Hillel Kook
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Hillel Kook (1915-2001), also known as Peter Bergson, was a Revisionist Zionist activist, politician, and prominent member of the Irgun. He was the nephew of Abraham Isaac Kook, Israel's first Ashkenazi chief rabbi.
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[edit] Early life
Hillel Kook was born in Lithuania in 1915, the son of Rabbi Dov Kook, Abraham Isaac Kook's younger brother. In 1924, his family immigrated to Palestine, where his father became the first Chief Rabbi of Afula. Hillel Kook received a religious education in Afula and Jerusalem and went on to receive a degree in Jewish Studies at Hebrew University. While there, he became a member of Sohba, or "Comradeship", a group of students who would later become prominent in the Revisionist movement, including David Raziel and Avraham Stern.
Kook joined the pre-state Haganah militia in 1930 following widespread Arab riots. In 1931, Kook helped found the Irgun, a group of militant Haganah dissidents. He fought with the Irgun through the 1940s, serving as a post commander in 1936, and eventually became a member of the Irgun General Headquarters.
[edit] World War Two
In 1937 Kook began his career as an international spokesperson for the Irgun and Revisionist Zionism. He first went to Poland, where he was involved in fundraising and establishing Irgun cells in Eastern Europe. It was there that he met the founder of the Revisionist movement, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and became friends with his son Eri. In 1940, at the elder Jabotinsky's suggestion, Kook travelled to the United States, where he served as the head of the Irgun mission in America. This assignment was clandestine, and, many times during his time in America, Kook publicly denied he was affiliated with the Irgun.
[edit] Bergson Group
While in America, Kook led a group of Irgun activists under the pseudonym "Peter H. Bergson", supposedly to avoid embarrassing his family (particularly his famous uncle Abraham Isaac) with his political activities. The name "Bergson Group" or "Bergsonites" eventually became used to refer to all the members of Kook's immediate circle. The Bergson Group was composed of a hard-core cadre of ten Irgun activists from Europe, America and Palestine, including Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, Alexander Rafaeli, Shmuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky. The Bergson Group was closely involved with various Jewish and Zionist advocacy groups, such as the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and the Organizing Committee of Illegal Immigration. The group also founded some separate initiatives of its own, specifically the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, whose goal was the formation of an Allied fighting force of stateless and Palestinian Jews. Some credit the later formation of the Jewish Brigade, a British unit of Palestinian Jews, with Kook's activism. Two American members of the Bergson Group were author and screenwriter Ben Hecht and cartoonist Arthur Szyk.
Initially the Bergson Group largely limited its activities to Irgun fundraising and various propaganda campaigns. The outbreak of World War II saw a dramatic transformation in the group's focus. As information about the Holocaust began to reach the United States, Kook and his fellow activists became more involved in trying to raise awareness about the fate of the Jews in Europe. This included putting full-page advertisements in leading newspapers. In 1943, Kook established an "Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry". The Committee, which included Jewish and non-Jewish American writers, public figures, and politicians, worked to disseminate information to the general public, and also lobbied the President and Congress to take immediate action to save the remnants of Europe's Jews.
The proposal was ratified by the Senate Committee on Foregin Relations, and, in response to the pressure, President Roosevelt subsequently issued an administrative order for the establishment of a special national authority, the War Refugee Board (WRB) to deal with Jewish and non-Jewish war refugees. An official government emissary sent to Turkey was of considerable assistance in the rescue of Romanian Jewry. The WRB saved about 200,000 Jews. (Wyman 1984:285)
[edit] Opposition to Bergson
Kook and his followers were widely opposed by large sections of the American public, particularly by many prominent American Zionist organizations. In December 1943, the American Jewish Conference launched a public attack against the Bergsonites in an attempt to derail support for the resolution. (Wyman 1984:202)
The British embassy and several American Zionist groups, including the American Jewish Committee and other political opponents sought to have Kook deported or drafted. (Wyman 184:346) They encouraged the IRS to investigate the Bergson groups finances in an attempt to discredit them, hoping to find misapporpriation, or at least careless bookkeeping, of the large amount of funds the groups handled. The IRS found no financial irregularities. (Wyman 1984:346) In fact, Kook reported to Wyman that, when he complained to the IRS supervisor about the $97 they said was due them, the supervisor told him to have the letter framed. After two weeks of intensive audits, he said, finding under $100 of owed taxes was a testament to the group's honesty.
[edit] The Day the Rabbis Marched
One of the Committee's more memorable activities was a protest Kook organized known as the Rabbis' March. The protest took place in Washington, D.C. on October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur. While the Bergson Group was largely secular, Kook successfully used his family's rabbinic heritage to convince between 400 and 500 Orthodox rabbis to attend. Among the participants were Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Eliezer Silver, president of the Va'ad Ha-Hatzala and co-president of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States, Rabbi Mordechai Shlomo (sometimes recorded as Solomon Mordechai) Friedman, the Boyaner Rebbe of New York and president of the Union of Grand Rabbis of the United States, Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz, rabbinical dean of the Mir Yeshiva, Rabbi Naftali Carlebach, father of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and his father, Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Hertzberg. The Lubavitcher dynasty was conspicuously absent.
