The New Hotel on Emeq Refaim

The new Isrotel hotel of construction begins

This one:

a new Isrotel site in Jerusalem's German Colony neighborhood. The facility will be built at an estimated cost of NIS 256 million, including about NIS 31 million from the ministry [of Tourism]. The hotel, which will have 256 rooms, will be located at the corner of Emek Refaim Street and Bethlehem Road. Construction is slated to begin near the end of this year and is expected to take three years.

 Location:

Looking south along Emeq Refaim (the construction site is marked by the white fence on the left):

On the first building on the left:

By 1875, 100 people lived in the neighborhood. 1878 marked the beginning of a golden era. In this year the Templar leadership moved from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The head of the Templars, Christoph Hoffmann, called this the 'step' to Jerusalem....A secondary school was built in 1892 at 3 Emek Refaim. A cultural center was built at 1 Emek Refaim Street. This was transferred by Israel after 1948 to the Armenian Church.
 

and this

The Communal Hall – 1 Emek Refaim St.

...Communal life was important to the Templars, and the Communal Hall is evidence of this. It was inaugurated in 1882 in the presence of the governor of Jerusalem, and other honorable guests. The building also served for as a place of Sunday’s prayers and sermons, but the community members made sure not to call it a church and thus it hosted performances and meetings.

The architecture is unlike that of any conventional church: the apse, the recess where the altar stands near the wall of the church, rather than facing east, faces north. The building was built in Neo-Romanesque style, which was common in Europe of the Middle-Ages. The   roof has a triangle façade, embedded with a rounded window at its center and a small belfry on its vertex.

The communal life was led by the head of the colony who managed economical issues, by the communal council, and by the Council of Elders. Once a year a general meeting was held, and similarly to our government, it had to decide about the annual budget for the coming year and about other plans. It was mandatory for all citizens to participate, and those who were absent had to pay a fee of one mark, an example of the German's love of order...

and on the houses in the Colony that are on the construction site:

The School – 4, 5 Emek Refaim Street.

The children of the Templars studied in these houses. The school – lyceum – was built during two phases – the older southern part was built in 1878 and the newer northern part in 1882.

The Miller house – 6 Emek Refaim Street

^

Second Temple Hebrew Inscriptions

You know what "Hebrew inscriptions" means, yes?

Jews.

Israelites.

Hebrews.

Not Arabs.

So, here's a new book by Jan Dušek on the subject:

Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim and Samaria between Antiochus III and Antiochus IV Epiphanes


And the theme of the book

stands on the intersection of epigraphy and historical research: the Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions discovered in the vicinity of the Yahwistic sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim and their historical background. The study addresses the evidence from three perspectives: the paleography and dating of the inscriptions; the identity of the community who carved them and its institutions; and, finally, the larger historical and political context in which the inscriptions were produced.

And the best part:

This book is particularly useful for historians of Palestine in the Second Temple period, for biblical scholars, and for those dealing with Aramaic and Hebrew paleography and epigraphy.

By the way, Mt. Gerizim, you of course know, is at Shchem, aka Nablus.

Are you Pals. (and their supporters) still trying to engage in "identity theft" and "inventivity nationalism"?

From the Table of contents

I. Scripts of the inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim
1. Temple-city on Mt. Gerizim; 2. Scripts used on Mt. Gerizim;...6. Spelling with dalet or zayin;...9. Paleo-Hebrew fragments
II. Identity
1. Samaria in the Hellenistic period; 2. Identity of worshippers of Yahweh in Samaria; 3. Religious institutions in Hellenistic Samaria; 4. Texts used by the Samarian Yahwists: Pentateuch; 5. Samarian Yahwists as foreigners in the Jewish society; 6. Date and circumstances of the exclusion: the case of Sidonians in Shechem;...
III. Southern Levant between Antiochus III and Antiochus IV Epiphanes
...2. Chronology of Josephus in Ant. 12.129-236; 3. Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings in Ant. 12.129-236; 4. The dotal agreement (Ant. 12.154-155); 5. The Tobiads; 6. High-priests in Jerusalem

^

Bird Droppings

Benny Morris reviews Kai Bird's memoir in The New Republic (here).

