יהודים רפורמים בארה"ב עם טליתות וכיפות מפגינים נגד ישראל

תוקן על ידי רעיונוביץ ב- 20/10/2023 00:24:34

Wise's insistence on working closely with his government contacts, and his caution in accepting and publicizing the early reports of the Holocaust earned him vocal detractors both during his lifetime, and also in historical re-examination of his legacy.

Holocaust scholar David Kranzler, an expert in wartime rescue efforts, wrote in 2002 that Wise had a "penchant for protecting his close fri and confidant US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) regardless of the cost to the Jews of Europe." Kranzler accuses Wise of failing to recognize the existential threat to European Jewry prior to American entry into World War II, dismissing early reports of the Final Solution as propaganda, and obstructing rescue efforts.^[26]

Kranzler argues that Wise did not voluntarily publicize the Holocaust after the Riegner cable, but rather that he was pressured into going public by the American Orthodox Jewish community, who confronted him after receiving what is known as the Sternbuch Report on September 2, 1942. The Sternbuch Report included intelligence about the Holocaust the Polish underground, and had been passed to Orthodox leaders in New York through Swiss Jewish intermediaries using the Polish diplomatic pouch as a secret pipeline for their rescue efforts. Despite this information, Kranzler writes, Wise still declined to publicize these reports until after the U.S. State Department had formally confirmed their accuracy, almost three months later. And even after Sumner Welles gave Wise confirmation, says Kranzler, Wise insisted that he and he alone knew best how to address the crisis. "Every time a unified committee for rescue was organized which was not entirely under Wise's control," Kranzler writes, "he would force the committee to dissolve."^[27]

This impression was shared in the 1940s by screenwriter and Jewish activist Ben Hecht, who had been recruited to the inner circle of the Zionist movement known as the Bergson Group. This was a committee led by Palestinian Zionist Hillel Kook, who in his interactions with Americans favored the less alien-sounding alias Peter Bergson. Bergson and his team were members of the Irgun, a radical faction of Zionists who favored direct action over slow diplomatic negotiation. Bergson's original mission in the U.S. was to seek American help in creating an armed Jewish force to fight in the war. In 1942, after Bergson read the news stories of Stephen Wise's November 24 press conference, he pivoted into a full-bore fight to combat the slaughter of European Jews.^[28]

But the Bergson Group's stance on European Jewry was diametrically opposed to Wise's: they believed that it was imperative to loudly broad the facts of the Holocaust in hopes of saving as many Jews as possible the Nazi onslaught. Most American Jewish institutions sided with Wise. Both Bergson and Wise were jockeying for influence over U.S. policy.

As part of his collaboration with Bergson, Hecht d a giant pageant publicizing the Holocaust called We Will Never Die which debuted at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1943.^[29] Hecht recruited show-business fris like Kurt Weill and Moss Hart to write and stage his pageant, and to raise public awareness of the Nazis' mass murder of Jews as stridently as possible. As plans for the show accelerated, Hecht wrote, he was abruptly contacted by Wise:

Wise was successful in preventing some performances, but not the national broad, of We Will Never Die.^[31]

In the 2002 book A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, David Wyman and Rafael Medoff argue that Wise hindered the Holocaust rescue attempts of the Bergson Group and others.^[32]

Historian Saul Friedländer said that Wise prevented the shipment of food packages American Jews to German-occupied Poland for fear that the Allies would interpret the aid as being sent to the enemy. Friedländer writes: