opinion
Haredim ‘R’ Us
BY DOUGLAS ALTABEF
ou could have set your watch to it: The New
York Times came out with a shocking, truly
shocking, revelation about the complete waste of
resources expended by the New York Board of
Regents on retrograde haredi schools.

The students in these schools did really poorly
on standardized English and math tests, with
scores that would likely lead to the conclusion that
the funds were completely wasted and raise the
question of what is going on in these places.

This inquiry would be a bit funny if it didn’t cut
so close to the bone. Why funny? Because these
students are learning at a pace and going through
a quantity of material that would put most secular
counterparts to shame.

Why close to the bone? Because when one con-
siders the issue, there is an eerie parallel to how
most of the world sees Jews in general and Israel
as a country.

There is a profound degree of just not getting
what the haredi schools’ mission is, not to mention
what the haredim themselves are about. For centu-
ries, there has been a similar lack of understanding
about what Jews do, what Jews are about and why
Jews even continue to exist.

And now, in the latest permutation of non-com-
prehension, there is broad-based confusion as to
why Israel would hold it so important to cleave to
Jewish tradition and to insist on a state predicated
on Jewish law, norms and values.

In other words, we don’t compute. We are the
perennial odd man out — the exception that can-
not be measured by the norms and standards that
seem to fit so much of the rest of the world.

In the case of the haredim in New York, what
would make for a good investment or a bad one?
Surely, it cannot be relegated to the realm of test
scores. The investment must be seen as a long-
term one designed to produce law-abiding, pro-
ductive citizens who contribute to the welfare and
well-being of New York.

Of course, eyebrows will arch at the idea that the
haredim are somehow contributing to the common
good of New York. After all, they are famously insu-
lar, with values that often do not overlap with those
of the larger society.

But if we are talking about an investment, we
have to look at the ancillary costs and benefits that
particular communities provide to the larger society.

Haredim are not mugging their fellow citizens,
nor are they breaking into their homes. Haredim
take care of their own with a breathtaking array
of social-welfare organizations. When was the
16 SEPTEMBER 22, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
last time anyone stepped over a homeless haredi
person? If the idea of an investment is to turn out peo-
ple who can perform trigonometric functions or
remember quadratic equations into adulthood,
then haredi schools have indeed failed.

However, if the goal of education is to empower
someone to love learning — to be a lifelong student
possessed of the tools to learn even subjects previ-
ously not encountered — then I would suggest that
the investment in haredi schools is a bargain.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of inter-
acting with an extraordinary school on the Golan
Heights that was training both Ethiopian Israelis
and haredi Israelis to become electronic tech-
nicians for the air force. The program has been
remarkably successful, and I remember asking how
the haredim were able to manage it, given their
lack of relevant preparatory work in the yeshivahs.

The answer was basically: When you have been
learning Gemara for years and years, you can pick
up other subjects pretty quickly.

Would the New York Regents regard invest-
ments in schools that were concentrating on the
sociology of the Maori people in the South Pacific,
requiring their students to speak that language and
to immerse themselves in that culture, as a bad
investment? I suspect that they would appropriately say, no,
of course not. This is diversity of experience and
learning, and it is valuable in and of itself.

So why is there not the same empathy for the
haredim? Back to my basic premise: The profound
non-comprehension of the haredim is of a piece
with the historic and widespread non-comprehen-
sion of Jews.

Why do we have to adhere to such anachronis-
tic ideas as not eating a whole array of perfectly
healthy foods? Why do we insist on practices that
take us out of the realm of larger civic life, and are
designed to make us stand out and look different?
Israel is the outlier of countries, cleaving to
Jewish traditions, cleaving to the historic Land of
Israel, cleaving to the importance of a nation-state
that is a Jewish state, respectful of its non-Jewish
residents, but a Jewish state nevertheless. Again,
the odd man out, the case that doesn’t fit neatly
into the existing categories.

The difference that demarcates Jewishness and
Judaism has always been an irritation to many,
and at times has been perceived as a threat and
a menace. A candid assessment would conclude
that New York State’s assessment of haredim is not
so removed from this perspective.

Rather than feeling the need to defend the
haredim, I would congratulate the Regents on their
far-sighted investment in the continuity of a com-
munity that has added stability, viability and vitality
to New York.

New York Regents, keep up the good work! JE
Douglas Altabef is the chairman of the board
of Im Tirtzu — Israel’s largest grassroots Zionist
organization — as well as a director of B’yadenu
and of the Israel Independence Fund.

Keith Lance / E+ / gettyimages
Y



opinion
Ken Burns’ Holocaust Documentary May
Be Hard on America, But not Hard Enough
BY RAFAEL MEDOFF AND
MONTY N. PENKOWER
I n September 1944, David
Ben-Gurion rose before the
Asefat Hanivcharim, Palestine
Jewry’s elected assembly,
and delivered an explosive
“j’accuse” against the Allies
for abandoning Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust.

The words of the man who would soon be
Israel’s first prime minister take on added signif-
icance in view of the upcoming release of Ken
Burns’ three-part, six-hour PBS documentary
“The U.S. and the Holocaust.” Its official website
says the film “dispels” the “myth” that America
“looked on with callous indifference” during the
Holocaust. By contrast, Ben-Gurion told the gathering of
Jewish community leaders in Jerusalem on Sept.

