(engine roars)
(gentle music)
- [Dick] Perhaps no other century
in human existence
experienced the terrible
and remarkable contrasts
of the 20th century.
For the century was heroic and tragic,
progressive and reactionary,
forward-looking and
frighteningly regressive,
a century of contradiction,
confusion and massive change.
But the nature of human
beings had not changed.
And it is that basic nature
more than anything else
which is the determining
catalyst of human history.
Certainly the history of the 20th century,
Faith and Fate will focus
on how all these events
and occurrences impacted on
one specific group of people,
a people whose survival
has defied the ravages
and challenges, not only of this century
but of the over 40 centuries
that have led up to it.
Faith and Fate, the story
of the Jewish people
in the 20th century.
(exciting piano music)
In episode one, The Dawn of
the Century, 1900 to 1910,
we saw the great immigration
of Jews from the Russian empire
to America and the rest of the world.
We saw the tensions of poverty, inequality
and the restlessness of change.
The beginnings of socialism,
secular and religious Zionism,
the impact of Haskalah, the
enlightenment, reformation
and the desperate struggle
over Jewish identity.
Now to episode two,
the Implosion of the
Old Order, 1911 to 1920.
(somber piano music)
- [Ashley] Whatever dreams
the Russian immigrants
may have had about the
golden land of America,
the socioeconomic reality they encountered
was quite different.
Eastern European Jewish
immigrants recreated the shtetl
in neighborhoods like the
Lower East Side of New York
and in every other American
city in which they lived.
They crowded into impossibly
primitive tenement housing
and toiled in the textile
and needle trades.
Barely eking out a living
in dangerous conditions,
working 12 to 14 hours a day.
- Jewish immigrants
not only faced physical
but spiritual challenges as well.
And it was extremely
difficult for those Jews
who wished to remain
religious to be able to do so.
Many immigrants had to forego
perhaps the most precious thing
that they had brought with
them from Europe, the Sabbath,
the core of their Jewish identity,
in order now to be able
to physically survive.
- People today in the United States
and elsewhere don't realize
what a tremendous problem
this was for observant Jews
until perhaps 50 years ago.
Many Jews were compelled
to go to work on Saturday.
As the saying went in
American garment industry,
if you don't show up on Saturday,
don't bother coming in on Monday.
In other words, you
had to work on Saturday
or lose your livelihood.
- You didn't work, you didn't eat.
It was that era when you
just couldn't hold a job
if you couldn't come in on Saturdays.
And it was a terrible time,
nothing I would ever want
to face in my life.
It helped me understand our
grandparents' generation.
(somber music)
I came across a tkhine, a
prayer that a woman says prior
to lighting candles.
It was printed in New York, around 1916.
And it was a tkhine in Yiddish
that a woman's supposed
to say as she's lighting candles,
and it begs, it begs, it
begs God that her husband
and her children should
be able to find work
without desecrating Shabbos and Yom Tov.
People who did keep Shabbos were heroes.
(somber music)
- [Ashley] To counter these
workplace difficulties,
several Jews took action.
As in Europe, in the previous decade,
a group of Jewish workers in
New York organized themselves,
forming the United Hebrew Trades.
Another prominent union,
the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union,
was comprised almost exclusively
of Jewish members and leaders.
After orchestrating two strikes,
the workers forced those in
power to react, and eventually
wages and working
conditions began to improve.
In Chicago, a former student
from the Slabodka Yeshiva
in Lithuania, Sidney
Hillman, became the leader
of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers of America.
Together with the ILGWU,
these two Jewish labor unions
spearheaded militant
union activity in America.
These ideas became part of
what would constitute policy
in factories two decades later
under Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal to create jobs
and stimulate America's economy
during the Great Depression.
What had started in the
Jewish social workers movement
and the Bund in Eastern
Europe, now found expression
in the American workplace.
Unfortunately, it took a tragedy
to give the garment workers
and their unions their greatest boost.
In 1911, 141 young women died in a fire
in the Triangle Shirtwaist
Company's factory in New York.
- The fire escapes were closed.
And when the fire broke
out, it was impossible
for the workers to flee.
And in many instances,
people were burned to death.
Some people jumped from the windows.
And the sight of these dead women
on the streets of Manhattan was a moment
where so many Americans took cognizance
of the difficult laboring conditions
under which Jewish workers existed
in the first decade of the 20th century.
- [Ashley] Supported by
pressure from the press
and public opinion, the
unions were galvanized
to forever eradicate
unsafe working conditions.
Their greatest contribution
that of organizing workers
to fight for their rights left
a deep, lasting impression
on American economic life.
- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,
more than any other single
event, sensitized not only Jews
but Americans in general to the plight
of the working people
in the United States.
- Another problem the Jews had
to face was something that they thought
they had left behind in
Europe, antisemitism.
But in the United
States, it was different.
In Russia, the czar
and the government were
openly antisemitic.
But in America the government and society,
to a great extent, was
not openly antisemitic,
and there were not
anti-Jewish laws in force
in the United States of America.
- [Ashley] American antisemitism ranged
from disgruntled
malcontents from all classes
of society blaming Jews
for America's social ills.
From the Ku Klux Klan,
a racist organization
that fanned anti-Negro, anti-Catholic
and anti-Jewish sentiment,
to the lynching of an
innocent Jew, Leo Frank,
in 1915, in Atlanta, Georgia,
to Henry Ford, the most
famous industrialist
in America, who disseminated antisemitism
through his newspaper,
The Dearborn Independent.
- Jews were excluded
from many organizations,
commercial enterprises, hotels
and educational institutions.
Even those schools and universities
that did admit Jews
only did so on the basis
of a numerical quota.
It would not be 'til well
after World War II that most
of the social, professional
and business restrictions
against Jews would begin to disappear.
