks the question that the Sun’s editorial asks, “What did we learn?”
That question reverberates in the hearts of those who are now trying desperately to change mainstream Jewry so that it understands the critical dangers facing Israel today, and indeed the entire Western world. This time, we must not be silent or afraid.
HELEN FREEDMAN
New York, N.Y.
