City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

3 During Catastrophe and Triumph

73 Jews of New York lived at the center where American Jewish responses emerged to the cataclysmic events that decimated their people in the decade of the Holocaust. Their location placed them in the midst of decisions leading to the rise of the State of Israel. More than any community in America , New York was the hub of national Jewish organizational life. Hundreds of Jewish political, social, and religious groups, across the broadest of spectrums , had offices in the metropolis. Although the seat of American government was 250 miles away, seemingly all major deputations to influence leaders in Washington, D.C., originated in New York. Between 1938 and 1948, Jewish organizations spread within Midtown across Forty-Second Street, east to west, were positioned to garner public attention. Two major defense organizations , the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, with often polar-opposite approaches to Jews’ monumental problems, stood at opposite sides of the famous New York street. The Congress, a Zionist massmembership organization that advocated public remonstrations to its government to champion Jewish plights, made its headquarters off Eighth Avenue. The Committee, a bastion of elite leadership, prized quiet diplomacy and commanded space on Lexington Avenue. They did, however, walk together in harmony on those occasions when they were given the opportunity to speak to government. Jews who set foot among the powerful, they believed, had to do so with respect and dignity. The offices of the Joint Distribution Committee and the American section of the Jewish Agency for Palestine faced each other across the street between Park and Madison Avenues. The Joint acquired renown for securing or C H A P T E R 3 During Catastrophe and Triumph 74 ■ j e w s i n g o t h a m secreting supplies to Jews in eastern Europe before, during, and after the war. The Zionist organization’s most dynamic publicity arm, the American Zionist Emergency Council, and its primary fund-raising group, the United Palestine Appeal, shared space with its parent organization, the Jewish Agency, the prestate Jewish government in Palestine, first at 41 East Forty-Second Street and later a block or so away at 342 Madison Avenue.1 Future leaders of American Judaism’s movements also located in Manhattan . Rabbis and religious teachers in training at the Orthodox Yeshiva Rabbi Isaac Elchanan and its undergraduate school, Yeshiva College, studied in Washington Heights. Sixty blocks south in Morningside Heights, the men and women of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America prepared either to become Conservative rabbis or, in women’s cases, to graduate as Hebrew teachers . On Sixty-Eighth Street, off Central Park West, stood the Jewish Institute of Religion, a Reform rabbinical school led by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who was also president of the American Jewish Congress. Volunteer workers and advocates for Zionist organizations with very different strategies for how Palestinian Jews should fight for their freedom, and varying visions of what sort of state Jews might create, passed one another daily on the way to their offices on Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh Streets in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. At lunch time, Madison Square Park, off Fifth Avenue between Twenty-Third and Twenty-Seventh Streets was a fine location for unscheduled waxed-bag debates between supporters of the David Ben-Gurion–led Histadrut, the “umbrella framework of the Labor Zionist movement in Palestine,” and the confrontational New Zionist Organization . In the critical first postwar days of 1945–48, the backers of the Histadrut pleaded that the British could be convinced through diplomacy and cooperation to exit Palestine. Their interlocutors, Revisionist Zionists, sought to drive out the English through violence and intimidation. For longtime observers of these ideological conflicts, this Palestine debate represented but a continuation of wartime disputes between Wise’s Congress, allied with Ben-Gurion, and the Revisionists over how to approach the government to rescue Jews. The transcendent disagreement was over whether the Roosevelt administration had Jewish concerns at heart. Wise believed in and trusted FDR; the Revisionists did not. If the Congress spoke to the powerful with respect and regard, the Revisionists—who rarely could get audiences with government—harangued and condemned.2 During Catastrophe and Triumph ■ 75 In another part of the park, Mizrachi members spoke passionately to those who might listen about the glories of a future Jewish state rising in “the Land of Israel, for the people of Israel, in the spirit...