- [Ashley] For the Jewish immigrants,
the glow of the golden land
quickly faded into reality.
Yet, most Jewish immigrants
continued to believe
that America was the
only country in the world
that would one day give
them a fair chance.
After all, many of the
earlier German immigrants
had succeeded in business.
One in government, Oscar Straus,
had been the first Jew appointed
to the White House cabinet.
And in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson
selected Louis Dembitz Brandeis,
the first Jew to sit on the
United States Supreme Court.
(bright piano music)
- We Jews are eternal optimists.
Our humor flourished.
Jewish newspapers, Yiddish theater,
all these reflected the
times, the aspirations
and the will to regenerate and succeed.
- [Ashley] This optimism was reflected
in the immigrant letters
and postcards at the time.
- [Maurice] Dear Mother, hope
this picture will relieve you
of the unpleasant dreams you're
having about me, Maurice.
- [Ashley] It was also
reflected in the lyrics of one
of the most patriotic songs ever written.
♫ God bless America
♫ Land that I love
♫ Stand beside her
♫ And guide her
♫ Through the night
♫ With a light from above
♫ Through the mountains
♫ To the prairies
♫ To the ocean
♫ White with foam
♫ God bless America
♫ My home sweet home
- [Ashley] It was composed by
the legendary Irving Berlin,
a Russian Jewish immigrant in 1918.
Also, between 1870 and 1910,
more than 200,000 Eastern
European Jews had immigrated
to Great Britain.
Most of them settled in London,
and especially London's East End,
which became the equivalent
of New York's Lower East Side.
England was coolly hospitable
to the new arrivals.
And whenever unemployment rose,
Jews were usually made the scapegoat.
In addition, numerous immigration
restrictions were proposed
to keep the Jews out.
Understandably, Jews in England
kept a very low profile.
Jews also emigrated to other countries,
which were less
industrialized and established
than America and England.
Countries which offered
their new Jewish immigrants
more opportunities and less restrictions
to pioneer and develop their own destiny.
By 1911, there were
approximately 40,000 Jews
in South Africa, mainly
from England and Lithuania.
Most of them prospered,
not only in the diamond
and gold industries but also in trade,
manufacturing and small businesses.
It was the same in Canada,
Australia and South America.
(energetic music)
While Jews, each in their own
way, grappled with the lands
of their new dreams, a
nightmare in the form
of war would soon darken
the European horizon.
Tensions in Europe were escalating,
and the imperial powers were
strengthening their ties.
On the one side, Germany and
the Austro-Hungarian empire
were bound by an alliance.
On the other side,
the Russian empire was
aligned with France.
The most powerful empire, Great Britain,
unofficially allied with France when,
in an act of aggression,
Germany laid claim to Algadir,
a French port on the Moroccan coast,
England was concerned of
the kaiser's open ambitions
to equal Great Britain as a
naval power and colonial empire.
The kaiser's actions
were a direct challenge
to Britain's imperial status.
Meanwhile, in Russia,
the situation for the Jews
continued to deteriorate.
- The czar had a policy in which he said
that one-third should convert
to the Russian Orthodox Church,
one-third of the Jews should die,
and one-third of the Jews should leave,
and that would solve the Jewish problem.
Well, one-third of the Jews did leave
because of the fact
they didn't want to die,
and they didn't want to convert.
- [Ashley] In this atmosphere
of antisemitism in 1911,
a poor Jew from Kiev,
Mendel Beilis, was accused
of murdering a Christian child,
in order to use its blood
for the baking of matza.
The ramifications were many.
While Beilis was eventually acquitted,
Jews were again inspired
to emigrate out of fear.
(somber music)
Jewish youth in Europe were by
now worn down and embittered
by poverty, social
inequality and persecution.
On the battlefield of ideas,
Torah and traditional Judaism
had a very difficult time
countering the appeal of every other ism
sweeping the Jewish world.
- Atheism, anarchism,
secularism, socialism, communism,
secular Zionism, Marxism, all
claimed many among the ranks
of traditional Jews at the time.
- [Ashley] The younger
generation in the main fled
from its past, associating
the terrible conditions
of physical Jewish life in Eastern Europe
with the religious life
of Torah and Judaism.
- It is tragic, but it is understandable
that with the choice
on one hand of visible
and what appeared to be
tangible opportunities,
especially for the young
and on the other hand,
an invisible, and what appeared
to be an intangible God,
a very tough call.
The Mussar movement, the
yeshivas, the Hasidic movement
and religious Zionism,
all valiantly attempted
to stem this tide.
- [Ashley] In 1912, a group
of leading Orthodox scholars
founded Agudath Israel, a
religious political movement
to unify Orthodox efforts
to face the new challenges.
- One thing the Jewish people have learned
over our almost 4,000 years
of survival in history is
that history itself
always has the last vote.
Therefore, fortunately towards
the end of this 20th century,
we have seen the pendulum swing back
with Jewish youth rediscovering
the enduring vitality
of Jewish tradition, Jewish
values and Jewish life.
(somber piano music)
- [Ashley] Meanwhile, while Germany
and it's foes were preparing to face off,
Jewish immigrants
continued to make their way
to Palestine, just before World War I.
As the secular Zionist movement started
in the 1890s by Theodor Herzl grew,
it was torn by divisions and personalities
and experienced its own
tumultuous battlefield of ideas.
Menachem Ussishkin, Chaim Weizmann,
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Nahum Sokolow,
Shmaryahu Levin and others
led the Zionist movement,
though not always in
concert with each other.
In Palestine, Yitzhak
Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion
led the establishment of the new Yishuv,
the new settlement of the
land by the secular Zionists.
