Hillel Kook

Kook was born in Lithuania in 1915 into a prominent rabbinic family and grew up in Jerusalem after immigrating to Palestine as a child.[5] His father was Rabbi Dov Kook, and his uncle was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine.[5] His upbringing was religious, while his subsequent political activity took him into Revisionist Zionism and eventually toward advocacy of a secular Hebrew republic.[5]

As a young man, Kook studied Judaic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and belonged to Sohba, or Comradeship, a student group whose members included David Raziel and Avraham Stern, both of whom subsequently played important roles in the Irgun.[6] He joined the Haganah in 1929 and later left it for the Irgun when the latter organization was founded.[6] He became a follower and admirer of Ze’ev Jabotinsky.[5]

The Revisionist movement sought Jewish statehood on both banks of the Jordan River and unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, then governed by Britain under the Mandate.[1] Kook’s early assignments connected that political program with the practical work of bringing Jews to Palestine: he went to Europe in 1937 to coordinate and promote immigration outside British legal restrictions.[5] Sent to Poland at the end of that year, he worked there in 1938 and 1939 organizing the smuggling of Polish Jews to Palestine.[1][6]

Kook arrived in the United States in 1940 and adopted the name Peter H. Bergson to avoid embarrassing his family, which included a prominent rabbi.[1] He accompanied Jabotinsky as an Irgun representative and remained in the country after Jabotinsky’s death in August 1940.[1] Other Irgun figures involved in the American mission included Aryeh Ben Eliezer and Alexander Raphaeli.[6] His initial responsibilities were to mobilize support for the Irgun, promote Jewish military units to fight Nazi Germany, and build support for a Jewish state in Palestine.[1]

From 1940 to 1948, Kook and Samuel Merlin jointly led what they called the Irgun delegation to the United States.[5] Their work proceeded through several political committees rather than a single organization: these included the Committee for a Jewish Army, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation.[1] The wider organizational network also included the American League for a Free Palestine.[1] These interlocking bodies became generally known as the Bergson Group, taking their collective name from Kook’s American pseudonym.[7]

The campaign combined newspaper advertising, conferences, public programs, marches, petitions, and direct appeals to elected officials.[1] Its supporters crossed professional and political boundaries, including writer Dorothy Parker, playwright Ben Hecht, artist Arthur Szyk, Congressman Will Rogers Jr., and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.[1] Other supporters associated with its organizations included Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, William Green, and Fowler Harper.[6] Kook and Merlin sought prominent American cultural, intellectual, and political figures as allies in their public campaign.[1]

The Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews was formed in late 1941 to promote a Jewish force fighting alongside the Allies.[7] Kook’s organization sought Allied approval for a Jewish army against the Nazis, making military participation its principal early American campaign.[7] One formulation of its proposal called for an international Jewish armed force of 200,000 men.[8]

In 1942, the committee pressed the White House and sought to send a delegation to Britain to advance the proposal directly with British officials.[9] The proposed four-person delegation consisted of Peter H. Bergson, described as a “Palestinian expert,” Alfred A. Strelsin, Kenneth Leslie, and Congressman Andrew L. Somers.[9] They intended to travel on private passports and present their case to the British authorities.[9] The proposal thus involved both American political pressure and an effort to secure British agreement to Jewish military organization.[9]

The Jewish army campaign also reflected Kook’s interest in distinguishing Jewish peoplehood from Jewish religious identity.[8] He and his associates treated the proposed force as a national undertaking rather than simply a religiously defined military formation.[8] This distinction later appeared in his advocacy of an Israeli republic and his attempts to define the relationship between a sovereign state in Palestine and Jews living elsewhere.[3][4]

When information about the mass murder of European Jews became public in November 1942, the Bergson Group redirected its immediate efforts from the Jewish army campaign toward rescue.[7] Kook’s committee sought American government action on behalf of Jewish refugees and used full-page advertisements in major newspapers to bring the emergency before the public.[10] The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe became a principal vehicle for this work.[1]

The committee lobbied Congress, sponsored more than 200 newspaper advertisements, and organized public rallies.[11] Its advertisements and petitions criticized what its members regarded as American inaction, particularly by the State Department, and used the names of prominent supporters to draw attention to its demands.[12] The campaign pressed for an official rescue organization, asylum for refugees, and American pressure on Britain to admit Jews to Palestine.[6] Historian Yehuda Bauer later argued that Stephen Wise’s press conference received minimal newspaper coverage and that the issue was largely ignored until the Bergson Group went into action.[13]