Joined by Bergson Group activists, the Jewish War Veterans of America, and a number of prominent members of Congress, the protestors marched on the Capitol Building, Lincoln Memorial, and White House, pleading for U.S. intervention on behalf of the Jews in Europe. Though the delegation was reluctantly received by Vice-President Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt avoided them entirely, both out of concerns regarding diplomatic neutrality, but also influenced by the advice of some of his Jewish aides and several promiment American Jewish spokespeople (including Dr. Stephen Wise), who thought the protest would stir up anti-Semitism and claimed that the marchers, many whom were both Orthodox as well as recent immigrants (or first-generation Americans) were not representative of American Jewry. Shortly before the protest reached the White House, FDR left the building through a rear exit to attend an Army ceremony, and then left for a weekend in the country. Disappointed and angered by the President's failure to meet with them, the rabbis stood in front of the White House and refused to read their petition aloud, instead handing it off to the Presidential secretary, Marvin McIntyre. The march garnered much media attention, much of it focused on what was seen as the cold and insulting dismissal of many important community leaders, as well as the people in Europe they were fighting for. One Jewish newspaper commented, "Would a similar delegation of 500 Catholic priests have been thus treated?" [1]
[edit] Post-War Activities
[edit] Growing Divisions
Following the end of the war, the Irgun declared an open revolt against British rule in Palestine. To assist in recruiting and propaganda efforts, Kook established the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation and the American League for a Free Land of Israel, both of which were involved in lobbying U.S. and other diplomats and in trying to attract the American public to support the Irgun's rebellion. Kook remained strongly affiliated with the Revisionist camp after the war and the creation of the state of Israel. While he was unquestionably loyal to his cause, his position as the Irgun's leading American activist was not free from conflict. In 1946 Kook received a letter from Menachem Begin, who had become chief of the Irgun in 1943. Begin admonished Kook for various positions of his that strayed from the official Irgun party-line. These included Kook focusing on the transportation of illegal immigrants to Palestine instead of his "primary" assignment, arms shipments to Irgun fighters, as well as his (rather common) usage of the term "Palestine". At the time Kook was in the habit of saying "Palestine Free State", which Begin thought left too much potential for bi-nationalism. Begin demanded that Kook instead publiclly refer to the future Jewish state as the "Free State of Eretz Israel". He also criticized Kook for keeping too high a profile, angrily reminding him that the Irgun was an underground organization and that he was supposed to be using his resources to help the revolt in Palestine, not organize parades and marches.
Begin's letter illustrated the deep tensions that existed between the formal Irgun leadership and its independent and influential activists in the United States. It also revealed the increasing ideological schism that emerged between the camps of Begin, who inherited the political and military infastructure of Jabotsinky, and Kook and his followers, who saw themselves as Jabotinsky's true ideological and political heirs. This tension would later come to a head when Kook and many of the Bergson Group members returned to Israel after its establishment in 1948.
[edit] Kook Returns to Israel
In 1947, the Bergson Group had purchased a ship originally intended to carry new immigrants to Israel, but, perhaps partially due to Begin's influence, was eventually used to ship arms. The ship was named Altalena, and would eventually be attacked and sunk by Palmach fighters after refusing to surrender to David Ben-Gurion. Following the Altalena Affair in 1948, Kook was arrested with four other senior Irgun commanders on Ben-Gurion's orders and held for over two months. Of the five, only Kook was a member of the Bergson Group. The five were eventually released following a series of public protests and appeals.
Kook served in the first Knesset as part of the Herut party list but quit the party with his close friends and fellow MKs Ari Jabotinsky and Shmuel Merlin after two years following ongoing disagreements with their colleagues, particularly Menachem Begin, over the party's leadership and direction. Kook, who had left Israel over ten years earlier, was now confronted with the reality that the country and movement he had fought for bore little resemblance to his ideals. Kook and his friends served as independent or "single" MKs for the remaining months of their terms, the first ever to do so. Profoundly disillusioned with the Israeli political process and future of the Revisionist movement, Kook left Israel in 1951 with his wife and daughter. In 1968, four years after his wife's death, he returned to Israel with his two daughters. He remarried in 1975 and lived near Tel Aviv until his death in 2001.
[edit] Philosophy
While Kook never re-entered politics, he continued to give interviews for many years, in which he continued to articulate his independent perspectives on Zionism, Jewish identity, and Israeli politics. His more controversial ideas included declaring that Jabotinsky's primary goal in creating a Jewish state was in making a country to which all Jews would want to belong, and that once Israel had been created, any Jews who refused to make aliyah had made a conscious choice to become "integrated" citizens of their naturalized countries. This distinction between Jews and Hebrews was another major sticking point between Kook and the larger Irgun leadership as early as the mid-1940s.