Please read it. (k/t: LadyB)

Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

...Jump-switch to the 1950s and here again we have Bird vilifying the Israelis and getting most of it wrong. Before 1956, he tells us, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser wanted peace and “asked for minor territorial adjustments along the Sinai-Israeli border. And they said they needed a land link through the southern Negev to Jordan.” But “negotiations commenced in earnest only after” the moderate Moshe Sharett took over from the hawkish Ben-Gurion as prime minister in late 1953. The Egyptians were willing to accept compensation instead of repatriation as a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, but then the dastardly Israeli defense establishment muddied the waters with “Operation Shoshanah,” the plot to blow up Western installations in Egypt in order to prevent the planned British evacuation of the Canal zone—or, as Bird speculates in a very Middle Eastern way, “the implementation of Susannah [Shoshanah] may have been specifically designed to scuttle Nasser’s secret talks with Sharett.” And yet “a window to a real peace settlement was still open in 1955. In Nasser, Israel had a popular Arab leader who was willing to shoulder the political risks of dealing with the Jewish state … He undoubtedly would have insisted that Israel … agree to recognize the 1948 [sic, should be 1949] armistice lines as final borders.”

But alas, Nasser was stymied by the return of Ben-Gurion to power, first as Defense Minister in February, then as prime minister. Israel reverted to militancy and the chance for peace was lost. Moreover, Operation Shoshanah had led to resurgent anti-Semitism in Egypt and massive Jewish emigration from the country.


Let me offer another—and, in my view, more accurate—reading of what actually happened in the 1950s. There were intermittent Israeli-Egypt peace contacts between 1949 and 1952, when the Farouk regime demanded that Israel give up half its territory, the Negev Desert, in exchange for some form of settlement (it was never clear whether Egypt meant real peace or some form of non-belligerency). The Egyptians never gave up the demand for massive refugee repatriation. Contacts, though far less frequent and direct, were renewed between the two countries after Nasser’s revolutionary junta took over in Cairo in the summer of 1952. But there were never any “negotiations,” and never any direct or substantive high level talks between Nasser and the Ben-Gurion-Sharett governments. (Such exchanges between the two countries did not occur until the Sadat peace initiative of 1977.)  [that was the Begin initiative, more properly - YM]

Nasser, in a number of unsigned missives and oral transmissions through third parties between 1952 and 1955, hinted at a willingness to enter into a peace process in exchange for various economic and political benefits (for example, Israeli help in persuading the British to evacuate Egyptian soil). He and his emissaries always said Egypt wanted all or large chunks of the Negev, and not “the armistice lines,” as final borders. (Where on earth did Bird get this from? Not even Avi Shlaim, whose Iron Wall is highly sympathetic toward Nasser, makes such a claim.) But Nasser never offered Israel “peace,” and he was not interested in Israel’s continued existence or in peace, which in any case he probably felt unable to deliver as it would have raised hell in the Arab world, which he sought to gain leadership over. Getting the British out was his main foreign policy priority. Confronting Israel militarily, while his army was weak and while British forces sat astride his lines of communication eastward, was not an option. At the same time, maintaining relative quiet along the Israeli border while making pacific noises in order to keep Washington and London happy made perfect sense.

Operation Shoshanah and the Israeli raid on Gaza in February 1955, both of which Nasser always trotted out as reasons for his subsequent belligerence toward Israel, probably had very little to do with the substance of his policies between 1954 and 1956 (though the latter incident without doubt prompted him to energetically pursue Soviet armaments). And Egyptian Jews steadily left the country in the years following Egypt’s attack on Israel in 1948 (many hundreds of prominent Jews were incarcerated and fined by the Egyptians, and there were a series of murderous attacks on Jewish pedestrians and businesses during that war)—and following the Israeli-British-French assault on Egypt in 1956. There was no wave of emigration following Operation Shoshanah: this is pure invention.