Other than socialism, the
most powerful movement
to attract the Jewish youth in Europe,
especially Eastern Europe
was secular Zionism,
with its promise of Jews
controlling their own destiny
in their own Jewish homeland
but returning to Zion was
not a new Jewish concept.
(somber piano music)
- One aspect of Zionism, which is unique
to make it a nationalism
is the traditional longing
for a return to Zion.
It's in our prayers.
It's in the Talmud Bavli.
It's in next year in
Jerusalem, the rallying cry
which includes the Yom
Kippur and Passover service.
It certainly explains why
individuals made their way
to Eretz Israel as individuals
but never a mass return.
- The first immigrants to
Palestine in the late 19th century
and early 20th century were
in the main religious Jews.
To them, returning to Zion meant
returning to the Holy Land.
For the secular Zionist immigrant,
it meant shedding the past
and creating somehow a new
national Jewish identity
in their new but ancient home.
- From 1904 to 1914,
waves of Jews began coming
to Eretz Israel, strongly influenced
by the revolutionary spirit
that was then sweeping across Europe.
These are left-wing, Laborites influenced
by Russian ideology to set up
communes, to work in the land.
Communes, communal, we all work together.
That's not a far-stretch from communism.
Therefore, we work with
our own hands in the soil.
The religion of labor,
that labor regenerates the Jewish soul.
I think there is that
strong sense that one wants
to create a new Jew, negating the exile,
slamming the door on all that.
The optimism of the rabbis,
the fact that we always are,
at the best, puppets on a string,
always at the whim of some gentile ruler.
It's a new phenomenon.
- Secular Zionism was Jewish nationalism,
pure and simple, nothing else.
And it negated everything that happened
to Jewish history until them.
- Secularists said that in the modern age,
one identified as a Jew by choice.
But all those thousands
of years that Jews held on
to Talmud and Torah, forget it.
- [Ashley] The vehement
rejection of tradition and faith
by the young secular pioneers was matched
by an uncompromising defense
of traditional Jewish life
by the religious settlers
centered in Jerusalem
and the northern city of Tsfat.
- The religious issue of
so-called the old Yishuv,
which found its leaders in Rabbis Diskin
and his successor Rabbi
Chaim Sonnenfeld believed
that the Zionist movement
was very dangerous
for the future of the Jewish people.
It would drive the Jews even
further from Torah life,
because it was whetted clearly
to secularist enlightenment values,
labor, mastering our own destiny.
The religious old Yishuv
believed that one waited
for the Messiah to bring the redemption.
One didn't challenge
God's mysterious plan.
- [Ashley] There were some
Orthodox rabbis who disagreed.
Mizrachi, the religious
Zionist movement founded
in the early 20th century in Europe
by Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines
represented a radical change
in that it fused both the
Orthodox spiritual link
between Torah and the land
of Israel, on the one hand,
and on the other hand, it
supported the mass movement
of Jews to return to
their biblical homeland.
It therefore worked in tandem
with the World Zionist Organization
whose leadership was
overwhelmingly secular.
- Religious Zionism said we're
gonna take everything good
that the exiled produced.
We're gonna take all of our tradition.
We're gonna take all the religious people,
and we're gonna move them
to the land of Israel.
We'll build a religious
Jewish community there,
in the Holy Land of
Israel where we'll be able
to achieve spiritual goals
and not just physical ones.
- [Ashley] By the
beginning of the Great War,
there were more than 85,000
Jews living in Palestine,
and Hebrew had been established
by the secular Zionists
as the official language.
The country was ruled
by the Ottoman Turks.
And there were over
620,000 Arabs living there.
The new all-Jewish city
of Tel Aviv sprang forth
from the old mixed
population city of Jaffa
and numbered close to 1,500 souls by 1914.
Jewish agricultural settlements
had been established
all over the country by
the secular Zionists,
especially in the Galilee
and the Sharon Plain.
A watchman's guild Hashomer was organized
to defend the settlements
from the many Arab marauders.
- Hashomer, they look like Bedouin.
They purposely dress as such.
They ride magnificently on
the horses and all that.
We want to be independent at last,
and that sense of independence made it
through the long haul.
Then they did remarkable things
despite the malaria and every,
true, many, many left.
But those who stayed created
what they called correctly
the state in the making.
So despite Turkish
oppression, tremendous famine,
the uncertainty of war and all that,
there is that sense we're here to stay.
- [Ashley] While small numbers
of Jews were involved
in building Palestine,
the vast and mighty Ottoman Empire was
on the verge of collapse.
It's ultimate fate would impact
very directly on the Jews,
not only in Palestine but also
in other countries controlled
by the Ottoman Turks.
- The Ottoman Empire was at
its peak during the 1600s.
By the middle of the
1700s, it was declining
and losing some territory.
By the time we got to the 20th century,
the Ottoman Empire had
contracted some more.
(slow drum music)
The Jews of the Ottoman
Empire were a large
and diverse community.
Some Jews were very
prosperous, very successful,
doing very, very well for themselves.
But the masses of Jews
were relatively poor.
Rich, poor, well-educated,
not well-educated,
they had a very great sense of solidarity.
And they actually had a
very strong family life,
and communities were very
much like extended families.
And this also lent to
the sense of security
and well-being that the Jews enjoyed.
However, in general,
Jews and Muslim countries
were relegated to second-class citizenship
or no citizenship at all.
They were called dhimmis,
or protected people.
Jews were not allowed to do anything
that would make them
seem superior to Muslims.
They couldn't ride a horse
if a Muslim was walking on the street.
They couldn't bear arms.
They couldn't vote, obviously.
That being said, I would
not describe the Jews
of the Ottoman Empire
as an oppressed people,
but there were periods when Jews lived
in relative benign peace,
and there were a few times,
where there were actual
physical violence against Jews.
