Why would Satmar idolize, Ben Hecht, known for his marital infidelities
and who was characterized as an "un-Jewish-Jew " by the historian Julien Gorbach.?
Hecht wrote a novel in 1931, called "A Jew in Love" that reveal his conflicted relationship with Jewish identity and assimilation.
His portrayal of a Jew in this novel was so grotesque that critics called the main character " the caricature of an antisemite come to life."
Jews were outraged and Rabbis in Cleveland declared they would never allow Hecht to be buried in their city.
So how did Hecht turn around and become a Zionist militant?
Hecht looked around in 1939 and was horrified to see Jews around the world under siege (sound familiar?) and most American Jews seemingly hesitant to respond.
Many had "discarded their Jewishness out of the belief that as Jews they could line up only for a snubbing" (Hecht in a letter)
Hecht became an active Zionist after meeting Peter Bergson, who came to the United States with Jabotinsky near the start of World War II!
Peter Bergson's real name was Hillel Kook a nephew of the great Harav Avraham Yitzchok Kook z"L , and was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician
Kook led the Irgun's efforts in the United States during World War II and the Holocaust in order to promote Zionism, attempting thereby to save the abandoned Jews of Europe. His rescue group's activism was a factor leading to President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishing the War Refugee Board, which rescued as many as 200,000 European Jews, partly via the Wallenberg mission.
One of the Committee's more memorable activities was a protest in Washington, D.C. that Kook organized, which took place on October 6, 1943—three days before Yom Kippur. Known as the Rabbis' march, the event involved solely Orthodox rabbis, who were intent on pleading for the lives of the European Jews before the US government
.
In 1947, Hecht, shocked and outraged newspaper readers across the world with a full-paged ad supporting terrorist attacks against Great Britian.
So even though he was characterized and epitomized as the assimilated "Un-Jewish Jew" he turned into a Jewish Jew in 1939,
He later wrote:
"The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, brought my Jewishness to the surface"
From 1939 on, British land, sea, and air forces had shut Europe's Jews out of Palestine, effectively clamping Adolf Hitler's trap shut during the war years and in the aftermath, leaving survivors to languish as "displaced persons" in the liberated concentration camps.
Hecht and the Irgun Tzvi Leumi, the militant faction of Zionist fighters that he championed, believed a guerrilla war was the best way to finally smash the blockade, open the gates to mass immigration by Holocaust survivors, and thus clear a path to Jewish statehood.
Hecht's "Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine" which appeared in more than a dozen newspapers, explained that American support for the Irgun had not be forthcoming because rich and influential American Jews were opposed to the attacks.
But speaking for the common person and swearing "on my word as an old reporter," Hecht declared,
"Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts."
The letter, as you can imagine, set off a storm of fury that roiled in the international press for months, exposing a deep schism within both Jewish and American Life.
What has all this to do with Satmar??
Everything!!
Having mentioned that Hecht was a "Revisionist Zionist" it is important to mention that they loathed and hated the Zionist Mapai Party that Ben Gurion headed. This is not the time to go into the entire history, suffice it to say that there was no lost love between them. The Revisionist Zionist Party subsequently became the Likkud Party headed by none other than Menachem Begin!
Rudolf Kastner!
In August 1952, Malchiel Gruenwald (1882–1968), a hotelier who lost 52 relatives in the Auschwitz concentration camp, accused Rudolf Kastner (1906–1957),
who became a civil servant in Israel in 1947, of collaborating with the Nazis in Hungary during the Holocaust.
The allegations were made in a self-published newsletter, Letter to Friends in the Mizrachi!
Since Kastner was a member of the Mapai headed by Ben Gurion, the Israeli government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kastner's behalf.
Gruenwald was represented by Shmuel Tamir (1923–1987), a former Irgun commander, who turned the case into one that examined the actions of the governing Zionist Mapai party during the Holocaust, and what had been done to help Europe's Jews.[
One of the key issues was whether Kastner, who in Hungary had helped to found the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, had in effect collaborated with Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) and Kurt Becher (1909–1995), two SS officers, in his efforts to secure safe passage from Budapest to Switzerland in July 1944 of 1,684 Jews, on what became known as the Kastner train.
I am not going to go into whether Kastner was in fact evil or a saint; many historians
have already debated both sides of the Issue!
I am focusing on why Satmar would not only idolize a staunch Zionist
but someone who advocated publicly to terrorize the British? And in fact many have said , that as a result of his actions, Ben Hecht was a
contributing factor for the eventual founding of the Zionist State!
Ben Hecht attended the Kastner trial as a journalist and wanting to overthrow the Mapai, wrote a book called "Perfidy"
The book is based on transcripts from the trial and concludes that in 1944 Rudolf Kastner deliberately withheld from the Jews in Hungary knowledge that the trains the Nazis were putting them on were taking them to death by the gas chamber, not to a fictitious resettlement city as the Nazis claimed and that Kastner then lied about it under oath.
Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University says, "It is an amazing piece of writing, it's very passionate. But It's not historical ... The problem is lots of the information in it is fundamentally wrong!"
She mentions Hecht's involvement with the Bergson boys and says,
"much of what he's writing is Kastner as a foil for attacking Ben Gurion, for attacking the Labor Party, and he makes claims in there about the Labor Party, about Ben Gurion, not caring about what was going on in Europe, which is, again, historians now show, has simply not stood the test of time."
This book "Perfidy" is the most esteemed book in the Satmar community and is the third holiest book after the VaYoel Moshe and Al Hagila!
Why??
Because Satmar in its Revisionist History wants to erase the fact that the Satmar Rebbe was in fact saved by this very Kastner!
Just this week we showed that even a Flatbush Newspaper fell into the Satmar Fake News trap and printed an outrageous lie that the Rebbe was "rescued as a result of the negotiations of Rav Michael Ber Weissmandl with Adolf Eichmann!"
Conclusion
Satmar would rather idolize Ben Hecht, though a stanch Militant Zionist, as long as that makes Kastner a Rasha, and they reason, people will say that "it cannot be that a Zionist Rasha rescued the rebbe!"
And so they dragged Rav Michael Ber Weissmandel z"l out of his resting grave to lend credence to their unmitigated fabrication that Kastner had nothing to do with the rescue of the rebbe!
The facts will be facts and will stand the test of time that Rudolf Kastner the Zionist rescued the Satmar Rebbe from the Holocaust by giving him a precious seat on the famous Kastner Train!
My mother a"h had a great Yiddish expression:
"When you need the thief, cut him off the gallows!"
The RBS"O who has a sense of humor, runs this world in mysterious ways!
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