On the 6th of Kislev we commemorate the Yahrzeit of an important, but not widely known, leader of rescue efforts in Slovakia during the Holocaust, Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandl (1903–1958). An acclaimed student in the Slovak yeshivot of Sered, Tirnoy, and Nitra, Rabbi Weissmandl was also an expert of Hebrew manuscripts, who visited Oxford several times during the 1930s to examine Hebrew rabbinical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. From March--October 1942, the Germans deported about 58,000 Jews from Slovakia. The Working Group was established during the peak of the deportations as a rescue agency. Weissmandel and other Working Group leaders toiled night and day, devising ways to save Jewish lives. He begged for assistance from every possible source, in Slovakia and elsewhere. In the summer of 1942 Weissmandl initiated the plan to bribe SS officer Dieter Wisliceny, in exchange for halting the deportation of Slovakian Jews to extermination camps. The Working Group paid Wisliceny between US $40,000--$50,000 in two installments. When the deportations did in fact stop, Weissmandl and the Working Group believed that it was because of their bribe. Others believe that the deportations had been brought to a halt for a variety of reasons: bribes paid to Fascist leaders of Slovakia; the intervention of the Minster of Education and the Governor of the Slovakian National Bank – neither of whom were bribed; and pressure from the Vatican and local bishops, who did not take kindly to the fact that the president of Slovakia, the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, was involved in the deportation of Jews. The Working Group next decided to try and repeat their success with the rescue of Jews from all over occupied Europe. This was termed the Europa Plan. The group agreed to amass about two--three million US dollars, and to provide a down payment of $200,000; but was unable to do so. In March 1944 Weissmandl wrote to friends in Budapest about making contact with Wisliceny, who by that time had been transferred to Hungary. However, just two months later, the Germans launched the deportation of Hungarian Jewry. By then, Weissmandel had changed his mind and advised his friends not to get involved with bribing the Nazis, but rather to try to escape and set up resistance. Rabbi Weissmandl and his associates in the Working Group tried other rescue efforts as well, sending food packages and valuables to deportees in Poland, and attempting to smuggle them into Hungary, which was at that time still a relatively free country. In the spring of 1944 four Jewish escapees from Auschwitz told the Working Group about the mass exterminations going on there. Weissmandl broadcast this information to Jewish organizations abroad, the Slovak government, and the countrys Catholic Church. He begged the Allies to bomb Auschwitz and the railways leading to it, but there was no response. After the Slovak National Uprising was crushed in October 1944, the Germans resumed deportations from Slovakia. In October Rabbi Weissmandl and his family were apprehended and put on a train to Auschwitz. Rabbi Weissmandl escaped from the sealed train by sawing open the lock of the carriage with an emery wire he had secreted in a loaf of bread. He jumped from the moving train and hid in a secret bunker in suburban Bratislava. On Passover 1945 he and other Jews were rescued by Rezső Kasztner and taken to Switzerland. In 1946 he arrived in the United States, a broken man having lost his wife, his five children, and his community. Although he remarried, had a new family, and was able to re-establish the Nitra Yeshiva, Rabbi Weissmandl never overcame his Holocaust experience and suffered from depression for the rest of his life. While there is general consensus that Rabbi Weissmandl dedicated himself heroically to rescue efforts, there is an ongoing dispute regarding his accusations that world Jewry - particularly the World Jewish Congress, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Zionist leadership - neglected to send the down payment required for life-saving bribery. The Europa Plan affair remains a bitter bone of contention between the Orthodox and secular Jewish worlds, the former claiming that the Jews of Europe were abandoned, and the latter that these allegations originate in Orthodoxy’s need to fortify itself against the secular and the Zionist. geni/people/rabbi-michuel-ber-weissmandel/6000000011546386357 myheritage/person-4026413_6308541_6308541/rabbi-chaim-michoel-dov-rabbi-michael-weissmandel-weissmandl-%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%99-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%90%D7%9C# (Posted by Edna Kalka Grossman)
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 23:30:00 +0000
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