Rabbi Meyer Bar-Ilan (1880-1949), the Jerusalem-based leader of the Religious Zionist movement, visited the United States in 1943 and took part in important meetings with government officials and American Jewish leaders.
Bar-Ilan’s three-day mission to Washington in February of that year illuminated the difficulties of trying to influence U.S. policy on refugees and Palestine. He found Senator Alben Barkley (D-Kentucky), the Senate Majority Leader “quite unfamiliar” the plight of Europe’s Jews and the Jewish claim to Palestine.
Rabbi Bar-Ilan (then known by his original family name, Berlin) told Senator Robert Wagner (D-New York) that “if horses were being slaughtered as are the Jews of Poland, there would by now be a loud demand for organized action against such cruelty to animals. Somehow, when it concerns Jews, everybody remains silent, including the intellectuals and humanitarians of free and enlightened America.” [See below!!]
Nonetheless, Wagner was “lukewarm” on matters of Jewish concern, insisted he had “no influence” regarding the British White Paper that closed Palestine to most Jewish refugees, and tried to change the subject to the status of Jews in the Soviet Union, whom he claimed were “well situated.”
The “most disappointing” of the rabbi’s meetings was with Vice President Henry Wallace. The vice president disagreed with Bar-Ilan’s statement that Europe’s Jews were “threatened with total extinction.” He declined to endorse Jewish statehood, on the grounds that some American Jews were themselves against Zionism. In his diary, Wallace accused Bar-Ilan of having “a very poor sense of time and place.” [Saving the Jews from extinction is considered bad timing!!!!]
Bar-Ilan appeared to have better luck with the one Republican congressman he met, House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, of Massachusetts. Martin promised to “do whatever possible” to facilitate a congressional resolution about European Jewry, and would “try to do his very best” to press the British on Palestine. He did not, however, take a leading role in subsequent congressional initiatives on those issues.
During his stay in the United States, Rabbi Bar-Ilan took part in a number of meetings of two major Jewish coalition groups, the Joint Emergency Committee for European Jewish Affairs and the Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs. There he repeatedly pressed for greater activism by the Jewish leadership. In one meeting, he “complained bitterly about the indifference, inadequate action and lack of feeling [about European Jewry] on the part of American Jews compared with the Palestine Jews,” according to the minutes of the session. At another meeting, he pressed for a concerted public campaign against the White Paper. “He pointed out” –perhaps having in mind his experiences in Washington– “that many people in political life here were ignorant of the significance of the White Paper and that plans should be made to provide the necessary information.” He also urged that the issue “be brought the attention of the President.”
After returning to British Mandatory Palestine in early 1944, Rabbi Bar-ilan held a press conference in which he criticized the established Jewish organization and praised the Bergson Group for organizing rallies for rescue, mobilizing 400 rabbis to march to the White House, and placing ads in U.S. newspapers about the plight of European Jewry. He said the Bergsonites had done much to “awaken the conscience of the American people.”
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Speaking of saving horses:
Soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment took part in a Czech ceremony this week commemorating Operation Cowboy, a mission Gen. George Patton entrusted to the same unit in the closing days of World War II.
The cavalry unit’s orders were simple: the general, a famous horse enthusiast, directed the soldiers to save a group of purebred horses from slaughter.
The soldiers were successful, saving the horses — the Lipizzaner Stallions, one of Europe’s oldest breeds — and freeing over 150 allied prisoners while liberating the Czech towns of Bela and Hostoun. The two towns have put on a celebration to honor the American troops for more than 10 years, after dedicating a memorial for two U.S. soldiers who died in the fighting.
“The entire experience was absolutely humbling,” said Capt. Dallas Wiggins, a troop commander with the regiment who took part in the events this week marking the 74th anniversary of the operation. “To fall into this [unit’s] legacy and represent those few that changed the culture of these towns is truly remarkable.”
Wiggins spoke at ceremonies in the town squares of both Hostoun and Bela, where soldiers from the regiment marched in a color guard and presented wreaths. Troops also showed off the regiment’s Stryker armored vehicles to local children.
Civilians dressed in WWII-period uniforms also took part in the events, and Libor Picka, Bela’s mayor, wore the cavalry’s signature Stetson while speaking at the site of the stone memorial honoring Pfc. Raymond E. Manz and Technician 5th Grade Owen W. Sutton, the two members of Alpha Troop, 42nd Cavalry Squadron, who were killed during Operation Cowboy.
After the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the American operation that liberated the horses and the towns eventually faded from memory until recent decades.
The mission had sprung from concerns that the Lipizzaner lineage would be lost. The Third Reich had seized nearly all the horses of the breed, several hundred, from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and brought them to a stud farm outside Hostoun as part of a livestock breeding program.
But in April 1945, the farm was directly in the path of the advancing Red Army, which was on a collision course with remaining brigades of the SS, an elite and fanatical Nazi unit. A German prisoner of war told 2nd Cavalry’s Col. Charles Reed about the horses, who some caretakers were worried the hungry and tired Soviet troops might kill for food.
Reed telegraphed his boss, Patton, who had competed in an equestrian event in the 1912 Olympics, asking permission to save the stallions. Patton ordered them to do it quickly.
The capture of Hostoun on April 28, 1945, “resembled a fiesta,” Reed wrote in his report on the operation, listing 300 Lipizzaner horses rescued along with more than 100 of the best Arabian horses in Europe, about 200 thoroughbred racehorses and 600 Cossack breeding horses.
Still, there weren’t enough U.S. troops to ride and drive the horses some 25 miles back to U.S. lines. Then a group of White Russian Cossacks fleeing with their horses from the Soviets offered to help. They left their horses behind, which did end up as food for the Red Army.
The Lipizzaners were returned to Vienna and many of the other rescued horses were sent to Fort Riley, Kan.
“We had seen so many horrors in the previous months that we had to do something wonderful,” Reed would say of the decision to undertake the rescue.
Horses hold a special place of significance for the regiment, which began as a horseback-riding dragoon unit in the early 19th century, Wiggins said. The regiment’s soldiers are still called dragoons today.
“For the Dragoons, 2CAV, we are mounted infantrymen. If it was [on] a horse, an armored car or a Stryker, we will close with and destroy the enemy,” Wiggins said. “Ultimately, horse riding is our cavalry heritage. It’s a (cavalry) thing.”
