Dr. Isaac Lewin has been active throughout his life in two distinct areas of human endeavor. He is a scholar, a distinguished historian of Polish Jewry and has played a prominent role in Jewish public affairs.
In this he has followed in the footsteps of his famous father, the late Rabbi Aaron Lewin, who was both a great rabbinic authority and an outstanding communal leader. Rabbi Aaron Lewin was one of the leading personalities of Agudat Israel and was a member of the Polish Sejm.
Mentioning the late Rabbi Aaron Lewin, I cannot help recalling his visit to London early in 1939 as a member of a Polish Jewish delegation which sought to explain to British statesmen the precarious position of Polish Jewry.
Rabbi Lewin was enthusiastically received at a special Melaveh Malkah in North London where he was welcomed and introduced by Rabbi Abraham Twersky who was then the editor of the Vochenzeitung, London’s Agudist weekly.
Rabbi Lewin not only addressed the gathering, but delighted the audience by singing solo Zemirot.
In his communal activities, Dr. Isaac Lewin has been — as was his father — associated with Agudat Israel.
In the years prior to World War II, he was a member of the Lodz city council. Fleeing occupied Poland, he arrived in the U.S. in the spring of 1941. Here he was active in rescue efforts. Since 1948 he has served as a non-government representative at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.
In addition to teaching history at Yeshiva University and serving Agudat Israel in a variety of capacities, Dr. Lewin has been the director of the New York based Research Institute for Religious Jewry whose publications include the seven volumes of Eleh Ezkerah which contains the biographies of hundreds of rabbis and religious writers and communal leaders killed by the Germans.
Dr Lewin authored books in Hebrew, Yiddish, English and Polish, among them studies in the history of the Jews of Poland, collections of addresses before public bodies and essays about events and personalities.
His latest book, “In Defense of Human Rights” includes documents and correspondence relating to his rescue efforts during World War II, in which he was helped by the Polish diplomatic missions in Europe and in the United States. The volume also features speeches by Dr. Lewin at various forums, reflecting his endeavors to protect fundamental civil liberties, especially the rights of Jews.
In the first section of the book, which covers the pre-war years, we find six speeches Dr. Lewin delivered in the Lodz City Council in 1937.
Reproduced are not only the speeches, but the continuous interruptions and interjections by anti-Semitic councilors.
“Jew, descend from the rostrum!”
“Jews, your days are numbered in Poland.”
Jew, don’t speak anymore, because if you do not stop. we will throw you down from the rostrum.”
These were some of the offensive remarks hurled at the speaker.
It was indeed, no pleasure to be a city councilor in anti-Semitic Poland. In order to be able to cross swords with anti-Semitic thugs one needed — in addition to other qualifications — a great deal of courage. When during a speech demanding that the Lodz city council pay for the education of orphaned Jews who were murdered by Anti-Semites, Dr. Lewin apprised the council of the killing of one more Jew in the streets of the city, two councilors interrupted him, glorifying the murder. “So what? Only one! Bravo, bravo!” one councilor declared. “Only one soul of a dog. I am ready to kill hundreds of you in one hour,” exclaimed the other.
Dr. Lewin states in a note that the District Attorney of Lodz logged a complaint against the councilors. The stenographers testified that the councilors had indeed, glorified the murder. The Judge then asked the accused whether they could state “under their word of honor” that they had not said what was imputed to them. They gave their word of honor and the judge dismissed the charge. The case was brought to the Court of Appeals which annulled the decision of the district court. The two councilors were sentenced to six months in prison and suspended for three years. They never served any time because of the outbreak of World War II.
To be continued
The Jewish Press, Dec. 3, 1993
Conclusion
The second section of the volume, entitled “During World War II” tells of rescue activities and aid to refugees. The accounts are based, in great part on the records of the organizations, with which Dr. Lewin had been associated. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States, and Canada, World Agudat Israel and the two relief committees which existed in the war years, “Vaad Hatzala” in New York and Hijefs in Zurich. (Hijefs is an abbreviation of Hilfsverein fuer juedische Fluechtlinge in Shanghai. Originally formed in 1941 to aid the Polish and Lithuanian Yeshiva students who had arrived in Shanghai via Moscow and Siberia, the organization later extended its activities and worked for the rescue of Jews from the Germans.) Hijfes which was the counterpart of the New York based “Vaad Hatzalah” was headed by Isaac and Recha Sternbuch.
