Who was Peter Bergson?
The anniversary of Hillel Kook’s death was this week. A Jewish Walter Mitty and a colorful, complex, dual personality also known as Peter Bergson.
Jeremy Rosen
He was born in Lithuania in 1915. The son of Rabbi Dov Kook, the younger brother of the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook. In 1924, his family moved to Palestine where his father became the first Chief Rabbi of Afula. Hillel Kook attended Merkaz Harav Kook his uncle’s Religious Zionist yeshiva and the Hebrew University.
Kook joined the pre-state Haganah militia set up to defend the Jewish community in 1930 after widespread Arab Riots and massacres. But he became disillusioned with the socialism and the political machinations of the Ben Gurion clique. In 1931, Kook helped found the Irgun as a group of militant dissidents and fought with them in Palestine through most of the 1930s.
In 1937, Kook began his career as an international spokesperson for the Irgun. He first went to Poland where he was involved in fundraising and establishing Irgun cells in Eastern Europe. The founder of the Revisionistmovement Zeev Jabotinsky, then sent him to the USA where he adopted an international persona and the name Peter Bergson. There he led the Irgun’s efforts to promote his version of Zionism and warn of the impending catastrophe in Europe.
He gathered around his magnetic personality a group of personalities called the Bergsonites. Amongst them the highly successful Hollywood screen writer Ben Hecht and the artist Arthur Szyk.
His rescue group’s activism was the main factor leading to President Roosevelt establishing the War Refugee Board, which protected and rescued tens of thousands and possibly many more, partly via the Wallenberg mission despite the American refusal to take in Jews fleeing Nazism.
As information about the Holocaust began to reach the United States, Bergson became more involved in trying to raise awareness about the fate of the Jews in Europe. This included putting full-page advertisements in leading newspapers, such as “Jews Fight for the Right to Fight”, published in the NYT 1942, and “For Sale to Humanity 70,000 Jews, Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece”, in response to an offer by Romania to send their Jews to safety if the travel expenses would be provided.
On March 9, 1943, the Group produced a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden written by Ben Hecht,”We Will Never Die“, memorializing the 2,000,000 European Jews who had already been murdered. Forty thousand people saw the pageant that first night, and it went on to play in five other major cities including were First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt six Supreme Court Justices, and some 300 senators and congressmen watched it. Their efforts were stymied by antisemitic bureaucrats and politicians. As were attempts to change very restrictive immigration policies. But working undercover and with support from individuals such as Raoul Wallenberg, the Bergson efforts helped thousands escape,
One of the Committee’s more memorable activities was a protest Kook organized known as the Rabbis March of hundreds of Orthodox rabbis pleading for the lives of their people. It took place in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kipur. They were met by a number of prominent members of Congress but not by the President who refused to meet them. The Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise ( who had the ear of the President) dismissed them as a group of Orthodox rabbis who didn’t represent anyone.
Bergson and his followers were opposed both by American Zionist and progressive Jewish organizations. They tried everything to undermine him, even getting the IRS to examine his books, but they found no irregularity.
Bergson returned to Palestine to fight for Independence. In 1947, the Bergson Group now focused on opposing the British Mandate and smuggling arms to the Irgun. Later he purchased a ship originally intended to carry new immigrants to Palestine but was eventually used to ship arms. The ship was named the Altalena and was sunk in a violent confrontation between the newly formed Israel Defence Forces and the Irgun. By then he had reverted to Kook and was arrested with four other senior Irgun commanders and held for months before being released.
With Independence in 1948, he served in the First Knesset as part of Herut, but soon left the party with his close friend and fellow Herut Member of the Knesset Ari Jabotinsky. Disillusioned with the Israeli political process and the future of the Revisionist movement, Kook left Israel in 1951. In 1968, four years after his wife’s death, he returned to Israel with his two daughters. He remarried in 1975 and died in 2001.
Kook was a strong supporter of the need for a constitution, which had been stalled during its writing in 1948 and never completed. He claimed that the lack of a constitution was “Israel’s greatest tragedy .” And as with all Revisionists, he was sidelined and ignored by the Ben Gurion government until Menahem Begin became prime Minister in 1977.
Kook has been disparaged both by the left and the right, the religious and the secular. His dreams for Israel as a Jewish homeland were not Messianic. He was an idealist and a realist. He would not have been surprised at the state of Israeli politics today or the profound divisions in the country. He was as disillusioned by politics then, as I fear are many of us today, both with the right and the left. But he reminds us of the important contribution to the cause of a Jewish homeland by individual initiatives and mavericks.
Wherever we look we see how well-intentioned political movements can lose their inspiration and integrity, and decline. As the vice tightens around Israel, I think many of us are hoping that some new idealists with fresh ideas will soon emerge.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.