Kook had a specific body of critiques concerning what he saw as the distortion of Zionist philosophy and idealism by Israeli politics. He maintained that he had always conceived of Israel being a "Jewish state" by having a majority of Jewish citizens, not through specific associations to Jewish nationalism. Paradoxically, Kook's "theocratic" vision of Israel gave him a great deal of ideological flexibility in regards to some of Israel's more intractable problems. He supported according all non-Jewish citizens of Israel with full rights and privileges, and once, in an interview with an Israeli Druze, commented that, like Jabotinsky, he saw "no reason" why the State of Israel could not have a non-Jewish president. He was in favor of ammending the Law of Return to consider prospective immigrants on an individual, and not national or religious basis, except for cases of immediate danger.
Kook was also a strong supporter of Israel's constitution, which had been stalled during its writing in 1948 and never completed. Kook claimed that a formal constitution could have solved many ongoing issues in Israeli society, such as discrimination against Israeli Arabs, by providing all of Israel's citizens with a clearly defined, and egalitarian, role in Israeli nationalism. He once remarked that the lack of a constitution was "Israel's greatest tragedy", that Ben-Gurion's decision to change the Israeli governing body from a Constituent Assembly to a Parliament had been a putsch, and that he regretted not having resigned from the Knesset immediately after the decision had been made. Kook also favored the creation of a Palestinian state, albeit one established in modern-day Jordan. He was one of the first Israelis to call for a Palestinian state shortly after the Six-Day War. For the remainder of his life, Kook adamantly claimed that his positions would have been shared by his ideological father, Jabotinsky.
Kook repeatedly referred to himself as a post-Zionist, and was one of the first in Israeli society to voluntarily (and positively) adopt the term.
[edit] Legacy
Kook had been largely forgotten in the years leading up to his death, which was likely both the result of his decision to abandon his public activist persona, as well as his clashes with Begin and his loyalists, for whom it was convenient to downplay Kook's accomplishments and involvements in the Irgun and Herut Party's histories. Similarly, Kook's role in America has been given fairly minimal scholarly attention. Again, this must be seen as at least partially the result of Kook's iconoclastic personality, which made him few friends among the American Jewish establishment or its successors.
Since the late 1990s, some historians have attempted to restore Kook to a position of semi-prominence by re-examining and evaluating the significance and importance of his American activities during World War Two, and, in a secondary capacity, his role as a political opponent of Begin. One allegation Kook historians and supporters have made is that Kook's adversaries, both in Israel and America, have historically downplayed some of his accomplishments, as well as attempted to minimize their own role in curtailing his activities. David S. Wyman, author of a 2004 Kook biography, suggested that, had it not been for the interference of the American Jewish establishment, Kook might have become as successful (and noteworthy) a rescuer as Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. Some have also suggested that Kook's story remains politically troubling for authority figures in Israel and America, as it illustrates that their main priorities were not in promoting awareness of the Holocaust, in trying to stop it, or in helping the survivors flee Europe.
While Kook remains relatively unknown among the general Jewish and Israeli publics, his vocal and independent activism on behalf of the dying Jews of Europe has earned him a distinguished place in Jewish history during a period largely known for passivity and silence.
[edit] Quotes
We, the Hebrews, decedents of the ancient Hebrew nation, who remained alive on God's earth despite that great calamity that our people have experienced, have come together in the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. The Jews today who live in the European hell together with the Jews in the Land of Israel constitute the Hebrew nation—there isn't another nation to which they owe their allegiance but the Hebrew nation. We must state it clearly: the Jews in the United States do not belong to the Hebrew nation. These Jews are Americans of Hebrew decent.- From A Manifesto of the Hebrew Nation, 1944.
Why did we respond the way we did? The question should be, why didn't the others? We responded as a human and as a Jew should.- On his Holocaust activism, 1973.
I, who was the liaison officer of the Irgun central command with Jabotinsky, and who accompanied him almost daily for four years—remained loyal to his teachings. I also believe that the Land of Israel, on both banks of the Jordan River, is our historic homeland. But I am also certain that had Jabotinsky lived today, he would have argued that now, after we've achieved our independence, our mission is to attain peace in order to establish the Israeli people as the political heir of the Jewish people.- Interview in 1977.
There is no exile. The exile ended on May 14, 1948.- Interview in 1982.
[edit] Sources
- The Day the Rabbis Marched on Washington, from the American Jewish Historical Society
- The Day the Rabbis Marched On-line Exhibit, from the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
- Irgun in Exile
- Bergson Bio, from USHMM
- The "Bergson Boys", from America and the Holocaust, PBS.
- Hillel Kook Knesset Bio
- The Bergson Group, America, and the Holocaust: A Previously Unpublished Interview with Hillel Kook, by David S. Wyman, from American Jewish History 89:1 (2001)
- A Rebel with a Cause: Hillel Kook, Begin and Jabotinsky's Ideological Legacy, by Eran Kaplan, from Israel Studies 10.3 (2005)
- Jewish World Review op-ed
[edit] References
- Rapaport, Louis. Shake Heaven & Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe. Gefen Publishing House, Ltd., 1999. ISBN 965-229-182-X
- Medoff, Rafael. Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948. University of Alabama Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8173-1071-1
- Wyman, David S., Medoff, Rafael. A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust. New Press, 2004. ISBN 1-56584-856-X
- Baumel, Judith Tydor. Trans. Dena Ordan. The "Bergson Boys" And the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8156-3063-8