To be sure, between 1949 and 1956 the infiltration into Israel by Palestinians, mainly 1948 refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza, was a source of constant Israeli-Arab friction. There were many thousands of such illegal border crossings each year, most of them for economic and social reasons—to reap crops, to recover goods, to visit relatives, to resettle in former villages, to steal. But alongside these individual incursions there were a very small number of terroristic infiltrations. Much of this terroristic infiltration, certainly from 1954 on, was organized by the Egyptian government. The fedayeen units were recruited, organized, and sent on their way, from 1954, by Colonel Mustafa Hafiz, who headed the Egyptian army’s intelligence bureau in the Gaza Strip. Yet Bird writes: “[Nasser] … allowed Palestinians in Gaza to organize irregular guerrilla units called fedayeen—self-sacrificers.” Israel responded to fedayeen strikes in 1954-1956 with retaliatory raids, almost exclusively targeting Jordanian and Egyptian military and police facilities.

^

Arabs and Christians - The Beginning

I caught a book and reading its description, a thought came to me.

It's called Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine, published by Ashgate Variorum in 1992. The author is Sidney H. Griffith of the Catholic University of America, USA.

This is the description:

The history of Christian literature took a new turn in the 8th century when monks in the monasteries of Palestine began to write theology and saints’ lives in Arabic; they also instituted a veritable programme for translating the Bible and other Christian texts from Greek (and Syriac) into the language of the Qur’an, the lingua franca of the Islamic caliphate. This is the subject of the present volume. Two key factors leading to this change, as Professor Griffith indicates, were that the confrontation with the developing theology of Islam created a direct need for apologetics to face this new religious challenge in its own language; and, second, simply that as the memory of Byzantine power waned, so too did the knowledge of Greek. Issues of particular interest in this apologetic literature are those of the freedom of the will, a key topic in the controversies between Melkites and Muslims, and of the legitimacy of icon veneration, a subject of great contemporary concern at the time of Iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire.

Admittedly, I am not a scholar of that period but, in a logical approach, one could ask this question:

if Arabs were "always resident in Palestine", as the propaganda claim is made, why did a need for all this appear only in the 8th century, some 150 years after the appearance of Islam?  Was Arabic a 'foreign language' in that geographical area even if Islam was relatively new?

True, the Byzantine empire disappeared and with it the main lingua franca but that was already as early as 614. Moreover, Christianity had been around for centuries and if Arabs lived in the country in any number, they would have known all the theology by now. They were pagans until Muhammed and so were even a better 'target' for Christianity.  Even the rise of Islam in the early 7th century would have provided enough previous time and a need for such translations.

Could it be that in the Land of Israel the presence of Arabs was minimal? And that there was no need for the local monks to engage them theologically?

^

Let's Hear It for the American Congress

Eli Hertz reminds us of:

The United States Congressional Record
1922 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
National Home for THE JEWISH PEOPLE JUNE 30, 1922
HOUSE RESOLUTION 360 - UNANIMOUSLY ADOPTED

"Palestine of today, the land we now know as Palestine, was peopled by the Jews from the dawn of history until the Roman era. It is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. They were driven from it by force by the relentless Roman military machine and for centuries prevented from returning. At different periods various alien people succeeded them but the Jewish race had left an indelible impress upon the land.

Today it is a Jewish country. Every name, every landmark, every monument and every trace of whatever civilization remaining there is still Jewish. And it has ever since remained a hope, a longing, as expressed in their prayers for these nearly 2,000 years. No other people has ever claimed Palestine as their national home. No other people has ever shown an aptitude or indicated a genuine desire to make it their homeland. The land has been ruled by foreigners. Only since the beginning of the modern Zionist effort may it be said that a creative, cultural, and economic force has entered Palestine. The Jewish Nation was forced from its natural home. It did not go because it wanted to.