Space permits me to mention only a few of the rescue attempts and activities describe and documented by Dr. Lewin.
In September 1942, Isaac Sternbuch sent a message, via Polish diplomatic channels, to Jacob Rosenheim, president of the World Aguda, in New York, informing him of the destruction of Warsaw Jewry. The cable, which was transmitted b the Polish Consul General in New York to Dr. Lewin, was the first authentic document about the extermination of the Jews of Warsaw to reach the United States. It shocked American Jews into an awareness of the magnitude of the Jewish tragedy in Europe.
In June 1944 a message was received in New York from Baron Freudiger, a leader of Hungary’s Orthodox Jews, describing the despair of Hungarian Jewry. In a follow up cable, Isaac Sternbuch reported that 15000 Jews were being deported daily and demanded that the British and American authorities be requested to bomb the railway junctions at Kosice and Presov, through which the trains to Auschwitz passed. Sternbuch himself had presented this request to the British and U.S.A. legations in Bern, but to no avail.
“Unfortunately, our efforts in Washington and London were no more effective,” Dr. Lewin writes. “Despite immediate interventions at the Department of State and the Foreign Office, the bombing of the railroad junctions did not take place.”
Dr. Lewin devotes many pages to a detailed account of Dr. Musy’s negotiations with Himmler. during the last eight months of the war, for the release of Jews from concentration camps. Dr. Jean Marie Musy a former President of the Swiss Confederacy, was recruited for this mission by the Sternbuch’s committee. As a result of the negotiations, a transport of 1200 Jews from Terezin arrived in Switzerland (February 1945), thousands of women were rescued from Ravensbruck and taken to Sweden, and a number of individual Jews, whose release was specially requested by Musy were free from concentration camps and brought by him to Switzerland, when he returned there from his second meeting with Himmler.
The third section of the book, features Dr. Lewin’s testimonies before a committee of the U.S. Senate regarding the Jewish method of slaughtering animals. He appeared before the agricultural and Forestry Committee of the U.S. Senate in behalf of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis as well as in behalf of other Jewish organizations. It was primarily due to Dr. Lewin’s brilliant defense of Shehita, that Public Law no. 85-765 (establishing the use of humane methods of slaughter of livestock) adopted by the U.S. Congress on August 27, 1958, not only accepted the Jewish method of animal slaughter as humane but also stated specifically that “in order to protect freedom of religion– ritual laughter and the handling of other preparation of livestock for ritual slaughter, are exempted from the terms of this Act.”
The fourth and last section of the book contains Dr. Lewin’s addresses in various committees of the U.N.
In June 1949, addressing the UN Commission on Human Rights, which discussed the Covenant on Human Rights, Dr. Lewin proposed inter alia the inclusion of the following paragraph: “Children whose parents were killed during a war or other catastrophe shall be brought up in the religion of their parents.”
Declaring that history has taught us that such a provision was necessary, Dr. Lewin reminded the Commission that during the Holocaust many thousands of Jewish children were taken into Christian homes and institutions. In many instances these children were not returned to the Jewish people after the war.
Less than a year later, again addressing the Commission on Human Rights, Dr. Lewin asked for the option of measures which would enable Jewish communities in various countries to search for and locate children of Jewish extraction who, on account of the war, had become estranged from their religion.
Dr. Lewin has spoken up on many occasions in UN committees in behalf of civil liberties and especially the rights of Jews. We cannot enumerate them here, but we must mention that the “Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination based on religion or belief,” adopted by the General Assembly in 1981, grew out from a study on discrimination in the area of religious rights and practices, which was undertaken by the UN at Dr. Lewin’s request. He was awarded for this the Medal of Peace of the U.N.
The Jewish Press, Friday, December 10, 1993