Jerusalem, Israel (December 15, 2003) – Memories of an almost forgotten chapter of Jewish-Zionist history were evoked last week with the passing here of Baruch (Ben) Robbins at the age of 89.
Seventh generation descendant of Chassidic patriarch, The Bal Shem Tov, American secretary to Zionist-Revisionist icon, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, partner with the late Hillel Kook in the early 1940s promotion of Jewish statehood and a consciousness-raising attempt to alert America to the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, financial broker for Menachem Begin’s Irgun underground insurgency, co-pioneer of Jewish settlements in Elon Moreh and Kedumim, Robbins’ life encompassed enough adventures for at least one Hollywood opus.
The scenario might include, inter alia, his arrest as a teenage firebrand for causing havoc at pro-Soviet, anti-Zionist Bundist rallies in New York; his intrepid 1947 venture into the lair of Los Angeles underworld kingpin Mickey Cohen and his emergence with a $50,000 check for arms for the Irgun, and a weekend spent as a wartime guest of Dominican Republic dictator Juan Trujillo, resulting in the procurement of 1,500 entry visas for a group of Jewish activists trapped in Europe. It would also certainly highlight his success in convincing a coterie of U.S. Congressmen, Senators, Broadway and Hollywood figures, in the midst and aftermath of a war against Germany and Japan, that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine merited their most urgent concern.
From a small office on Capitol Hill in Washington, Robbins ground out a steady stream of press releases, feature stories, speeches and statements for Congressmen and Senators, some of which became part of the Congressional Record, that sensitized an entire nation to the justice of Jewish statehood.
From radio microphones, to synagogue pulpits, to outdoor rallies, his voice in support of Jewish national sovereignty was never stilled. Robbins first arrived on the Zionist scene in 1932 as a 17 year-old rabbinical student in a Jerusalem still little changed from the depressed backwater Mark Twain had described 50 years earlier. He returned to America, but the experience sealed his destiny as a permanent recruit to the Jewish Palestinian cause he was to serve for the remainder of his life. Emigrating to Israel in 1969 with his Canadian-born wife, Malka, and their seven children, Robbins initially operated an art gallery on Tel Aviv’s fashionable Ben-Yehuda Road, which became a showcase for some of Israel’s later-to-become-known, but then-struggling young painters. With Menachem Begin’s prime ministerial election in 1977, Robbins threw himself into Israel’s burgeoning settlement movement, building a home in Kedumim and becoming the movement’s spokesman to the English-language media.
Robbins never returned to the "Green Line." After several years as a resident of the Samarian community of Sha’are Tikva, he spent his final days in Nokdim, high in the Judean hills.
Baruch Rabinowitz (Robbins), an American-born rabbi who lobbied on Capitol
Hill for U.S. action to rescue Jews from the Holocaust, passed away in
Jerusalem on December 8, after a long illness. He was 89.
One of the first full-time Jewish lobbyists in Washington, Robbins - then
known as Rabinowitz-- was the chief D.C. representative of the Emergency
Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, better known as the Bergson
group. The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies <www.WymanInstitute.org>,
which holds a collection of memoirs and documents pertaining to Rabinowitz's
work, has established a Baruch Rabinowitz Memorial Fund to encourage research
into his and his colleagues' Holocaust rescue activities.
Known for his ability to obtain bipartisan support for his efforts, Rabinowitz
played a major role in the Bergson group's crowning achievement, a November
1943 Congressional resolution urging the Roosevelt administration to establish
a government agency to rescue Jews from Hitler. During the final fifteen
months of the war, the Board helped rescue an estimated 200,000 Jews,
including current U.S. Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA).. Part of its
work involved facilitating and financing the rescue activities of Raoul
Wallenberg.
After the Holocaust, Rabinowitz remained with the Bergson group in Washington,
lobbying for U.S. support for the creation of a Jewish State, and also quietly
raising funds for Etzel, one of the Jewish militias battling the British in
Mandatory Palestine.
Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Rabinowitz was a seventh-generation direct
descendant of the founder of Hassidism, the Baal Shem Tov. He was
expected to take the mantle of his father, Rabbi Samuel A. Rabinowitz, who was
known as "Brooklyner Rebbe." But at age 17, he chose instead
to board a ship and sail to the Holy Land, where he studied under its first
chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, from whom he received rabbinical ordination.
He later returned to the United States, became active in the nationalist
Revisionist Zionist movement, served as a rabbi until 1940, and then became a
full time Jewish activist. After the Six Day War in 1967, Rabinowitz -
now known as Baruch Robbins - moved to Israel.. In 1978, although 64
years old and legally blind, he left his home in Caesarea to settle in the
fledgling community of Elon Moreh.
Arutz 7 (December 10, 2003)