A perusal of Jewish history, a reading of Josephus, will convince the most skeptical that the grandest fight that was ever put up against an enemy was put up by the Jew. He never thought of leaving Palestine. But he was driven out. But did he, when driven out, give up his hope of getting back? Jewish history and Jewish literature give the answer to the question. The Jew even has a fast day devoted to the day of destruction of the Jewish homeland.

Never throughout history did they give up hope of returning there. I am told that 90 per cent of the Jews today are praying for the return of the Jewish people to its own home. The best minds among them believe in the necessity of reestablishing their Jewish land. To my mind there is something prophetic in the fact that during the ages no other nation has taken over Palestine and held it in the sense of a homeland; and there is something providential in the fact that for 1,800 years it has remained in desolation as if waiting for the return of the people."

UPDATE: And this from Dr. Andrew Bostom,

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the “Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine—anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Congressional Record contains a statement of support from New York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation, about “Turkish and Arab agitators… preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against…the Jews” of Palestine. During this same era within Palestine, a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current—epitomized by Hajj Amin el-Husseini—promulgated the forcible restoration of Shari’a-mandated dhimmitude for Jews via jihad. Indeed, two years before he orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots of 1920, i.e., in 1918, Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish co-worker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I.A. Abbady, “This was and will remain an Arab land…the Zionists will be massacred to the last man…Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.”

(Kippah Tip: Pam G.)

Mark Twain, Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama

Here on how, or how not,

"a book by Mark Twain might factor in the quest for Middle East peace"

.

History Is Slippery

A follow-up to this

Here:-

Sir, – Paul Preston’s reply (Letters, April 10) to David Roman’s criticism of the review of Preston’s book about the Spanish Civil War, We Saw Spain Die, manifests a disturbing bias.

...Preston chooses to overlook and to remain completely silent on Roman’s most serious contention – that the Republican side, at the time, was equally guilty, and perhaps more so, of perpetrating appalling atrocities (he cites the slaughter of thousands of prisoners transferred from prison in Madrid to nearby Paracuellos de Jarama, arguably the biggest atrocity during the Civil War)...

It is a pity that in this way Preston uses his authority to lend credence to the prevailing simplistic, fashionable, liberal-leftist orthodoxy, officially sanctioned by the current Spanish government, that the Republican side fought the Civil War against Fascism in defence of liberal representative democracy. The Left in Spain now seeks to exploit the memory of nationalist atrocities as part of a cynical, opportunistic campaign aimed at associating the conservative opposition with the Franco regime.

In marked contrast, objective historians, using evidence available in the Moscow archives since the collapse of the USSR, show that the threat to the Second Republic came just as much from the revolutionary Left, and increasingly as the Civil War progressed, from the Moscow-dominated Republican government itself through Stalin’s main instrument, the Spanish Communist Party...had the Republican side won, the most likely outcome would have been the establishment of an East European-style communist regime during the Soviet era, i.e., a state in which all meaningful vestiges of democracy and opposition would have been brutally eliminated at the cost of thousands of lives.

JOHN HARGREAVES
Flat 1, 23 Nightingale Lane, London SW4.

When The Brits Fought the Pals.

Between 1936 and 1939, the indigenous Arab population of Mandate Palestine rampaged, pillaged, killed, scorched and otherwise were extremely violent.

There main objects were the Jews, their communities, their fields and crops and other items.

They also killed, ambushed and assassinated the British.

For online sources, try: here; here; here; this book; this book; Italian Fascist involvement and this article too; see here for Nazi links; and we'll stop with this.

About 500 Jews and 4,500- 5,000 Arabs died in total. A large number of Arabs were killed by Husseini's faction, which apparently killed more Arabs than Jews, and most of the rest were killed by brutal British reprisals. There was at least one massacre of Jews in Tiberias.

