When 400 rabbis marched on Washington

On October 6, 1943, 400 rabbis marched from the Washington DC railroad station to Capitol Hill. The sight of 400 Orthodox rabbis marching up Pennsylvania Avenue in their black hats and beards blowing in the wind must have been astonishing to residents of wartime Washington. Also astonishing was the date, October 6, two days before Yom Kippur.

Why in heaven’s name would these rabbis leave their congregations two day before the holiest Jewish holiday to march in Washington? The answer is that it was, indeed, in heaven’s name. The rabbis came to Washington to follow the Talmudic injunction of Pikuach Nefesh, to save a life; not just one, but thousands. By 1943 the desperation of their fellow Jews was reported to the Orthodox rabbis by friends and relatives still in Europe. The rabbis knew that two million Jews had already been killed and that millions more would be slaughtered unless they tried to intervene. The knowledge that Hitler was killing the Jews of Europe by industrial extermination was also known to the Allies. Even knowing this, Roosevelt and Churchill rejected the desperate cries for help with the pretext that the best way to save Jews was to end the war. The urgent reason for the rabbis’ march on Washington two days before Yom Kippur was, somehow, to prevent the death of Jews. Their plan for the march was simple and direct: First to speak to members of Congress and then to President Roosevelt in an attempt to rescue their Jewish brethren from German death camps.

On October 6th the rabbis marched to Capitol Hill and were met by Vice-President Henry Wallace and members of Congress. At the meeting, the rabbis read aloud, both in English and Hebrew, a petition calling for the creation of a federal agency that would both rescue European Jews and increase the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States. What they received from Wallace has been described as “a diplomatically minimal answer. “ Undeterred, the rabbis then marched to the White House and requested to meet with President Roosevelt. On the advice of the President’s advisors, he refused to see the rabbis and, to avoid a confrontation, left the White House by a rear door. This rebuff was Roosevelt’s political calculation that most Americans did not want an increase in immigration and that supporting an increase might jeopardize his reelection.

Roosevelt’s refusal to see the rabbis had unintended consequences. The snub was picked up by the press and the next day the headline in the Washington Times-Herald read, “Rabbis Report Cold Welcome at the White House” .A columnist for a Jewish newspaper went further when he asked, “Would a similar delegation of ….. Catholic priests have been thus treated?” And the Jewish newspaper, Forward, commented that “it is voiced that Roosevelt has betrayed the Jews.”

The impact of the march of the rabbis and the ensuing publicity was a resolution introduced in Congress that called for a federal agency to rescue refugees. At first the Roosevelt administration objected to the resolution until, with the help of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and the realization that Congress was going to pass the resolution anyway, the President announced the creation of the War Refugee Board. The War Refugee Board has been credited with saving as many as 200,000 Jewish lives. When the 400 rabbis returned to their congregations that Yom Kippur; they did not know what their march in Washington would accomplish. But on October 6 when the rabbis marched on Washington, they observed the highest injunction of Pikuach Nefesh and helped save thousands of Jewish lives.