But it wasn't a routine thing.
When Jews were being killed,
or where there'd be a pogrom
in any of these countries,
it would be shocking to those Jews.
It just didn't happen.
When there were blood libels against Jews,
brought basically by Christians
in the Ottoman Empire,
the sultan always
defended the Jews, always.
- The relative peace of the Sephardic Jews
who lived under the Ottoman Turks,
as well as life for the Ashkenazic Jews
throughout Europe was now about to change
with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars.
- [Ashley] In 1911, Italy, in
an ongoing territorial dispute
over Libya, attacked the Ottoman Empire.
It succeeded in capturing
Tripoli, Libya's main port.
This encouraged the Balkan League,
made up of Bulgaria, Greece,
Serbia and Montenegro
to attack the Ottoman Empire for control
of the last countries in
Europe under Ottoman rule,
Thrace, Macedonia and Albania.
At the end of the conflict,
the Ottoman Turks had lost
nearly all of their European territories.
The Balkan victors soon
fell out over the spoils
and went to war against each other.
(explosion roars)
To safeguard peace in Europe,
the great powers intervened
and opposing alliances were formed.
Russia, with France and
England, sided with Serbia.
Germany and the Austrian Empire aligned
with the Ottoman Turks.
The stage for World War I was set.
The brutal relations
between the competing powers
in Europe were like tightly-tied,
dry tinder waiting for a spark.
That spark ignited on June
28th, 1914, in Sarajevo, Serbia,
when a 19-year-old student
(gun fires)
assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
heir to the throne of
Austria-Hungary and his wife.
- World War I can be understood
as a local conflict that got out of hand.
(explosions roar)
In other words, what happened
was that the great powers
of Europe were drawn into
a conflict as a result
of a local political assassination.
On a deeper level, this was
a conflict among empires
who were struggling for dominance over
what we call today the Third World,
the colonies and their resources.
And also it was intra-European politics.
Who would be the dominant power in Europe?
And when the United
States entered in 1917,
it becomes, in some sense, a world war.
(cannon fires)
- [Ashley] In July, 1914,
Austria declared war on Serbia
and began to bomb Belgrade.
And the alliances across
Europe lined up to fight.
Russia and France mobilized
millions of soldiers,
while Austria, German
and eventually England
also mobilized their armies.
On August the 2nd, Germany invaded France.
And on August the 4th, England
declared war on Germany,
after it had advanced into Belgium.
The conflict would not be
confined to European borders.
On August the 23rd, Japan
entered the war against Germany.
It was a war on a scale that
had never before been waged.
Over 65 million troops were mobilized.
The death toll would
total almost one million
after only six months.
Many Jews found themselves
right at the center
of the conflict, both in the military
and as innocent citizens.
- [Zvi] Jews fought on
both sides of the war.
There were Jews in the German army.
There were Jews in the
Austro-Hungarian army.
There were Jewish generals
in the Austro-Hungarian army.
There were many German Jews
who won the Iron Cross,
a high German military decoration.
- It must have been a terrible dilemma
for Jews fighting each other, not as Jews,
but as Germans and Austrians on one side,
and as Russians and English and French
and Americans on the other side.
- [Ashley] There were also a
large number of Jews fighting
in the Russian army,
many with distinction.
Despite this, Russians with a, by now,
familiar, accusatory
antisemitic cry claimed
after defeat that the Jews were disloyal,
and that they were spying.
As a result, hundreds of
thousands of Jews were removed
from their homes and forced
into an uncertain future.
(somber music)
Since 1795, the Jews
and the Russian Empire
had been restricted by the czars
to live in the 15 provinces
of Western Russia, known
as the Pale of Settlement.
- The Pale of Settlement was
a swathe of the western part
of Russia, 150 miles wide,
running from the Baltic
in the north, all the way to
the Black Sea in the south.
It was poor.
It was overcrowded.
It was riddled with disease.
It was not a pleasant place to be.
- As late as 1900, 97% of the Jews
in the Russian Empire lived
in that Pale of Settlement.
Ironically, what happened in
1915, was that the restriction
of the Pale of Settlement
was finally lifted,
not because the czar
suddenly became benevolent
to the Jews, but because
he distrusted them.
- The czar had exiled them
to the interior of Russia,
including Siberia, where
under terrible hardship,
they attempted to rebuild
their Jewish communities.
The miracle is how Jews
survived under the czar
as long as they did and
as well as they did.
- [Ashley] As the war raged
on, the Russian army continued
to suffer catastrophic
losses with no end in sight.
(explosions roar)
The dislocation of the Jewish population
in Eastern Europe continued.
In 1915, after the Russian
army fell in Prussia,
Germany invaded Russia
and captured vast sections
of Lithuania and Poland
and with them large Jewish populations.
The invasion of Lithuania
by the German army
destroyed the life and
influence of the yeshivas there.
And the vitality of the Hasidic courts
was greatly diminished.
And while the European
Jews were struggling
to rebuild their lives,
the Jews in Palestine
under Ottoman rule were also suffering.
They were hoping that the
Turks would be defeated
in the war, and there
would be an opportunity
for independence, but to no avail.
In what would prove to
be a recurring theme,
the Turks turned against the
Jews presence in Palestine,
and the Jews, especially in
the committed religious Yishuv,
lived through terrible economic, political
and social persecution.
- Poverty in the Yishuv was a fact,
not simply the question
of starvation and disease,
but Turkish efforts also to
stymie Jewish regeneration,
and in a war situation,
clearly not benefiting to the Yishuv.
- [Ashley] The Turks had
a very tough of expulsion
of those who were not Turkish citizens.
At the beginning of the war,
6,000 Russian Jewish residents
of Jaffa were ordered to
leave the city immediately.
