Bergson Boys

Hillel Kook ( he, הלל קוק, 24 July 1915 –18 August 2001), also known as Peter Bergson (Hebrew: פיטר ברגסון), was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.

Kook led the Irgun's efforts in the United States during World War II to promote Zionism and mainly to save the abandoned Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. His rescue group's activism was the main factor leading to President Roosevelt establishing the US War Refugee Board, which protected and rescued tens of thousands and possibly many more, partly via the Wallenberg mission. He later served in Israel's first Knesset.

Biography

Hillel Kook was born in Kriukai in the Russian Empire (today in Lithuania) in 1915, the son of Rabbi Dov Kook, the younger brother of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine. 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 attended his uncle's Religious Zionist yeshiva, Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem. He also attended classes in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, where he became a member of ''Sohba'' ("Comradeship"), a group of students who would later become prominent in the Revisionist movement, including David Raziel and Avraham Stern.

Military career

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, and fought with them in Palestine through most of the 1930s. He served as a post commander in 1936, and eventually became a member of the Irgun General Staff.

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 Ari. At the founders' request, Kook traveled to the United States with Jabotinsky in 1940, where he soon served as the head of the Irgun and revisionist mission in America, following the elder's death in August. This assignment was clandestine, and Kook publicly denied he was affiliated with the Irgun many times while in America.

Activism in America

While in America, Kook led a group of Irgun activists under the pseudonym "Peter Bergson." 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, such as "Jews Fight for the Right to Fight", published in ''The New York Times'' in 1942, and "For Sale to Humanity 70,000 Jews, Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece", in response to an offer by Romania to send their Jews to safety if the travel expenses would be provided. On March 9, 1943, the Group produced a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden written by Ben Hecht, titled "We Will Never Die", memorializing the 2,000,000 European Jews who had already been murdered. Forty thousand people saw the pageant that first night, and it went on to play in five other major cities including Washington, D.C., where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court Justices, and some 300 senators and congressmen watched it.

In 1943, Kook established the 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. United States immigration laws at the time limited immigration to only 2% of the number of each nationality present in the United States since the census of 1890, which limited Jews from Austria and Germany to 27,370 and from Poland to 6,542; even these quotas often went unfilled, due to United States State Department pressure on US consulates to place as many obstacles as possible in the path of refugees.

The proposal to admit more refugees was ratified by the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and, in response to the pressure by the Bergson Group as well as Jewish Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr and his team, President Roosevelt subsequently issued an administrative order in January 1944 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. Those rescued through the WRB were probably mostly in Hungary, in part through the Raoul Wallenberg mission which was sponsored by the WRB.

Some of the members of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe were: Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson) and Alex Hadani Rafaeli, Alex Wilf, Arieh Ben-Eliezer, Arthur Szyk, Ben Hecht, Rabbi Ben Rabinowitz (Robbins), Eri Jabotinsky, Esther Untermeyer, Gabe Wechsler, Senator Guy Gillette, Harry Selden, Johan Smertenko, Konrad Bercovici, M. Berchin, Samuel Merlin, Sigrid Undset, Stella Adler

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