After all that, I found this portion of a 2005 obituary interesting:

Major Vernon Sudbury

Major Vernon Sudbury, who has died aged 87, won an MC in Palestine with the Sherwood Foresters in 1939, and later a Bar in 1944 when he escaped from a Italian PoW camp.

As the Mandatory Power in Palestine since 1920, Britain had the exacting task of keeping the peace between Jews and Arabs, and maintaining friendly relations with both races. The Foresters' main problem was the armed gangs which seldom engaged them, even at long range, but preferred to terrorise villages, extort money and suppress, by abduction or assassination, any tendency to support the government.

On August 18 1939, a Sherwood Foresters force, consisting of Column HQ and three platoons, one commanded by 2nd Lieutenant Sudbury, left barracks for operations in the Arraba area.

As it was leaving El-Mughar, a group of about 10 armed men was seen in the olive groves to the west and south-west of the village. Two platoons were ordered to cut off the gang on either flank while the third waited for five minutes and then attacked through the olive groves. A call was made for air support.

About 15 minutes later, a gang of about 40 men was seen running out of the olive grove before splitting up. Sudbury's platoon pursued some of the rebels across the rough terrain, and succeeded in cutting them off from the main group, while inflicting several casualties. Sudbury then realised that speed was essential if he was to prevent another group from getting away.

He picked his fittest men and, despite coming under fire at close range, pushed ahead very fast through thick scrub. Towards the end of the operation, the platoons came under fire from the high ground, and the air support reported that it had pinned down part of the gang on the far side of the crest.

A section of Sudbury's platoon then went forward with Column HQ and engaged them. Four Arabs were killed in the open, but their total losses were later found to be substantially higher. A quantity of ammunition and a saddle-bag of documents were also captured. Sudbury was awarded an MC.

Travelling Between Shchem and Ramallah, Then and Now

This past Shabbat, a group of bikers came in to visit the area of Shiloh and they left word that if we wanted to see pictures of their visit in the area, that we could go to a forum site and look.

So, I did and I found this picture:-



It shows the bikers coming up from the north, from Shchem (Nablus for those unfamiliar with the original Hebrew name of the city), ascending the hair-turn/s-curve road that is rarely used nowadays, passing by Lubban A-Sharaqiyah and coming up towards Sinjil, on the way south towards Ramallah. That was the road we used to drive along until the new Highway 60 became the favored path.

I looked at it and remembered a similar picture.

That picture was taken almost 100 years ago. In 1913 to be exact.

Here it is:-



Same location.

Different motor vehicle.

A Bit of History

Assaf Wohl replies to Arab-Israeli leader who claimed that land’s past belongs to Arabs in History lesson for Khatib

While speaking at an Islamic Movement ceremony to mark the “Nakba,” you, Mr. Khatib, said: “I emphasize this to the members of the Jewish people. We, the Palestinians, are here. We are the past, present, and future of this land.” And as I consider myself to be a member of the Jewish people, which you addressed, allow me to respond to your words.

Someone should have brought you up to date on this matter, Mr. Khatib. You may be able to sell your dubious merchandize in Gaza or on Tel Aviv’s Shenkin Street, but not to someone who studied history for more than 15 minutes. Or perhaps this was some kind of sense of humor, when you happened to speak at the location of two magnificent communities from the Second Temple era, Kfar Kana (today it’s Qana) and Zippori, while calling on me to recognize your right to this land...

...You should visit your brothers in Egypt. I am certain that they would be delighted to present to you the Merneptah Stele (also known as the Israel Stele,) which dates back to 1208 B.C. and commemorates Egyptian ruler’s Merneptah’s war against the tribes of Israel he encountered in Canaan. Do you understand, Mr. Khatib? More than 3,000 years ago, there were Israelites at Canaan. And it isn’t me who’s claiming it, but rather, an Israel-hater called Merneptah.