Many of them were forcibly
deported to Alexandria, Egypt.
Thousands of other Jews fled the country
in the face of Turkish oppression.
David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi,
among other leaders of the
Jewish community were expelled.
It is estimated that
eight to 10,000 Jews died
in Palestine in the first
two years of the war,
most of them from hunger and disease.
The Jewish community in Palestine shrank
by nearly one-third during the war.
The community was spared
total destruction due in part
to Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish ambassador
from the United States,
to the Ottoman Turks,
who facilitated bringing
American aid to the Jews
of Palestine prior to America's
entry into the war in 1917.
- Morgenthau, in 1914,
contacted friends in New York.
Zionists and anti-Zionists raised funds,
at least $50,000 as an emergency drive,
then another $100,000 came to him.
He carried it literally in
gold coins at his request
into Eretz Israel, and the
monies helped the Yishuv.
That's how grim the situation was.
- [Ashley] Caught between the
Turks who controlled Palestine
and the uncertainty of
the outcome of the war,
Zionists remained politically neutral.
But all this changed
when the British decided
to break a stalemate in
the war by landing an army
at Gallipoli, Turkey, in order to attack
and take the Austrian and
German armies from the rear.
Jews, including many from Palestine,
and the highly decorated
Jewish Russian officer,
Joseph Trumpeldor formed
the Zion Mule Corps
and volunteered to fight for the British.
However, after nine
months of fierce fighting
and terrible losses, the attempt failed,
and the British were forced to withdraw.
In October, 1917, under
General Sir Edmund Allenby,
the British invaded Palestine.
With the Allies on the advance,
Jews did not remain passive.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the
leading Zionist writer
and activist, organized the Jewish legion,
and 6,500 young Jews volunteered
to assist the British
in attempting to expel the Turks.
- Jabotinsky understood
this was the right moment
to strike, while the iron was hot.
Jabotinsky's position was clear.
Only by fighting does a
nation gain its independence.
- [Ashley] At this time,
1.5 million Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire were being
systematically exterminated
by the Turks, and the
Jews of Palestine feared
that they would face the same tragedy.
It was only the capture of
Palestine by the British
that forestalled such a fate.
On December 11th, 1917,
the triumphant entry
of the British troops
led by General Allenby
into the old city of
Jerusalem heralded a new era
of hope for the Jews of Palestine.
- Allenby, weened on the Bible,
when he was ready to enter the old city,
he dismounted from his
horse and entered on foot,
because he did not want
to appear as the conqueror
but rather a humble human
being entering God's territory.
Everyone within the
Yishuv believed the aura,
the biblical promise, is
going to be fulfilled.
This is the divine hour.
Now the Jews should
stream to the Holy Land,
'cause now the British will
implement these things.
And Jabotinsky and the
elders believed it as well.
They were soon to be
disabused of this hope.
The British military soon enough turned
against the Zionists.
- [Ashley] The British supported Hussein,
the Sharif of Mecca and the head
of the Bedouin Hashemite tribes,
and assisted by the
legendary Lawrence of Arabia,
they revolted against their
common enemy, the Turks.
They subsequently swept the Turks out
of the Arabian peninsula and
parts of Transjordan and Iraq.
All three separate groups,
the British, the Jews
and the Arabs played a
role in freeing Palestine
from the grip of the Ottoman Empire.
Each group, with its own interests,
had territorial claims on Palestine.
This would create a conflict of interest
that continues to characterize
the Middle East to this day.
(explosion roars)
While World War I was raging in Europe,
the most dramatic set of events to unfold
in 1917 were taking place in Russia.
There the majority of the people lived
under the severe oppression of the czar,
in dire poverty and with
increasing social unrest.
- I can literally say that a
bunch of disgruntled women,
standing on a breadline
in Saint Petersburg,
started murmuring, "Why do we
have to stand on line so much
"for a simple loaf of bread?"
And the policemen there heard them
and said, "How dare you speak that way!"
Things escalated to the point
where the women wound up
saying, "Down with the czar."
The police reacted predictably.
The conflict escalated predictably.
Soldiers were called in
to put down the revolt.
And lo and behold, the soldiers
took the side of the women.
The Russian army began
to desert in droves.
And the czarist regime
literally melted away.
This was a mass, spontaneous uprising,
which then began to spread
to the rest of the country.
- [Ashley] This civilian revolt
and military mutiny forced the czar
to abdicate in March, 1917.
A provisional parliamentary
government headed
by Alexander Kerensky was established.
In the next several months,
an alternative form of government emerged
called Soviets of Workers',
Peasants' and Soldiers'.
It was dominated by
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
Both were Marxian socialists.
A large and evil force was
about to take center stage.
By the fall of 1917, the power
of the Soviets had increased,
and their leader Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin gave the signal
to seize power.
Bolshevik forces led by
Lenin's Jewish assistant,
Lev Davidovich Bronstein,
known as Leon Trotsky,
stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd
and threw out the provisional government.
- They then took the czar and his family,
and under the direction of a Jew,
named Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov,
who was effectively the Prime Minister
of the Bolshevik government,
the czar and his family
were shot in the Ural Mountains.
Now there has been a big debate
about who really was
responsible for the murder
of the czar and his family.
- The great Talmudic sage Hillel stated
that because you have destroyed others
so shall you be destroyed.
And those that destroy you,
shall in turn be destroyed.
But who in the fervor of the
Bolshevik Revolution took heed
of Hillel's statement?
And who realized that
Providence rules the world
measure-for-measure, and
that within 75 years,
the communists themselves would fall?
- [Ashley] The Bolshevik
Revolution threw Russia
into a ferocious civil war
that lasted almost four years.
