"The Day Is Short and the Task Is Great": Reports from Jewish Military Chaplains in Europe, 1945-1947

In November 1940 , with war already underway in Europe and its clouds hanging over the United States, Frank L. Weil, president of the Jewish Welfare Board, met with Assistant Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson "to discuss the religious needs of the Jewish personnel in the armed forces." Patterson subsequently wrote to Weil, "We shall do everything compatible with our primary mission of training to help safeguard the religious observations of men of the Jewish faith." However, when the United States entered the war in December 1941 , neither the United States armed forces nor the American Jewish community were prepared to meet the religious requirements of Jewish military personnel. Similarly at war's end in 1945 , the military and the organized American Jewish community failed to anticipate the extraordinary requirements of the liberated Shearith ha-Pletah, the European survivors of the Shoah. The burden of meeting the spiritual, religious, and material needs of Jewish soldiers and civilians fell directly on the Jewish military chaplains who served in the United States Army and Navy.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into the war, the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB), in cooperation with the three major Jewish rabbinical organizations, recruited 311 rabbi chaplains who served between 1941 and 1948.¹ The JWB created a semi-autonomous organization, the Committee on Army and Navy Religious Affairs (CANRA), to plan the effort to recruit, train, equip, and support the chaplains. Once in the field, the chaplains were required to file monthly reports with CANRA. Some of those reports are excerpted below. Their format has been changed for easier reading, and we have made minor changes to the texts to eliminate obvious spelling or grammatical errors.

Urged on by their rabbinical organizations and with the financial support of their congregations, more than half the American rabbinate volunteered to serve in the Army and Navy. For those who were accepted, the struggle to meet the competing and at times conflicting demands of the Jewish chaplaincy in wartime proved exhausting and debilitating. As their reports indicate, each rabbi had to represent Judaism to the Jewish soldiers he encountered, regardless of his own denominational affiliation or that of the soldier. As Rabbi Herbert Eskin's report below illustrates, Jewish chaplains at times also had to meet the spiritual needs of Christian soldiers. Little in pre-war American Judaism or interfaith relations prepared these rabbis, especially the Orthodox ones, for this level of trans-denominational or Jewish-Christian intimacy. Contacts between the chaplains and non-Jews helped make the rabbis more cosmopolitan, much as fighting alongside Christian compatriots made American Jewish soldiers more fully American. Both phenomena helped pave the way to the increased social integration of American Jewry in the postwar period.

The constant travel between military camps, battle sites, cemeteries, and hospitals exhausted the chaplains. Armed with small Torahs and arks that attached to the back of a jeep, the rabbis crisscrossed occupied France, Germany, and Italy until war's end and beyond, never having sufficient time to meet all the needs of the Jewish soldiers in their territories. Even more difficult to meet were the needs of the Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who, beginning in 1945 , flocked to the American zone of occupied Germany. As the reports below indicate, at first the U. S. military authorities prohibited the chaplains from "fraternizing" with the local population, including the Jewish DPs, a situation that vexed the chaplains. After President Harry S. Truman ordered General Dwight D. Eisenhower to improve conditions for the Jewish DPs, these restrictions were lifted. Many of the chaplains returned to the United States physically ill and emotionally depleted as a result of their efforts to meet the survivors' needs and the soldiers' spiritual requirements, while coping with their intimate exposure to death and the almost complete destruction of...