But why go so far? At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the capital of the sovereign State of Israel, you can take a look at the Tel Dan Stele and read about the “House of David.” Very surprisingly, this inscription was not found in Lithuania or in Poland, but rather, in the Galilee; and in this inscription too, the king of Aram boasts of victories over Judea and Israel. Look around Mr. Khatib, can you spot any Arameans around here?

Not far from there, in the very same Jerusalem, you can find the Shiloach inscription, made by the slaves of Judean King Hezekiah...it’s written in the Hebrew language. There you go, Hezekiah and I are linked through culture, religion, and language, despite the 2,700 years separating us...And even if you turn the entire Temple Mount into dust, you won’t be able to find even one inscription written in Arabic that dates back to the period before 638 A.D. – the year of the Muslim conquest of the land of Israel.

...Stop bringing disasters upon your public...Did you reach any achievements whatsoever with that holy fury of yours?

Holocaust Absurdities

And since I mentioned the The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, here's another important contribution to history:

The Ten Most Absurd Statements of 2007

Washington, D.C.- Authors who last year distorted the Allies’ response to the Holocaust have received their comeuppance, with the publication by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies of its annual list of the “Ten Most Absurd Statements” about how the U.S. and its allies responded to the Nazi genocide.

Writing About the Allies’ Response to Holocaust:
The Ten Most Absurd Statements of 2007

1. “Within Germany, bombing the camps or the railroad lines carrying people to the camps would only have killed swiftly men and women who would otherwise have died slowly and miserably.”

(Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. , Journals 1952-2000 [New York, Penguin Press, 2007], p. 675)

[COMMENT: In fact, (1) bombing the camps might or might not have resulted in some Jewish casualties, but not in numbers even remotely close to those being killed by the Nazis; (2) bombing the railroad lines in all likelihood would have resulted in few if any Jewish casualties, since the planes would be targeting the railroad tracks and bridges, not the railroad cars moving along them; and (3) the Jews in Auschwitz were not dying “slowly”; during the period when Allied bombing was feasible, they were being gassed at the rate of as many as 12,000 daily. ]

2. “The United States accepted about twice as many refugees as the rest of the world combined, 200,000 out of 300,000.”

(Robert Rosen, Saving the Jews [paperback edition, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007], p. 442)

[COMMENT: In fact, “the rest of the world” took in about 365,000 refugees, meaning that the approximately 200,000 admitted by the United States represented about 35 percent of the total, according to the figures reported in widely accepted history texts concerning refugees from Nazism.]

3. “Amid all the pressing concerns of the war on land, at sea and in the air, and the desperate struggle to find the means to challenge the continuing Nazi domination of Europe, Churchill always made time to deal with Jewish issues.”

(Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007, p. 196])

[COMMENT: In fact, Churchill refused to deal personally with news of the Holocaust or appeals for rescue, directing all such inquiries to the Foreign Office, which prepared the replies.]

4. “Churchill’s emphatic instruction [in favor of bombing Auschwitz] did not need to be carried out. Three days after he endorsed the bombing of railway lines leading from Hungary to Auschwitz, the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz was halted.”

(Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007, p. 212])

[COMMENT: In fact, Churchill and his aides did not know the deportations had stopped until fully eleven days after he first made that July 7 “instruction” to bomb Auschwitz; it was not until July 18 that the news of the halt to the deportations reached the Foreign Office. Thus, between July 7 and July 18, the Foreign Office and the Air Ministry were passing the proposal back and forth between them, despite their assumption that deportations were continuing; and Churchill did not pursue the matter in any way during that period, even though he had no reason to believe the deportations had stopped. Even after the Hungarian deportations stopped on July 18, Auschwitz continued to function and approximately 150,000 Jews were murdered there between July 7 and the liberation of the camp six months later. Even though bombing still needed to be carried out during that period, Churchill never revisited the issue.]

5. “During WWII as prime minister, Churchill encouraged more Jewish immigration into Palestine ...”

