#passover 5704

[paulinedorchester]

Passover: Meanwhile, back in 1944:

This photo of a Seder for Allied troops appeared in the Kent Messenger's issue of April 14th, 1944. I didn't come across this two years ago, when I was looking for material from 1944 in the British Newspaper Archive; maybe the page hadn't been added yet. It seems to have been scanned from a damaged original, and bits of the caption are obscured. Here's what it appears to say, with some commentary from your truly:

The Passover feast, in commemoration of the Jewish exodus from Egypt some 2,000 years ago ...

More like 3,000 years ago actually; it's the Passover Haggadah that's nearly 2,000 year old.

... was held at an Infantry Training Centre, on Friday. In front of each person was placed the Passover cake ...

Excuse me — what? Cake? The Passover cake? What a weird way to refer to matzah!

... and a dish of bitter herbs, to remind the gathering of the affliction which their ancestors suffered in the land of Egypt.

(Image ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.)

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1944: Topicality remains easy to find.

Above, two accounts of a message released by Rabbi Jacob Schachter (1886-1971), a Romanian immigrant in Belfast, in the Belfast Telegraph, April 4th (left), and the following day's Belfast News-Letter.

From the Manchester Evening News, April 6th:

(Bylines were still rare enough in the 1940s that I decided to try and find out who Noah Elstein was. I didn't get very far. He was apparently born in 1900; in 1926 he wrote a play called Israel in the Kitchen that seems to have won an award, and in 1930 he published a novel, Plight of Peretz, but but after that the trail goes cold.)

Also on April 6th, the Western Mail, a Cardiff paper, published a letter to the editor from Rabbi Harris Jerevitch (1886- sometime after 1952), an immigrant from Russia. The page scan is too poor to include here, but here is what it appears to say:

Sir — As we usher in tomorrow (Friday) evening, the Passover, the "Festival of Freedom," your minds will naturally turn to the unprecedented horrible plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries and you will pray for them. The message of Passover to our time is the call to put away despair. Persecution is an evil thing which recoils on him who practices it. History has demonstrated it time and again. In the Passover all tyrants, oppressors, dictators, and all who deny to God-intelligent creatures the right to live and act as conscience dictates, must read their doom. The millions of Jews — men, women, and children — will not be forgotten when the day of reckoning comes. Pray fervently for the victory of the United Nations, so that future generations shall never experience the tyranny and the suffering into which the enemies of civilisation have today plunged the world. In your prayers give thanks to God for having cast our lot in this blessed and liberty-loving country. Passover is the occasion for family reunions. May the day come soon when our sons and brothers, now engaged in the struggle which the Passover commemorates, namely, freedom for all mankind, be reunited with their families after a glorious victory.

And on April 13th, the Yorkshire Evening Post carried the following:

(All images ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.)

[paulinedorchester]

This is from the Somerset County Herald for March 25th, 1944. (Image ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.) If I were a betting woman I'd be willing to make a fairly substantial wager that Trickeys wasn't a kosher establishment. The Jewish community to which this ad is clearly addressed would have been made up entirely of temporary residents — evacuees, and also a large contingent of American troops, as this item from the May 5th Jewish Chronicle suggests:

(Captain Miller, a Reform rabbi, was born in 1904 received his ordination in 1932. Prior to induction in May 1942 he served a congregation in Greenwich, Ct. From 1950 until the mid-1960s he served as founding rabbi of a synagogue in — wait for it! — Durban, South Africa; I haven't been able to find much detail about that. He died in 1985.)

At any rate, here they were, offering an array of products for Passover, right down to matzah! It warms the heart and gives one hope, it really does — hope for the past, at any rate.

I wonder what the "Swedish Hors d'Oeuvres" were?

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1944: Meanwhile, back in the U.K. ...

As was the case during the previous year, matzah was on the points system, thus forcing the Jewish community to once again deal with what was essentially a bread ration.

The Jewish Chronicle announced this as early as January 14th:

I have to take issue with the statement that this was "on a basis similar to that which was adopted last year." In 1943 there was a 5-pound per person allowance, and I found nothing like that for 1944; while in 1944, the points value of matzah was lowered from 4 points all the way down to 1 point per pound for several months at the beginning of the year, which as far as I know didn't happen in 1943.

This was duly announced in the Ministry of Food's "Food Facts" in February (as printed in the Manchester Evening News on February 10th; I haven't been able to find anything about it having been "announced last month"):

And then, on April 30th, the value went back up to 4 points per lb.:

(Printed on May 1st in a newspaper that I haven't been able to identify. As a side note, the "Food Facts" series began in 1940 and continued for ten years, and are absolutely fascinating. They beg for a serious scholarly study! I recommend them to anyone with an interest in the British home front.) This was big enough news that it was covered in The People on April 30th ...

... and the Daily Telegraph on May 1st:

(All images in this post except for the first are ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.)