It was between the Whites,
anti-communist forces led
by officers faithful to
the czar, the old order,
and the Reds, the communist,
Bolshevik revolutionaries.
Lenin ruthlessly eliminated all opposition
to his elite ruling power.
And with an eye towards
transforming Russia
into a Marxist utopia,
signed the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
to end the war between Russia and Germany.
- The peace agreement between Russia
and Germany was negotiated
for the Russian side
by two Jews, Joffe and Trotsky.
And they're the ones that signed it.
Then, Stalin got rid of both of them.
- [Ashley] The Bolshevik
Revolution immediately embarked
on a ruthless campaign to make atheism
the universal doctrine
of the Soviet Empire.
And Lenin instituted a reign of terror
that would last for 50 years.
(somber piano music)
By the end of 1920, 50,000
people had been murdered
under the Cheka, the secret police
that reported exclusively to Lenin.
And if the pages of
Jewish history could cry,
how many tears would be shed
at the terribly painful irony
that many of the leaders of
this communist revolution
and subsequent Bolshevik
government were Jews.
- Many brilliant Jews, some
imbued with the fiery spirit
of their Hasidic ancestors, and others,
from their superior,
sharpened intellect inherited
from scores of generations
of Torah scholars,
once again came to invent the new Jew.
This time a communist Jew.
And in the process, millions
of Jews were destroyed,
spiritually, and many of them physically,
by the terrible results
of the zealous, misguided
Marxist ideology,
which was adopted by the communists.
- [Ashley] In 1917, for
the Jews in Palestine,
hopes flickered in the
form of a letter written
by the British foreign secretary
and former prime minister,
Lord Arthur Balfour to
Lord Rothschild of London,
declaring that His
Majesty's Government view
with favor the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people.
A subsequent clause referring to the civil
and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities
in Palestine would
foreshadow the stubborn,
underlying territorial
conflict in the Middle East.
- The Zionist hopes that the
Balfour Declaration would
in fact signal the mighty imperialism
of Britain's willingness
to carry out that pledge
to create that Jewish
national homeland in Palestine
would be in fact implemented
quickly was soon to be dashed.
Those hopes falling on the
rocks of British imperialism,
strategy, Arab opposition.
- Despite the Balfour Declaration,
and the seeming affinity
of England towards Jews,
German Jews remained
steadfastly loyal to Germany
during the war, unaware of
course of how Germany would turn
on them just 20 years later.
- [Ashley] In April,
1917, almost three years
after it had started, the
Americans finally joined the war.
Germany had miscalculated.
They assumed that they would
be able to emerge victorious
before America could marshal it's forces.
It was a costly mistake.
(cannon fires)
(explosions roar)
In 1918, the last year of the war,
Germany eventually broke
through the Allied defense lines
in the West, but with
their resources exhausted,
the Germans were finally
stopped short of reaching Paris.
The Allied blockade of
Germany had reduced much
of the population to hunger.
The German chancellor resigned,
as did the government.
The German general staff
despaired of ever winning the war.
The Allies then made a fatal mistake.
The Allied military commanders
wanted to invade Germany
and destroy its military infrastructure.
However, the Allied governments
bowed to public opinion.
And on November the 11th,
1918, the armistice was signed
on the Western Front.
The Great War was over.
But without a decisive peace treaty,
and with over 10 million dead,
Germany's military might, it's leadership
and infrastructure were left
intact, ready to rise again
under Hitler, less than two decades later.
- [Reporter] November the 11th,
1918, a day of jubilation.
The Great War is over.
- World War I, though it began in 1914
and ended on November 11th, 1918,
is the end of the 19th century.
I mean by that that the
political and cultural orders
that had been in place
throughout the 19th century
were smashed by the war.
Psychologically, the
war had a greater impact
than World War II.
The nature of fighting was different.
Fighting was face-to-face,
hand-to-hand, trench-to-trench.
Moreover, the war destroyed
four great empires,
the Ottoman, the German,
the Russian and the
Austro-Hungarian, which meant
that the map of Europe was
completely unrecognizable
in 1918 from what it had been in 1913.
And this had an immediate
and direct affect
on the Jews of Europe.
It meant that staying
in the very same place,
where they had been born and lived,
they were now citizens
of a different country.
Jews therefore had to
adjust to a new language,
to a new school system,
to a new army, to a new economy
and to a new government.
By and large, they did this very well,
because they've doing this for centuries.
- After World War I,
when the dust settled,
Turkey had lost almost all of its empire,
except for Turkey itself.
And that affected all
the Jewish populations
who were part of those other countries.
So for example,
once the Ottoman Empire
lost those territories,
it became bad for those Jews,
because the native population,
most of which were Christian,
assumed that the Jews were
on the side of the Ottomans,
and they were persecuted
as being loyal Ottomans.
And it was probably true.
- Jewish history has taught us
that empires come and empires go.
Unlike the Ottoman experience,
we cannot only rely on our host countries
for our long-term security.
Perfect example of this
is the Sephardic Jews,
who under persecution chose
exile from Spain in 1492,
rather than deny their faith.
- Having experienced the expulsion
and all the difficulties surrounding it,
Sephardim did not feel
sorry for themselves.
They did not sit down and
grieve and lick their wounds.
They saw this as one more
bump in the rocky history
of the Jewish people, and
they had to play their role
on the stage of history right now,
making sure that we do the best we can
to maintain these traditions and our faith
and make sure we transmit this
to our children and just hold on.
We're gonna make it.
- We have been through
this many times before,
the Babylonian exile,
the Greeks, the Romans.
What was it that gave us the strength
to survive and continue?
4,000 years of Jewish
experience has shown us
that it was only divine benevolence,
our commitment to Torah
and our faith in God.
That is what has held us together.