(Michael Makovsky, “Winston Churchill's was a Zionist at heart,” Washington Jewish Week, 8 November 2007)

[COMMENT: In fact, Churchill continued the White Paper policy of severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine throughout World War Two.]

6. “[A]fter the war began, virtually nothing could be done to rescue or even assist the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe, who were prisoners of a madman who was bent on killing all of them as his life’s mission and who was dictator of a continent.”

(William D. Rubinstein, “Response to the David Wyman Special Issue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40:3–4 [dated Summer–Fall 2004, but published in June 2007])

[COMMENT: In fact, there are numerous examples of Jews being “rescued or assisted after the war began.” About 26,000 European Jewish refugees reached Palestine between 1941 and 1944 in transports organized by Zionist activists. An estimated 27,000 Jewish refugees escaped to Switzerland and were granted haven during the war years, though thousands were turned away. More than 7,000 Danish Jews were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to safety in Sweden in 1943. Bulgaria’s Orthodox Church, in partnership with its right-wing government, refused the Nazi attempts to deport its 60,000 Jewish citizens. Thousands of Jews escaped France in 1942 by fleeing to Spain. Thousands of Jewish refugees managed to reach Allied-liberated Italy. Pressure by the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board in 1944 played a key role in Rumania’s agreement to move 48,000 Jews of Transnistria out of the path of the retreating German Army and into Rumania’s interior, saving their lives. The WRB also financed a variety of operations to help refugees survive in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, including bribing German officials, providing supplies and forged documents, and sustaining some 8,000 Jewish orphans hidden in France. The War Refugee Board mobilized the international diplomatic pressure that stopped the deportation of Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944, and through Raoul Wallenberg saved many thousands from the Nazis in Budapest. As a result, some 120,000 Jews were still alive in Budapest at war’s end.]

7. “[E]ven had American Jews acted in complete solidarity, they could not have altered American policies in an era when the nation was consumed by the Great Depression and the Second World War.”

(Beth S. Wenger, The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America. New York: Doubleday, 2007, p.217)

[COMMENT: In fact, even though they were divided, Jews did succeed in altering America’s rescue policy. The Bergson Group played a major role in generating the public outcry and Congressional pressure in late 1943 that helped bring about President Roosevelt’s creation of the War Refugee Board. Wenger mentions the creation of the Board (p.215), but depicts Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. as being single-handedly responsible for its establishment, without any reference to the role of the Bergson Group or Congress.]

8. “Nor did notable or important Jewish leaders or organizations in America or Palestine request that American forces bomb Auschwitz at a time when bombing might have accomplished something.”

(Robert Rosen, Saving the Jews [paperback edition, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007], p. 404)

[COMMENT: In fact, numerous important Jewish leaders or organizations in America and Palestine asked the Allies to bomb Auschwitz in 1944, when it might have saved many lives, including Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress; Maurice Perlzweig, head of the British section of the World Jewish Congress; Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency; Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Division of the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency; Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency Executive, in Jerusalem; and the Jewish Agency representatives in Cairo, Budapest, and Geneva.]

9. “Nine days after meeting with Wise [i.e. December 17, 1942], Roosevelt induced Churchill and Stalin to join with him in a Declaration on Jewish Massacres ...”

(Jean Edward Smith, FDR [New York: Random House, 2007], p.609)

[COMMENT: In fact, the British Foreign Office, not President Roosevelt, proposed the idea of the declaration. Roosevelt administration officials actually watered down the wording of the original British draft.]

10. “[W]hile accusations have long been made about [the New York Times’s] failure to publish news about events related to the Holocaust, the record shows that articles about the [American Jewish] Conference, appeared at least six times from August 31 to September 3, 1943, twice on the front page.”

(Bette Roth Young, “The American Jewish Response to the Holocaust--a Reconsideration,” Midstream, March/April 2007, p.33)

[COMMENT: In fact, the Times sought to undermine the American Jewish Conference by ‘balancing’ its front-page coverage of the Conference with a half-page story about the alleged increase in Jewish support for the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism.]