If Jews do not help other Jews, then they cannot accuse other people of standing by passively, proclaimed Peter Bergson, the central figure of the new Simon Wiesenthal Center documentary, “Against the Tide.”
Bergson was the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, a Palestinian militant horrified by the world’s indifference to the emerging slaughter of European Jews during World War II. He came to New York in 1940 and tried — against all odds — to shake America and its Jewish community into some kind of rescue action.
He ultimately failed, perhaps inevitably, in his larger purpose, but the wonder is how a single, and single-minded, immigrant was able to reach the highest levels of the U.S. government to score some notable successes and rattle the conscience of the indifferent.
Curiously, there seems to be a kind of Bergson revival 65 years after the Holocaust, with a recent successful play about the man and a separate film in the works.
Is that because history is largely repeating itself, with small and large genocides in Africa and elsewhere raging all but unchecked?
Or, like Germans enshrining a few anti-Nazi resistance fighters, do American Jews want to prove that there were at least a few who stood not idly by while their European brethren were slaughtered?
Director Richard Trank of Moriah Films has assembled some remarkable footage of the era, in particular a never-before-seen 1978 interview by filmmaker Claude Lanzmann of Bergson, reflecting on the war years, with Dustin Hoffman as narrator.
But the chief merit of “Against the Tide” is to put Bergson into the historical and emotional context of his time.
These days, when half a dozen defense agencies are ready to protest any slight against Jews, it may be difficult to grasp how timid and insecure the American Jewish community and its leadership were in the 1930s and ’40s.
Instead of “Never again,” the prevalent motto was “Don’t make waves,” and the attitude was reflected by such leaders as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, whose overriding concern was not to offend his great patron, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
FDR, in turn, argued that nothing should detract from the goal of defeating the Axis powers, even rejecting Churchill’s (and Bergson’s) pleas to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz.
The were two main exceptions to the prevalent silence. One was the Vaad Hatzala, a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who protested en masse in front of the White House.
The other was a diverse and influential cadre of Jewish and non-Jewish Bergson supporters, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Will Rogers Jr. and such actors as Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni.
With their help, Bergson staged some mighty spectaculars, such as “We Will Never Die,” at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, their message and emotions grabbing the throat even now. The villains of the piece are Breckinridge Long and fellow U.S. State Department officials, who worked assiduously to delay or sabotage what few rescue attempts were undertaken.
As a sign of how times have changed, distribution of “Against the Tide” owes much of its present coordination and financing to the State Department’s Office of Holocaust Issues.
Credits for the film go to multiple Oscar winners Trank and Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Wiesenthal Center, as producers. Trank wrote the screenplay, based on original material by himself and Hier.
Initial public screenings of “Against the Tide” will be April 15 at the Museum of Tolerance. For tickets, $6 for museum members, $9 for nonmembers, call (310) 772-2452 or (310) 772-2505.
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