50 Years to the Six Day War- Personal Recollections of a Young Lobbyist

50 Years to the Six Day War- Personal Recollections of a Young Lobbyist

How can I convey to a young Jewish college student today what it was like to be a Jew before 1967?

Today, I hear of talk of us Jews as “White and privileged” and therefore, the Jewish narrative of suffering is irrelevant compared to the suffering of everyone else in America- except, of course, whoever is “White”. So, in this mix, my fellow Jews from Iran, you are white, my wife’s family, from Yemen, are white, but Muslims from the same countries are not white.

So let me step back from my rant, and look back, before 1967, at what it meant to be a Jew whether in the US, under the best of circumstances, or in the Soviet Union, under much less than ideal circumstances, or even in Iran, under the Shah.

We had barely survived the Holocaust when one third of our number vanished. True, the birth of Israel gave us all a major boost, yet that State was still a nebulous, unsure entity. It had held back the invasion, at its birth, of six Arab armies. It had pushed back the Egyptians in 1956 to the Suez Canal, yet its standing was not yet solid. There were constant terror attacks by Fedayeen gangs from Gaza and from Jordan-occupied West Bank. Oh, did I forget to add that Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan and neither of these occupiers offered Palestinians a state when they had it in their power to do so. Then, on top of it all , the Syrians were constantly shelling the farmers in the Galilee below their positions on the Golan Heights.

Jews were being expelled en masse from the Middle East, from lands we had lived in for five centuries before Christianity, a thousand years before Islam. Yes, the supposedly tolerant Islamic world suddenly had no room for Jews that were indigenous to the Middle East. This was the epitome of racism.

In the Soviet Union, to be a Jew was to live with a liability that blocked all avenues of advancement. Almost one third of our people trapped in limbo. Jews could live as individuals as long as they sacrificed their souls on the altar of Marxism-Leninism.

Even here, in the United States, in the most prosperous and secure Jewish community in history, we Jews were, internally, still insecure. I recall that my father served a congregation in the suburbs of  Washington, DC. The President of the congregation , himself a refugee, still spoke with a heavy accent, and since the members were all involved, in some way, with government work, they were concerned that my father did not sound American enough. That is the kind of insecurity that we Jews had absorbed, even if the American non-Jew, himself or herself, could not really care.

I myself had just begun college in the fall of 1966. We had a Jewish student’s group on campus and it was active, yet it could involve only a fraction of the much larger number of Jewish students on campus. This was New York University, after all. This was their exclusive campus, in the Bronx, that had, until a few years before, restricted access to Jews. It opened doors wide only when it received a huge donation for a new dormitory less than a decade before. Furthermore, Jewish students had bigger fish to fry-- the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the beginnings of Hippy and Yippy-dom.

Then, that   May of 1967, Egypt’s Nasser closed access to the Straits of Tiran. This was an outright violation of the terms of the cease fire agreements of the Suez Canal Crisis and the Sinai War of 1956. This meant that no ships bound for Israel could get to Eilat, which in turn meant that oil shipments, from an unnamed, anonymous, Middle Eastern Farsi speaking country, could not get through. This in itself was an existentialist threat to the survival of Israel and, by international law, grounds for war.   Nasser ordered the UN forces out of the Sinai (which politely obliged him without a peep, meaning, for Israel that international guarantees were worthless), and then massed tanks and troops in the Sinai. This was a larger massing of tanks in North Africa than that of the campaigns between Montgomery and Rommel in World War II.  In Israel, mass graves were being readied. It now has been revealed that Israeli intelligence knew, before anyone else, that Nasser had chemical weapons of mass destruction and had used them on his fellow Arabs in Yemen just a few years earlier. Arab leaders never had mercy on their fellow Arabs. Go ask Saddam Hussein and Bashir Assad. (Israel had supplied the anti-Nasser forces with weapons and had their people on the ground in Yemen).

Even here, in America, the tension for us Jews was palpable.

Then Vice-President Hubert Humphrey spoke to the convention of the Conservative Rabbis, which my father attended, that the United States of America would protect Israel. “Trust me”, he assured the assembly, as my father relayed to me. No assistance came forth; instead, President Johnson warned Israel not to initiate a pre-emptive strike.

In June, the fighting broke out; Israel scrambled jets and tanks. One the first day, they broke the back of the Arab air forces, on the second day, they broke the back of Egypt’s tank forces, on the third day, they liberated the old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall, on the fourth day, they broke the back of the Jordanian army , the best trained fighting force in the Arab world, and on the sixth day, they drove tanks up mountains where tanks could not go and made their way to Damascus. On the Seventh Day, they rested.