The unsuccessful Bermuda refugee conference of April 1943 provided a further impetus for the group’s demand for a government agency devoted to rescue.[7] At a New York conference on July 20, 1943, approximately 1,000 participants considered rescue measures and defended the proposition that Jews could be saved without undermining the Allied war effort.[6] Kook avoided making Jewish statehood the meeting’s focus because he believed doing so would antagonize Arabs and the American government.[6] The committee instead sought a bipartisan and nondenominational coalition around immediate rescue objectives.[6]

That conference week culminated in a national CBS radio broadcast by former president Herbert Hoover.[14] Hoover discussed temporary assistance for refugees and longer-term resettlement proposals involving Palestine and Africa, declaring that finding relief for persecuted Jews was “one of the great human problems of today.”[14] His participation brought a former president’s voice into a public campaign organized by Kook’s circle.[14]

Ben Hecht’s memorial pageant, We Will Never Die, debuted at Madison Square Garden on March 9 and 10, 1943, with Kook’s support and drew more than 40,000 people across its two performances.[15] The production used actors, children dressed in white rags and made up to resemble corpses, and elderly rabbis reciting Kaddish to dramatize the murder of European Jews.[16] It combined theatrical performance with mourning and public appeal, making the catastrophe the subject of a large-scale American cultural event.[15][16]

The pageant subsequently appeared in five other major cities.[15] Its Washington performance on April 12 was attended by Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court justices, more than 200 members of Congress, and members of the diplomatic corps.[15] Roosevelt later devoted part of her syndicated column to the production and the plight of Europe’s Jews.[15] Press coverage and NBC broadcasts extended the pageant’s audience beyond those who attended performances.[16]

Kook’s circle again worked with Hecht in the production of A Flag Is Born, which promoted support for Holocaust survivors and a Jewish state.[17] The production raised enough money to purchase a ship renamed the S.S. Ben Hecht, which attempted to bring 600 survivors to Palestine before British interception.[17] Rafael Medoff later credited the production with helping bring about theater desegregation in Baltimore in 1947.[18]

On October 6, 1943, more than 400 Orthodox rabbis mobilized by Kook’s secular activist group marched from Washington’s Union Station to the Capitol, accompanied by marshals from the Jewish War Veterans.[19] They recited prayers and sang a prayer for national leaders to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”[19] Their petition called for a federal rescue agency and expanded American admission of refugees.[19]

The rabbis recited Kaddish and met Vice President Henry A. Wallace, but President Roosevelt did not receive them.[2] Roosevelt left through a rear exit rather than meet the delegation, and press coverage of the perceived snub increased attention to the protest.[19] The march brought religious figures into a campaign whose organizers had relied heavily on secular activists, public personalities, and congressional allies.[1][19]

In November 1943, congressional supporters introduced matching House and Senate measures calling for a commission to devise and implement plans to rescue European Jews.[12] The Senate committee unanimously approved its nonbinding resolution, but neither chamber had passed the measure when Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board by executive order on January 22, 1944.[12] The House effort had stalled despite the public campaign and congressional hearings.[2]

During the hearings, State Department official Breckinridge Long argued that the United States had already accepted more than its share of Jewish refugees.[19] Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. prepared a report accusing the State Department of making Jewish immigration nearly impossible, and Roosevelt announced the board within days.[19] The Bergson campaign contributed to pressure for a government response and helped create an atmosphere favorable to changes in rescue policy.[12] The new board was charged with rescuing Jews from occupied Europe.[13]

Kook established the American League for Free Palestine in 1943–44 to rally American public support for Jewish statehood.[11] In May 1944, he created the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation and opened a “Hebrew Embassy” in Washington.[1] The committee asserted that it represented Jews in Palestine and Europe’s surviving Jews; it was intended to function as a government-in-exile for a future Jewish state.[1][11] It appealed to Americans and their elected representatives and secured support for Irgun activities in Palestine.[11]

The campaign continued after the war, turning increasingly toward the struggle for Jewish independence.[18] In a retrospective assessment, Rafael Medoff argues that the group helped mobilize American public opinion and organized volunteers, funds, and weapons for that struggle.[18] Kook returned to Israel in 1948, and the Hebrew Committee ceased operating after the state was established.[1] In a 1967 letter, Kook recalled arriving on May 15, 1948, to fulfill a public pledge to be present on the day of independence.[5]

Kook purchased the Altalena, which carried weapons and Irgun fighters toward the Tel Aviv coast in June 1948 during the first internationally brokered ceasefire of the War of Independence.[20] He also met David Ben-Gurion in an attempt to prevent the confrontation over the ship.[3] After the affair, Kook was among five Irgun commanders secretly arrested and detained at Beit She’an.[20] They were accused of treason, but no indictment was brought, and they were subsequently released.[20]

