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The Nazis Who Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

(Tablet) Larry S. Price - When war broke out on Sept. 1, 1939, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, was staying in Otwock, outside of Warsaw, where he'd established a Chabad yeshiva. He went into hiding in Warsaw. In America, Chabad was a relatively insignificant Hasidic movement. But Rabbi Israel Jacobson, in charge of a small Chabad synagogue in Brooklyn, contacted a few others in his congregation to mount a campaign to save the Rebbe, hiring Washington lobbyist Max Rhoade to advocate their cause. Rhoade contacted congressmen, senators, government officials, presidential advisers, and even Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Saving the Rebbe became a major Jewish struggle. U.S. diplomat Robert Pell had attended the Evian conference on refugees in France in 1938 and had made friends with the German diplomat Helmut Wohlthat. Pell then contacted U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, saying: "Last winter...Wohlthat had assured me that if there was any specific case in which American Jewry was particularly interested, he would do what he could to facilitate a solution." According to Menachem Friedman of Bar-Ilan University, "His (Wohlthat's) interest was to maintain good relations with the Americans. And the price that had to be paid for these good relations was this Rabbi from Poland. And that wasn't a high price." According to Winfried Meyer of the Berlin Technical University, "Wohlthat contacted Admiral Wilhelm Canaris," head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris asked Major Ernst Bloch to find Rabbi Schneersohn in Warsaw. Bloch eventually made contact with the Rebbe and put him and his family and entourage of 18 on a train to Berlin. Once in Berlin, Bloch arranged for visas and escorted them to the Latvian border. The group continued to Riga and waited there for visas to the U.S. Adm. Canaris was executed by the Nazi regime before the end of the war. Major Ernst Bloch was ousted from the Abwehr after a failed attempt on Hitler's life that Bloch had no part in. He was killed during the fighting in Berlin against the Allies.
2019-07-19 00:00:00
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