American Jewry scrambled as well- to demonstrate support for Israel.

My father served at the time as Rabbi of a small Jewish community in the heart of West Virginia. The Jews of West Virginia, as did those of the rest of the country, sent delegations; we were joined by noted journalist and biographer of Ben Gurion, Robert St. John. At the time, I was home on vacation from NYU and the community wanted a young presence to go with them. I was selected to join the delegation and I presume that I must have been one of the youngest lobbyists at that epochal event.

 We flew out of the small airport on one of the last of the DC-3s to still be flying. (As I said, it was a small airport on top of a hill in a very hilly land).

In Washington, we met with our Senators and Congressmen. We had one Senator, Jennings Randolph, who was “ Shomer Shabbat”, kept the Shabbat, but he was not Jewish. He was a Seventh Day Baptist ( different form Adventist) , and he, long before Senator Joe Lieberman, would not show up at Senate business on Shabbat. He assured us of his support and made mention of his being the only Sabbath-keeper in the Senate.( The great Jewish Senator of that time, Jacob Javitz, did not keep Shabbat ).

It was our meeting with the other Senator, though, that was significant. It was Senator Robert  Byrd, who had just become the leader of the Senate Democrats, who made the great impression on us.

Senator Byrd was leveraging his long-career in the Senate (since the early fifties) to move up in the ranks. By 1967. he had become the Secretary of the Democratic Majority and he was a close friend of President Johnson. He had, in his early years, been a member of the notorious Ku Klux Klan, bona fide racist and anti-Semite, but he had seen the light and the changes coming to America.

Ten years earlier, he told us, when the first Suez Campaign broke out in 1957, he had been a vocal opponent of Israel’s actions, as were President Eisenhower  and Secretary of State Dulles. At that time, he was sure that Israel was in the wrong to go into the Sinai.

This time, all was different.

He had studied the documents and treaties regarding the rights to the use of the Suez Canal and access to Eilat through the Straits of Tiran. Egypt, this time, was the aggressor and the closures were clearly causus belli. Israel was acting in self defense.

Furthermore, the next morning, he declared, he would introduce a major appropriations bill on the floor of the Senate for immediate funding and arms for Israel. Indeed, that is what happened next. Appropriations were issued, President Johnson met with his Soviet counterpart as Glassboro State College, and the US replaced France as Israel’s great ally. The rest is history.

Did we, the tiny Jewish community of West Virginia, cause this change of heart? I would love to take the credit, but more probably, it was Senator Byrd, who looked to the changing landscape of America, and saw his future in the new direction of America—Israel as an ally and an America open to all races and creed. This was a major shift for a master politician who knew how to move ahead. He became the longest serving member of the United State Senate and the most powerful Senator as Majority leader, third in line of succession to the White House.

The Arab world did not change. The Arab League of Nations responded to Israel’s offers of negotiating a return of the territories with the “Three Nos” of Khartoum: “No negotiations, no recognition of Israel, and no peace.”

It would take another major war, the Yom Kippur War, to lead to an actual peace accord with Egypt. It would take more decades , a fake peace by the PLO, and finally the threat of a nuclear Iran to bring the Arab world to a recognition that they were better off on Israel’s side, not against it.

But what changed here, with us as Jews?

When I came back to my campus that all, and led the Jewish students group on campus, the atmosphere was electric. Suddenly, all realized they were Jewish. Suddenly, the administration showed an interest in a kosher cafeteria. Suddenly, the faculty discovered Hebrew as a language. The downtown campus had a long standing and prominent Hebrew language department.( That campus, by the way, is at the Washington Square arch that you see in every romance movie filmed New York and I later would have my office, as director of the Jewish student group, right by that arch. It was also the site of the very first telegram sent and the very first major computer-one city block wide ).

The uptown Bronx campus was a very different entity from the rest of NYU at that time. It had always seen itself as on a par with the Ivy Leagues, was home to the original Hall of Fame, and had always refused to introduce Hebrew! As I said, for a long time, it had a numerus clausus policy towards Jews.

We wanted Hebrew as  an academic language. The faculty Senate had skeptical views of our request for Hebrew: Hebrew is a dead language, Hebrew has no literature , like Swahili.( Our campus Rabbi, from South Africa, lectured them on Swahili.)

