The painful shunning of survivors
American Jews and the Holocaust: Part 7
This is part 7 of an ongoing series. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.
It wasn’t only the Jewish-American organizations that failed to provide the refugees with adequate work opportunities; American relatives and sympathizers, too, often fell short of the refugees’ hopes. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History Project Life after the Holocaust, survivor Norman Salsitz shared his experience of trying to find a job through family connections after the war. His American cousins owned the largest silk company in the United States; looking for a way to support himself in his new life, Salsitz dressed in his finest outfit and went to his cousin to ask for a job: “So, he looked and looked at me. And he took out a wallet from his pocket. He took out a 100 dollar bill and put it on the table. And he said, ‘Take it and get off my back.’ And when he said this, naturally I didn’t take the hundred dollars. Now, tears filled up my eyes. Now, I couldn’t...I couldn’t answer anything, and I couldn’t cry. So, I didn’t take it.”
Salsitz’s cousin wouldn’t take responsibility for helping him or giving him an opportunity to help himself; he wanted to be rid of a perceived burden, by whatever means possible. It is also possible that he did not want to deal with the constant reminder of the death and destruction of the Holocaust that a survivor would inevitably provide. Whatever his motives, he provides a heartbreaking example of American Jewish communities’ unwillingness or inability to give the refugees what they needed, whether materially or emotionally.
Survivors appreciated employment training and placement, but they needed more than that from their fellow Jews, whether relatives or organizations. The Holocaust was an intensely traumatic, overwhelming experience to survive; survivors needed communal, emotional, and often spiritual support from their families or new communities. Plenty of survivors were taken in by loving relatives or tightly knit communities that were eager to do whatever they could to help the refugees. Unfortunately, however, many refugees did not share this experience. Orthodox Jewish survivors had particular difficulty in adjusting to life in the States. The caseworkers tasked with aiding them all too often did not understand their beliefs or lifestyles, and were not equipped or willing to deal with their special needs. Again, Dr. Neumann and the Denver branch of JFCS provide an example of a community that was unenthusiastic in aiding its refugees.
Although Denver had Jewish infrastructure including day schools, synagogues, and kosher slaughterhouses, the JFCS was unwilling to take in religious refugees. One refugee, Mr. G., was criticized in the JFCS files for making demands upon the organization because he had been transferred to Denver from a town without a synagogue or rabbi. Beth B. Cohen writes: “Describing Mr. G.’s desire for a community with a synagogue and kosher food as being excessively demanding clearly reveals not just a lack of sympathy for but also a lack of knowledge about the fundamentals of orthodox life.” The organization treated Mr. G.’s demands as picky, unnecessary trivialities; its caseworkers had no sensitivity for his beliefs or awareness that kosher food was not just a taste preference but a requirement of his religion.
Upon arrival and settlement in the United States, religious refugees, especially highly-educated and well-respected community members such as rabbis and cantors, found little of the kind of religious infrastructure and community support to which they had been accustomed in Europe before the war. Many rabbis and yeshiva students who arrived in America expected to be absorbed into and supported by the Jewish communities they found there, as they had been supported by their former communities in Europe. For the most part, this was not the case; they were expected to support themselves, and agencies sent them into the workforce. Fortunately for the new immigrants, “the employment was often within the orthodox world, but it garnered far less status than Torah study and it represented a rupture, rather than continuity, with the past.”
The Jewish world of the United States was so utterly different from the destroyed one of pre-war Europe that these religious communities forcibly changed forever. They had to adapt to a different kind of Orthodox Jewish world, an American one, and even religious Jews who tried to do so often did not receive the kind of support they needed. Cohen provides the example of a Mr. Lis, who arrived in Hartford, Connecticut in 1949 and attended the local Orthodox synagogue. His experience there was intensely lonely, “made even more so by the fact that none of the other congregants ever invited him for a Sabbath or holiday meal. ‘No one asked, “Where are you for Shabbos? Where are you eating? Never,”’ he emphasized. What accounts for this ungenerous response? ‘We were looked down on,’ Mr. Lis explained, especially ‘those like myself who had nobody.’ As survivors did in other communities he found a social life with other refugees.”
While Mr. Lis did not speculate on the motives of the American Jews who treated him with such indifference, others may do so. Rabbi Harold White, Georgetown University’s longtime Senior Jewish Chaplain, discussed in an interview his own memories of growing up in Hartford and seeing how American Jews treated immigrant Holocaust survivors. Yechiel Lieberman, White’s childhood Hebrew tutor, was a Holocaust survivor as well as a rabbi and a great scholar; when he came to the United States, however, he could not get work as a rabbi. To support himself, he became an insurance salesman, tutoring boys in Hebrew to earn extra money. White recalled Lieberman “was the one who told me how poorly he was received by the Jewish community. He sought, he wanted to teach in a Hebrew school, for example, and he was told, ‘You have an accent, and because you have an accent, you’re not acceptable. And besides, you might tell grim stories. We don’t want our kids to hear them.’”
Clearly Lieberman faced discrimination as a European Jew rather than an American one, for his local Connecticut community disapproved of his accent in Hebrew. More shockingly, he faced discrimination as a Holocaust survivor specifically because of the horrible traumas he had endured. These Americans did not want to hear about what Lieberman had endured, and they did not want their children to hear about it, either; on the chance that he would share these dark, true stories with his classes, they refused him work as a teacher. Many American Jews simply did not want to hear about the Holocaust at all, and to that end they shunned Holocaust survivors themselves.
According to Rabbi White’s testimony, the ill treatment and shunning did not stop at the Holocaust survivors–it extended to American Jews who reached out to survivors and tried to aid them in the resettlement and integration process. White reported how his father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, was very sensitive to the fact that the entire population of his hometown had been annihilated by the Nazis. Out of a sense of obligation to the survivors who came to Hartford, he rented apartments of the buildings he owned to Holocaust survivors.
White recalled the reaction of his uncle, the president of a Conservative synagogue: “My uncle did not have the sensitivity of my father, and my uncle therefore said to my father, ‘Give them a finger and they’ll take your whole hand.’ And instead of my father being congratulated on what he was doing, he was chastised by members of his family.” For people like White’s uncle, Holocaust survivors were purely victims, even needy parasites, who were just waiting to take advantage of the goodwill of the American Jewish community. For the American Jews who felt this way, there was no sense of loyalty or obligation toward their European brethren who had suffered so; they saw themselves as hard-working Americans who were smart enough not to let anyone else take advantage of them, even Holocaust survivors.
To what lengths could this viewpoint go? Pearl Gibber was the principal of a Jewish religious school in Hartford; as Rabbi White remembers, “She made it her life’s commitment to teach Holocaust survivors English, and she did this in the basement of her house. And I remember the criticism of her; someone referred to her as a nafka, a prostitute, said, ‘Yeah, she looks like a prostitute.’ I remember this vividly, twelve years old…‘a prostitute, what’s she doing with those people? Doesn’t she have better things to do with those people?’”
A woman who dedicated her time and energy to teaching Holocaust survivors English—a necessary skill for them to integrate into American life, find good jobs, and support themselves, avoiding becoming “parasites” on the community like some American Jews feared—was called a “prostitute.” People could not imagine why she was spending her time in service to these survivors; they had to attribute some strange ulterior motives to her, and the most insulting thing they could do was call her a “prostitute” for her charity. If they had acknowledged that what she was doing was indeed praiseworthy, would they then have had to acknowledge that, as members of the same community, they too had an obligation? It was easier to denigrate the survivors and the American Jews who tried to help them than to reevaluate their own stances toward Holocaust survivors.
This is part 7 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.