120 Israeli Leaders Urge Yad Vashem to Recognize Bergson Group
The petition was organized by the Washington,D.C.-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
The Bergson Group was a maverick political action committee in the United States in the 1940s that used rallies and newspaper ads to pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from Hitler. Its efforts played a key role in facilitating the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews during 1944-1945.
The signatories on the petition included former Supreme Court chief justice Meir Shamgar and fellow-justice Mishael Cheshin; political leaders from the left such as Meretz Party leader Yossi Beilin and former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, as well as political leaders from the right such former Defense Minister Moshe Arens and former Justice Minister Dan Meridor; leading novelists and playwrights, among them A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Yehoshua Sobol; and senior historians such as Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Friedlander and Mordecai Paldiel, former head of Yad Vashem 's Department of the Righteous.
[For a complete list of the signatories, please contact the Wyman Institute.]
A delegation led by Prof. David S. Wyman and Dr. Rebecca Kook, the daughter of Bergson Group leader Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) delivered the petition to Yad Vashem. Prof. Wyman and Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff are visiting Israel this week to speak at a conference about the Bergson Group, in Tel Aviv.
The delegation also met with Dr. Dan Michman, chief historian of Yad Vashem, to discuss the importance of adding the Bergson Group to Yad Vashem's exhibit. Michman told them that "as a matter of principle, Yad Vashem will never change any of its exhibits."
The delegation expressed surprise and disappointment at Yad Vashem's stance, especially in view of the fact that last year, in a response to a petition by the Wyman Institute, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., agreed to add material about the Bergson Group to its permanent exhibit. The Wyman Institute's request to the museum was endorsed former Members of Congress, prominent historians, and Jewish leaders such as Elie Wiesel. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose father, Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., was a supporter of the Bergson Group, also spoke out about the Bergson Group's achievements.
“This is a truly bipartisan cause,” said Dr. Rebecca Kook, who teaches political science at Ben Gurion University and worked with the Wyman Institute in organizing the petition. “Israeli political and cultural leaders from right to left recognize that the omission of the Bergson Group from Yad Vashem is a terrible injustice which must be rectified.”
Prof. Wyman and Dr. Kook noted that the issue of recognizing the Bergson Group should be of particular interest to Americans, since the group's protests played a central role in pressuring the Roosevelt administration to belatedly create the War Refugee Board in 1944. During the last fifteen months of World War Two, the War Refugee Board helped bring about the rescue of more than 200,000 Jewish refugees. It was the Board which sent Raoul Wallenberg to Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944 and financed his rescue campaign. (Wallenberg is only one of two non-Americans to ever be granted honorary U.S. citizenship (the other was Winston Churchill). "This crucial chapter in the history of the Holocaust and America's response to the Holocaust will be recognized in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; it should be recognized in Yad Vashem as well, " Dr. Kook said.