Kook was elected as a Herut representative to the Constituent Assembly, with Herut led by Menachem Begin.[1] He served in the first Knesset from 1949 to 1951 and did not seek another term.[1] Disillusioned with his political experience, he withdrew from political life and left Israel for the United States in 1951 with his wife Betty and daughter Astra.[1]

He returned to Israel in 1968 with his daughters Astra and Rebecca, remarried in 1975, and lived near Tel Aviv until his death in 2001.[1] Although his parliamentary career was brief, his political correspondence with Merlin continued for decades, extending from their return to Israel until 1986.[5]

An Israeli republic modeled on a Western liberal-democratic nation-state stood at the center of Kook’s political vision.[4] His reported views distinguished Israeli nationality from Jewish religious affiliation and treated Israeli sovereignty as the political realization of the historical Jewish people.[3] The questions he raised extended beyond obtaining statehood to the character of the state and the national identity of its citizens.[3]

Kook argued that an Israeli nation existed but was not recognized as such.[3] He also advanced the view that, following the establishment of Israeli sovereignty, Jewish identity outside that sovereign national framework should be understood as a universal religion rather than a separate people.[3] These were elements of his proposed distinction between Israeli nationality, Jewish religious affiliation, and the historical Jewish people.[3]

His critique could be sharply expressed: he described Israel as a “theocracy” established by secular people and as a Jewish mandate still awaiting fulfillment.[3] These formulations conveyed his dissatisfaction with the state’s religious-national arrangements rather than descriptions he accepted as a finished constitutional ideal.[3] Philosopher Joseph Agassi characterized Kook as a lifelong advocate of an Israeli republic modeled on a normal Western liberal-democratic nation-state.[4] Kook’s earlier separation of Jewish peoplehood from religious identity in the Jewish army campaign thus remained connected to his later thinking about sovereignty and citizenship.[8][3]

Kook’s wartime work brought the rescue of European Jews before American audiences through advertisements, theatrical productions, religious demonstrations, conferences, and congressional advocacy.[11][15] His organizations connected prominent writers and artists with political figures and religious participants in a sustained effort to secure government action.[1][19] Their contribution to the pressure surrounding the creation of the War Refugee Board forms a central part of his public legacy.[12]

Rafael Medoff credits the Bergson campaign with helping prompt Roosevelt to create the board and describes it as playing a central role in rescuing an estimated 200,000 Jews during the war’s final 15 months.[21] Medoff also argues that the group’s campaign helped influence Britain’s late-1944 decision to establish the Jewish Brigade.[21] Although the brigade fell short of the full Jewish army Kook’s group sought, some of its members subsequently helped bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine and participated in Israel’s War of Independence.[21]

Kook’s papers preserve another dimension of his legacy: the continuing political discussion between him and Samuel Merlin after the American campaigns and the establishment of Israel.[5] Following Kook’s death, 154 letters in Hebrew and English were found in his private library, documenting correspondence that continued until 1986.[5] The collection records his continuing concern with a Hebrew republic, Israeli national identity, and the relationship between Israel and world Jewry.[5]

In 2016, records showing treason charges against Kook and the other four detained Irgun commanders were cleared following research by the IDF History Department.[20] Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot agreed to cancel those records, an action described as their official exoneration 68 years after the Altalena affair.[20]

Kook’s confrontational tactics and Irgun connections brought strong opposition from established Jewish organizations and officials in Congress and the Roosevelt administration.[11][12] Many American Jewish leaders shared the broad rescue objectives but opposed his methods and resented public criticism of their organizations; some feared that the campaign could provoke antisemitism or undermine communal leadership.[11][12] The Irgun itself conducted violent reprisals following Arab attacks on Jews and attacked British targets, and Britain regarded it as a terrorist organization.[1] Kook’s distinction between Jewish nationality and religion also drew criticism as artificial or divisive.[8]

The extent of the Bergson Group’s influence on rescue policy remains a significant historical debate, with assessments ranging from a major role in establishing the War Refugee Board to a more limited contribution among several converging pressures.[8][12] Rescue totals associated with the board also vary in formulation and time frame and cannot simply be treated as counts of people saved by Kook’s campaign.[11][12] Hecht’s later judgment that We Will Never Die had accomplished “nothing” illustrates the frustration that accompanied its public visibility.[16] Kook himself later claimed that 1.5 million Jews could have been saved, an estimate rather than an established counterfactual count.[3]

The debate extended to public commemoration: in 2007, more than 100 Holocaust scholars and Jewish leaders petitioned for the group’s inclusion in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent exhibition.[22] Kook’s domestic political critique was similarly far-reaching; he and Ari Zhabotinsky challenged the first Knesset’s legitimacy on the ground that it had constituted itself, a political argument rather than a legal finding.[3]