12, 1944: “As millions of Jews were taken to the
slaughter — young and old, infant and newborn,
mother and daughter — the world leaders, those
who shout slogans about democracy and social-
ism, looked away from the bloodshed and did not
undertake rescue action — they did not even try
to rescue them.”
Two months earlier, Ben-Gurion had spoken in
similar terms at a ceremony on the 40th anniver-
sary of the death of Theodor Herzl. Addressing
himself to the Allies, he thundered: “What have
you allowed to be perpetrated against a defense-
less people while you stood aside and let them
bleed to death, never lifting a finger to help?….Why
do you profane our pain and wrath with empty
expressions of sympathy which ring like mockery
in the ears of millions who are being daily burnt
and buried alive in the hell centers of Europe?”
These words were not uttered after the fact.

The Holocaust still raged as Ben-Gurion spoke.

Trainloads of Jewish deportees were being sent
to Auschwitz every day. On the day of the Herzl
speech, July 10, three trainloads of Hungarian
Jewish deportees arrived in Auschwitz. Over the
course of four days that week, more than 30,000
Jews were gassed.

For a few weeks earlier that summer, Ben-Gurion
and his colleagues in the leadership of Palestine’s
Jewish Agency had mistakenly believed that
Auschwitz was a labor camp. But when they
learned in late June that it was in fact a death
camp, they lobbied Allied diplomats in Europe,
the Middle East and the United States to bomb the
railways and bridges leading to Auschwitz, or the
gas chambers, or both.

Future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann and
future prime ministers Moshe Shertok (Sharett)
and Golda Meyerson (Meir) were among those
promoting the proposal in meetings with Allied
officials. In early September, just before the afore-
mentioned meeting of the Asefat Hanivcharim,
Jewish Agency official Eliyahu Epstein (Elath)
reported to Ben-Gurion about his unsuccessful
efforts to persuade a Soviet diplomat in Cairo that
the Allies should bomb the death camps.

Roosevelt administration officials falsely
asserted that the only way to strike the railways
or the death camp would be to “divert” planes
from distant battle zones, thus undermining the
war effort. That claim is repeated in the Burns
film as if it were a fact. In reality, American planes
were already flying over Auschwitz, bombing the
oil factories in the death camp’s industrial zone
(where Elie Wiesel was among the slave laborers)
— less than five miles from the gas chambers. One
of those raids took place on Sept. 13, 1944, the
day after Ben-Gurion’s speech to the Jerusalem
assembly. In Ken Burns’ film, interviewees belittle the pro-
posals to bomb the railways on the grounds that
the Germans could have quickly repaired them.

But that was true for all U.S. bombing attacks
on railroads in Europe, yet it never deterred the
Roosevelt administration and its allies from target-
ing them as part of the war effort.

George McGovern, the future U.S. senator and
1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was one
of the young pilots who undertook those raids
(including bombing the oil factories at Auschwitz).

In a 2004 interview, McGovern argued that even
if the railway lines could have been repaired, the
damage would have delayed the deportations
and saved lives.

“[I]t would have helped if we had bombed the
railroad lines leading to Auschwitz. The purpose
of those rail lines was to carry human beings to
their death, and we might even have been able to
use long-range fighter planes to get down right
on the tracks and knock them out,” McGovern
said. Regarding a junction through which trains
passed on the way to Auschwitz, he said: “We
should have hit that junction and disabled it. We
should have hit the rail lines, even if we had to go
back several times.”
It is also important to remember that there were
bridges along those routes, and bridges could
not be quickly repaired. Some of the requests
put forward by Jewish groups at the same time
actually named bridges that should be targeted.

Those pleas were no secret. On July 10, 1944, the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that recent
escapees from Auschwitz were urging the fol-
lowing: “The crematoria in Oswiecim [Auschwitz]
and Birkenau, easily recognisable [sic] by their
chimneys and watch-towers, as well as the main
railway lines connecting Slovakia and Carpatho-
Ruthenia with Poland, especially the bridge at
Cop, should be bombed.”
Debating the options for Allied action, a com-
mentator in the Burns film argues that bombing
Auschwitz might have been a bad idea because
some of the inmates could have been harmed.

That argument is disingenuous for two reasons.

First, the United States could have bombed the
railway lines and bridges to Auschwitz without
endangering inmates. Second, the presence of
those prisoners was not the reason the Allies
rejected the bombing requests; note that they
bombed those oil factories in broad daylight,
even though slave laborers were likely to be
there. Likewise, the United States bombed a
rocket factory in the Buchenwald concentration
camp in daylight in August 1944, even though
the workers would be there; many were indeed
killed, but the Allies considered the attack to be
justified despite that risk.

Nahum Goldmann, who was the Jewish
Agency’s representative in Washington as well
as co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress,
repeatedly asked U.S. officials to bomb Auschwitz
as well as the railways, and heard their excuses
about not wanting to “divert” planes from the war
effort. Three days after Ben-Gurion’s speech in
Jerusalem, Ernest Frischer of the Czech gov-
ernment-in-exile reported to Goldmann and the
WJCongress that the Allies had been bombing
“fuel factories … in Oswiecim and Birkenau,” not far
from the “extermination installations.” Goldmann
pointed out that fact to Allied officials, to no avail.

They were, as Ben-Gurion put it, not willing to
even “lift a finger” to rescue Jews.

In a recent interview, Burns asserted that
President Roosevelt “could not wave a magic
wand” but did his best to help the Jews during the
Holocaust. Ben-Gurion, who actually lived through
those days and was an eyewitness to Roosevelt’s
abandonment of the Jews, understood the reality
far more clearly. JE
Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S.

Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author
of more than 20 books about Jewish history and
the Holocaust. Monty N. Penkower is professor
emeritus of modern Jewish history at the Machon
Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies and
author of a five-volume study about the rise of the
state of Israel between the years 1933-1948.

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