Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America

Chapter 4: “Bearded Refugees”: The Reception of Religious Newcomers

72 CHAPTER 4 “Bearded Refugees” THE RECEPTION OF RELIGIOUS NEWCOMERS
The photograph of the family of ten that appeared in the New York Times in April 1949 is astonishing. Even more so is the accompanying story. “DP Rabbi, Family Dock, Full of Joy, Father of 8 Can See New Life Here after Wanderings and Imprisonment,” the headline declares.1 The article details how Rabbi Goldman, his wife, and seven children evaded the Nazis in Hungary. One son was killed and another born in Germany after the war. They came to the United States under the auspices of USNA and were to be resettled in the Midwest. The reporter was curious about the man’s plans for the future. “I don’t know what I want to do,” said the forty-two-year-old newcomer, who had been a rabbi since the age of twenty-one. “Maybe teach Hebrew; maybe become rabbi of some synagogue where I could do some good,” he reflected. But he did not want to speak about his future, he insisted, rather “about America—this greatest land of refuge in the world, this wonderful nation that has taken us in and given us a chance to begin living once more.”2 Five years later, on a late summer day in 1954, Judge Rosenbaum of Denver, Colorado, found one Rabbi F. wandering around Union Station, not knowing where to go or what to do. He brought the man to the offices of JFCS and left him with a caseworker. The rabbi asked for financial assistance to carry him through until he reached New York and help in finding kosher lodgings because he could not travel on the Sabbath. The caseworker wrote in her report: Rabbi F was a Roumanian by birth and Orthodox in practice. He was finding it difficult to establish himself in this country and earn a living because of the different nature of religious functionary work in the United States. Rabbi F showed us a newspaper clippings [sic] from a New York paper, indicating that his wife had died aboard ship en “Bearded Refugees” 73 route to this country. . . . The infant and his four year old daughter are in a Children’s Institution in Brooklyn, New York, where the rabbi lives. . . . He was en route from L.A. back to New York when he came to our office to seek assistance. The clippings indicated that he had been a man of influence in his small hometown in Europe where he led a congregation. He keenly felt the difference in his position now as well as anxiety around making a livelihood. One could also sense difficulty in acculturating to American life and accepting patterns of religious activity other than what he himself is accustomed to. He looked older than his 48 years, and he was garbed in traditional Orthodox clothing and wore a beard.3 The descriptions of Rabbi Goldman and Rabbi F. capture both the promise and the dislocation that many survivors experienced in their early days here. We do not know what became of either one. These brief glimpses of their lives are all we have. Like all DPs, religious refugees struggled to find their place in America. The Holocaust demolished their previous lives and tossed them into an alien world. As happy as Rabbi Goldman was to be in the United States, he, like Rabbi F., would soon have to confront his future A religious family arrives in New York, circa 1948–1953. HIAS. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 74 Case Closed and the demands of the Jewish, but secular, agency and of the greater society as well. After the war, orthodox organizations such as rabbinic seminaries and the Vaad Hatzala (the wartime orthodox rescue committee) joined together to bring religious survivors to America.4 Shortly thereafter, other institutions approached USNA for financial support for this group.5 USNA (and eventually NYANA) and its cooperating agencies agreed to help shoulder this responsibility. At the end of 1947, a Religious Functionary Department (RFD) was created at USNA to respond to the specific vocational needs of certain orthodox Jews. The RFD’s goal was to assist those Jews identified as religious functionaries (RF) in finding appropriate work.6 USNA, NYANA, and local cooperating agencies also aided religiously observant refugees who were not religious functionaries, but part of the agencies’ general caseload. USNA...