(somber music)
- [Ashley] And as before
in Jewish history,
this time in Eastern Europe,
after the destruction caused
by the war and the death
of over a quarter of a
million civilian Jews,
through pogroms, malnutrition,
disease and exposure,
yet again, the challenge
for Jews was how to survive
and hold on to their faith.
At the peace conference at
Versailles, Germany was forced
to take sole responsibility
for starting the war.
Tight strictures were placed on it
to make sure it would never be able
to dominate Europe militarily.
The Allies demanded $23 trillion
in reparations from the Germans.
And as with the Ottomans,
they were required
to hand over all their colonial
territories to the victors,
with Great Britain taking the lion's share
of the Middle East.
The loss of the war and
the tough conditions
of the treaty left
Germany's economy in ruins
and its people humiliated and embittered.
This together with the fact
that many of the requirements
of the treaty, including
the drastic reduction
of Germany's military
infrastructure were never fully
enforced would have dire
consequences in the coming decades.
One of the central
agreements at Versailles was
to establish the League of Nations,
an international organization
to serve as a place
of mediation between nations in conflict.
The Senate of the United States refused
to ratify the Versailles Treaty
or allow the United States
to join the League of Nations.
After its losses in the Great War,
America didn't want to involve
itself in Europe's conflicts.
The government and the people
of the United States entered
into an extended period of isolationism
that would have sad effects on Europe
and eventually in World
War II on America itself.
(somber music)
The return of peace did
not end the suffering
of the Jews in war-ravaged Europe.
In the Balkans and Eastern Europe,
small, ferocious ethnic wars continued
in the aftermath of the armistice.
From 1918 through 1920,
in Ukraine and Poland,
more than 2,000 pogroms
occurred, far more devastating
than the notorious
Kishinev massacre of 1903.
30,000 Jews were killed.
500,000 were left homeless.
And another 150,000 Jews died of injuries,
starvation, disease and exposure.
And to compound this misery,
a plague of influenza swept
through the world in 1918
to 1919 and brought death
to more than 20 million people.
If this wasn't enough, in late-1919,
a territorial war broke out
between Russia and Poland.
It was fought predominantly
in areas occupied by Jews.
Several hundred thousand
people were killed,
and 275,000 Jewish children were orphaned.
- The Great War and the Bolshevik
Revolution should be seen
as the beginning of the end
of Eastern European Jewry.
Even though no one then could
ever have imagined the tragedy
of the Holocaust, and no one
could imagine what would occur
to Jewish life only 20
years later in Europe,
it is obvious that the old
world of the shtetl was coming
to an end, and another
chapter in Jewish history,
with its own new challenges
was about to begin.
- [Ashley] Even after all
the war, killing, bloodshed
and death, by 1920, it became evident
that most of the new countries of Eastern
and Central Europe were not tolerant
of their Jewish minority populations.
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania
and Hungary did not attempt
to hide their irrationally
antisemitic attitudes.
- The Soviet Union was a different story,
because the Soviet state, by and large,
controlled Soviet society.
And the Soviet state was
committed to fight antisemitism.
This was part of the
larger Bolshevik ideology
of being against ethnic discrimination,
and it promoted what they
called druzhba narodov,
the friendship of the
peoples, including Jews.
Jews were designated by the Soviet state,
not as a religious group
but as an ethnic group, as a nationality,
like Poles, Ukrainians, Kirghiz, Kazakhs,
Uzbeks, Lithuanians and so on.
There was of course
grassroots antisemitism
in the Soviet Union.
People didn't change
their habits overnight
just because of the revolution.
But it could not be expressed openly.
And the state would arrest people
and condemn people were they
to engage in antisemitic acts.
This was also the period when contrary
to the situation before 1917,
where less than 1,000
Jews were Bolsheviks,
that larger and larger numbers of Jews,
first, entered the Soviet government,
and second, entered the
Communist party, why?
Because this was a fantastic,
unimaginable opportunity
for Jews, who before 1917,
could not even be policemen
or postman or government
clerks under the czars.
And now the Bolsheviks
said, "You can go as far
"as your talents, energies
and desires will take you."
This was a tremendous
opening of opportunity,
undreamed of by Jews here to fore.
There was a price to be paid.
If you wanted to advance
in Soviet society,
you had to throw away your religion,
whatever your religion
was, in this case, Judaism.
You had to give up any
nationalism, any Zionism.
You had to forget about Hebrew.
You could still speak Yiddish, yes.
That was approved, but generally speaking,
it was clear that Russian was the key
to upward mobility and success.
(dramatic drum music)
- [Ashley] In Russia, every ism other
than communism was under attack.
All traditional religious
and Zionist Jewish life began
to be ruthlessly swept away
by the Communist regime,
the Bund the Zionists, the yeshivas,
the great rabbinic scholars
and Hasidic masters,
the writers and poets of the Haskalah,
and the intellectual dreamers.
The shtetl and its traditional
way of life were now
under a tyranny possibly
darker and more destructive
than that of the czars.
- But we Jews are a resilient people.
We've always been able to rise
no matter what has occurred to us.
The story of the Jewish
people is our survival.
We've always been able
to survive everything
that has come our way.
It's not without a cost.
It's not without tears and pain and blood.
But the core of Israel,
the core of the Jewish
people, always survives.
- [Ashley] There was an exodus
of Russian Jews to Poland,
Lithuania and America.
Yeshivas and their faculties,
many of which had been exiled deep
into Russia during the
war, endeavored to return
to Poland and Lithuania.
By 1920, a number of them
had successfully escaped,
returned west and
reestablished themselves anew.
But the Russian exit door
would soon be slammed shut,
trapping millions of
Jews in a Marxist exile
for the next 70 years.