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1944: with the Forces in Italy

With all that's been written about the vast movement of Allied troops to England's South coast in the Spring of 1944, in preparation for the invasion of Normandy, it's easy to forget that the liberation of Europe had already begun, with the Sicily landings of the previous July. So it comes as no surprise that groups of soldiers observed Passover in Italy in 1944. I've found evidence of at least five such Seders.

What seems to have been the largest was mounted by the 5th (U.S.) Army. Here's a write-up, from a wire service story printed in The Sentinel (Chicago) on April 13th:

In London, The Jewish Chronicle took note of it on the following day:

A much fuller account had appeared in The New York Times on April 8th. That article is so long that I decided it was impractical include it here. Here's a link (but there's no transcription and I'm not sure whether non-subscribers will be able to view the page image). Here are some salient details:

There were more than 1,000 people present.

Among them were three nurses and one WAC.

The WAC, Private First Class Frances Smith, sat with her husband, Private Isidore Smith. (You read that correctly: she held the higher rank! There were a great many married couples in the military by this time, and I'm wondering if that wasn't a fairly common situation.)

The chaplain, Major Aaron Paperman (1914-2002), "smilingly and explicitly compressed ten pages of service text into 'thirty seconds flat'." I have trouble imagining such a thing happening today — especially given that he was ultra-Orthodox. Awarded a Bronze Star, he had served a congregation in Plainfield, N.J., before the war.

Meanwhile, pan-Allied troops were making a Seder with only a slightly smaller number of people in attendance, as The Jewish Chronicle reported on April 21st:

Press coverage of that event may have been relatively sparse, but there are photos, with captions indicating that the Seder took place south of Cassino:

(© IWM NA 13705, NA 13706, NA 13707)

From Yad Vashem, here is an image of an American military-issue Hagadah that was used at a Seder at a British base in Bari attended by both American and British troops (many of the latter were from Mandate Palestine):

Finally, click here and here to see the covers of two home-made Hagadot used by members of British transport companies.

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1944: With the Forces in India

Since at least 1941, there had been concerns about the lack of a Jewish chaplain serving British troops in India, as noted in this letter in The Jewish Chronicle's January 28th, 1944, issue:

India does, of course, have its own long-established Jewish community (or at least it did then), which did try to help out, as noted in The JC on March 31st:

At last, though, a British chaplain was dispatched, as reported on April 14th:

And on April 28th, there was the following account:

By contrast, the American mentioned in this article, Captain David J. Seligson (1907-1992), a New York City native, was one of at least nine American Jewish chaplains to serve in India at some point during the war; I'd actually had no idea that American troops were stationed there! A Reform rabbi, he had previously led congregations in Birmingham, England, and Port Chester, N.Y. After the war he rose to national prominence, serving as the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, in Manhattan, for 20 years.

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1944: With the Forces across the country

Not all military personnel were massing on the South Coast, of course, and greater London wasn't the only place that saw large numbers of people in uniform observing Passover. The article below, from The Jewish Chronicle's April 21st issue, describes Sederim held under military auspices in Belfast, Birmingham, Bury St Edmunds, Buxton, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Glasgow, Hereford, Hull, Ipswich, Liverpool, Northampton, Nottingham, the Okney Islands, Peterborough, Portsmouth, Reading, the Shetland Islands, Torquay, Watford, Winchester, and at least one location that couldn't be specified for security reasons. In other papers, I read of Sederim in Bedford, Chester, Glastonbury, Plymouth, and Windsor. As in past wartime years, in a number of cases this was the first Seder ever held in that place. There was also a major, and apparently quite successful, campaign for provision of home hospitality in Manchester.

(If anybody wants information about the American chaplains mentioned in this article, please let me know.)

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1944: A respite amid preparations for D-Day

In 1944 Passover began at sundown on April 7th, a Friday.

By this time Allied troops were busily massing along the South Coast, although of course no one knew when the invasion would begin. Passover, with its tale of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea — and which also offered a chance for a change of pace and scene — must have been intensely meaningful for military personnel at that moment.

These photos were taken at a seder held that year "somewhere near London" and attended by more than 700 British and American troops.

It took place in an airplane hangar, I'm guessing.

The organizing seems to have been done mostly by British personnel:

(No American rabbi would be caught dead wearing that contraption around his neck. The photo caption refers to this gentleman as "The Jewish Chaplain to the Forces," but there was in fact more than one.) Having said this, I should point out that Goodman's, which supplied the matzah seen in these photos, was an American bakery, and those present seem to have represented a cross-section of the Allies.

A good seder is participatory. Here, Pte. Leopold Rosenbaum, a native of Bratislava who had arrived in the U.K. in 1938, helps lead the service:

The foods shown in the top photo are ceremonial, eaten before the actual meal, which isn't served until fairly late in the proceedings. Here, "Non-Jewish members of the Army Catering Corps serve the main fish course to Jewish service personnel," according to the caption:

They probably cooked the meal as well, and must have wondered what they'd let themselves in for.

(Photos, top to bottom: © IWM D 19336, D 19334, D 19335, D 19339, D 19338, D 19340, D 19337.)