#passover 5706

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1946: A U.S. Army chaplain, Lt. Jerome Robbins, shares matzah with a young girl in the Berlin-Mariendorf Displaced Persons Camp.

I haven't been able to find out very much about Rabbi Robbins (who wasn't the choreographer). He was born in 1918 (the same year as that Jerome Robbins, as it happens), possibly in California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940 and received his ordination just two years later from Hebrew Theological College, an Orthodox institution then located in Chicago and now in Skokie. He then served the Woodlawn Hebrew Congregation — long gone, but just a stone's throw from where I'm writing this — until his induction on November 4th, 1944. By the second half of 1946 he appears to have been discharged and returned to California, first as a hospital chaplain in the Bay Area, then at a synagogue in Los Angeles.

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1946: With the troops, in the U.K. and across the world

The war was over, but there were still personnel on active duty (service) far from home. On March 22nd, three weeks weeks before Passover began, The Jewish Chronicle (London) printed this appeal:

A week later, this announcement appeared in the Jewish Echo (Glasgow):

(Image ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. This paper has only just now appeared in the British Newspaper Archive.)

Meanwhile, Allied forces were still serving in defeated Axis nations where Passover observances made history of one sort or another, as noted in The New York Times on April 16th ...

... and in The Jewish Chronicle on April 26th:

Reports were still arriving as spring turned to summer, as The Jewish Chronicle noted on June 21st:

[paulinedorchester]

A unique Haggada created by Jewish soldiers in Europe after WWII infuses the traditional Passover story with the drama of a momentous era

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1946: In Italy, a crisis erupts.

The incident got a lot of newspaper coverage as it unfolded, but this story from the April 15th New York Times is the best summing up:

(This puts one in mind of Masada, but please remember that in Judaism we consider martyrdom a grievous fate, not a glorious one.)

There was a sympathy hunger strike in British Mandate Palestine, one of whose leaders was Golda Meir. You can read here about how the situation was resolved, in the paragraph labelled "Event History" — the tone of which is quite interesting considering the source.

Whether or not "Mossad agents decided to turn it into a media event to arouse world public opinion against Britain's restrictive immigration policy," as the linked page states, there was no question in the mind of the Jewish public as to who was to blame for the crisis, and indeed for the larger state of affairs regarding British Mandate Palestine, of which the La Spezia crisis was merely one of many symptoms. This cartoon appeared in the April 12th issue of the B'nai B'rith Messenger (Los Angeles):

And this, when you come right down to it, is how we got to where we are now in the Middle East. It's a fairly straight line.

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1946: Elsewhere in Europe

This thoughtful (and unaccountably bylineless) article from the Chicago Sunday Times' April 14th issue gets to the heart of things:

Meanwhile, on April 26th, The Jewish Chronicle (London) published these highlights:

[paulinedorchester]

1946: In London, not much has changed for the first post-war Passover

Rationing is still in force:

(The Jewish Chronicle, January 11th, 1946)

There are still active-service troops whose needs must be met (The JC, March 8th, 1946) ...

... and some of them are from overseas (The JC, March 22nd):

Meanwhile, the Blitz and its aftermath, not to mention the influx of refugees, have created new problems, as The Jewish Chronicle noted on April 22nd:

[paulinedorchester]

Passover, 1946: Germany and Austria

Above, from The New York Times, April 15th, 1946. On the previous day the same paper ran this story ...

... and these two on the 16th:

[paulinedorchester]

This photo illustration was printed in many Jewish papers in the United States during the second week of April, 1946, including on the cover of The Sentinel (Chicago), with the following caption:

As we'll see, the situation in Europe was tense.