(energetic piano music)
In America, Jews mobilized in an attempt
to aid their stricken European brethren.
The Joint Distribution
Committee, which had started
in 1914, to help the
poverty-stricken Jews in Palestine,
now took on the added responsibilities
of bringing material relief
to the destitute Jews in war-torn Europe.
- The Joint Distribution Committee,
or as it came to be
known just as the Joint,
deserves a special place
in the hearts of Jews,
not only for its work during World War I
and its aftermath, but
for its continuing efforts
on behalf of Jews
throughout the 20th century.
By the way, it should be noted
that it wasn't just organized
charities that helped.
Individual Jews in America and worldwide,
many of whom barely scraped
together enough money
to support themselves and their families,
nevertheless set aside part
of their wages and earnings
to send back to their relatives in Europe.
One of the noblest characteristics
of the Jewish people is that
despite our ideological,
cultural and individual differences,
Jews unite to help each
other in times of trouble.
- [Ashley] But the challenges facing Jews
were not just physical.
With the increase of
immigration to America,
the new challenge was spiritual.
- Judaism, until the modern
period, was never endangered.
It was never endangered.
Jews were endangered,
very different situation.
But the Jewish Yiddish
Karaite was never endangered,
because we were structurally involved
and linked to our own communities.
That was the nature of our relationship
with the world around us.
In modern times, and
particularly the United States,
it is the crisis of voluntarism.
You're being a Jew is
something that you selected,
something you choose.
And when Jews are given
options, and good options,
favorable options, it
makes the perpetuation
of Judaism far more
problematic than ever before.
(somber piano music)
- [Ashley] To stem the
tide of assimilation,
educators tried different ways
to invigorate Jewish
education and to inspire
and bring the meaning and
value of Torah Judaism
to the immigrants' children.
With the exception of the
Hebrew Theological College,
founded in 1919 in Chicago by
Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Rubinstein.
the few yeshivas, the
religious schools of that era,
were located in New York.
Yeshivas Etz Chaim, which
had started in 1886,
as the first Orthodox yeshiva in America,
became the Rabbi Isaac
Elchanan Theological Seminary,
or RIETS as it became known in 1897.
In 1915, Rabbi Dr. Bernard
Revel became president.
As a pioneer of American
Orthodoxy, he knew only too well
what would happen if authentic
Torah education failed
to take root in America.
- Rabbi Dr. Bernard Revel
believed that the Western culture
and secular studies and
American life were positive
and could be brought into the confines
of the Orthodox Jewish world,
and that they would not
be inimical to the ideas
of Torah and to the ideas of faith,
and that they could be synthesized.
- [Ashley] Later, RIETS evolved
into today's Yeshiva University.
Another seminal institution,
Yeshiva Torah Vodaas,
was founded in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Under Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz
who came to America in 1914,
it took a more traditional,
specialized approach.
- Rabbi Mendlowitz allowed
his students to go to college,
for instance, the
students of Torah Vodaas,
but Torah Vodaas would
not contain a college
within its walls.
- [Ashley] Rabbi Mendlowitz,
or Mr. Mendlowitz,
as he liked to be called,
was acutely aware of Jewish history
and how central Torah
was to Jewish survival.
He reasoned that while so many Jews
who were being distracted and
divorced from their Judaism,
Torah Vodaas should
concentrate and specialize
in producing productive
graduates whose main focus
and love in life would be Torah.
- Both streams, so to speak,
have proven successful.
They have both grown.
They both exist.
They both fight each other.
And these two people,
Revel and Mr. Mendlowitz,
are really the pioneers of American Jewry,
American Orthodox Jewry in
every sense of the word.
- [Ashley] Reformed Judaism, dominated
by its founding German Jewish
enlightenment ideology,
continued to pursue its
more radical mandate
of challenging the divinity of the Torah,
opposing Zionism and denouncing
traditional Jewish ritual
as old-fashioned and anachronistic.
In 1913, the conservative movement headed
by Dr. Solomon Schechter, the president
of the Jewish Theological Seminary,
created the United Synagogue of America,
which described its theology
as tradition without Orthodoxy.
With this shift to a
more lenient approach,
conservative Judaism allowed
itself to conform more and more
to the desires of its
congregants, who for the most part
were becoming increasingly assimilated.
Both the conservative and
reform movements continued
to grow attracting many of
the children and grandchildren
of the Orthodox immigrants.
(bright piano music)
The immigrants to
America had instinctively
recreated the Old World on the sidewalks
and in the tenements
of the Lower East Side.
Their self-contained
society would eventually
become extinct, due to the
impact of the New World
and the influence of the new technologies,
the radio, the airplane, the automobile
and perhaps most powerful of
all, the movies from Hollywood,
produced by studios which
were founded mainly by Jews,
from the shtetls of Eastern Europe.
- With social and educational progress
and economic opportunity,
life for the Jews
in the next decade would take
on a structure of its own.
Strongly influenced by the secular society
in which they now lived.
Jews would experience that
no matter how hard they tried
to invent the new Jew and
to realign their loyalties
and fashion themselves as model citizens
in their new worlds,
there would be challenges
to that new Jew and that the attempt
to separate the Jew from himself
in order to thwart him
from his own divine nature
and destiny would result in
very, very difficult times.
- [Ashley] 1911 to 1920
had been a brutal decade,
both physically and spiritually.
The future of the small
Jewish community in Palestine,
like the future of their fellow Jews
in Europe remained uncertain.
But with the end of
the war and the promise
of the Balfour Declaration,
it seemed optimistic.
In Russia, with another
swing of the pendulum,
Russian Jews had slipped into darkness.
While American Jewry accelerated
into the roaring '20s.
(upbeat piano music)
(bat thwacks)
(crowd cheers)
(upbeat piano music)