But here is my key point: we had energy! Like all good college students of the age, we staged a sit-in in the dean’s office.(At the same time, major donors were holding off donations until we got our way. I learned then how university administrators can be easily manipulated by their students; true in the 60’s, true today).

This was but one small aspect of the change that came over the Jewish world.

The campaign for the cause of Soviet Jewry led ultimately to opening the gates of the Iron Curtain to Jews to leave and it was a factor in the collapse of Communism as an ideology.

There was a resurgence of interest in all things Jewish. Look Magazine would have a cover issue on the Vanishing American Jew. Look Magazine vanished, not American Jewry.

The cause of Israel has become the one thing that both parties in America support. Israel has been considered by the US military as its “Aircraft carrier” in the Middle East, an integral element in America’s defense.

These are but a few of the effects that we, Jews world wide, have experienced from the event 50 years ago. Let no one tell you that Israel or world Jewry would have been better off if that event had not taken place. Fools die out very quickly. Israel is here to stay. Am Yisrael Chai.

The Jews of Clarksburg , West Virginia

The Jews of Clarksburg , West Virginia

My father , the late Rabbi William Weinberg, came to Clarksburg, West Virginia in 1963 and served as Rabbi of Etz Chaim Congregation till 1969.

Here was a worldly-wise man who had lived in Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, and lastly, Washington, D.C. What could possibly satisfy him in a small town of at best 28,000 population at that time. It was a long 12 hour drive over a winding highway to his previous home, Washington, and a 4 to 5 hour drive, also over twisted terrain, to the nearest major Jewish community, Pittsburgh, PA.

When I was a student at New York University, my dorm-mates were perplexed by this town they had never heard of, except, almost, in a song by the TV-series rock group, The Monkeys, “ Take the Last Train to Clarksville”( but “ville” , not “burg”). Finally, they were satisfied that indeed, such a place existed, because, on one  of the last episodes of “ The Fugitive”, the hero escape through a tunnel, which, he is told, will take him into Clarksburg.

Nevertheless, he said, in a thought that presaged the universality of communications of the iphone and wi-fi  era, nothing is distant anymore—all the benefits of sophisticated society could be found through movies and television and a good record could substitute for a symphony orchestra. A man who had survived Nazi prisons, concentration camp, and exile in the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union could make his home anywhere.

In truth, this town, despite its size and geographic isolation had its own element of sophistication. It was the birthplace of noted Civil War General Stonewall Jackson.  ( One of the members of the Jewish community, S. Joseph Birshtein was himself an authority on Jackson.) The graduates of my high school, Washington Irving, went on to significant universities; a small neighboring college, Salem, had moved its center to Clarksburg and was drawing students to it  from New York City. There was a local amateur theater company and cultural events of its own.

It also had a Jewish community which supported the Etz  Chaim Congregation ( recently disbanded, however).  They were key players in the civil society.

There were two rival  pharmacy and general supplies stores along Main Street.  The stores constantly advertised promotions to draw customers one form the other. What was not known was that both stores belonged to the Gottlieb family. This played to the benefit of the other local merchants despite what may have seemed unfair competition. One year, a discount store, in the style of a Kmart or Target, first opened in the outskirts of town, offering a huge selection, deep discounts, and ,above all else, easy parking. This was devastating to the local business—here was a one-stop shop all location, so close, why shop locally.

This did not phase the Gottliebs- they simply upped the ante, began an even more intensive rivalry between their two stores, the local customers stayed in town to catch their bargains, and , on their way  in and out, shopped at the other local merchants. Business stayed in town.

Another successful local Jewish business was the Workingman’s Store, a men’s clothier that carried both work clothes, as the name indicated, as well as a line of dress suits. The founder, Berman, was in his 80’s when he went to visit Israel and climbed the long ascent  to Masada, to that date, the oldest man to have made the climb since Josephus time. ( I did the ascent myself when I was 20, and it left me breathing hard. A cable car has since made that ascent easier and no longer a challenge).

Jews from distant towns made their way to Clarksburg for Jewish education for their children. One such family would come in every Sunday from Elkins, at least an hours drive in winding roads, where they had a lumber mill.

On the Shabbat of their  child’s Bar Mitzvah, the grandfather came to shule, took one look at the president, and told the Rabbi- Oh, my gosh! I know who he is! I put him in jail overnight!”

No big crime here. The president,Mr. Weiner,  who ran a successful scrap metal business, had come as a poor immigrant from Lithuania, and started in the West Virginia towns as an itinerant peddler, a fine tradition started by the likes of the founders of Macy’s. At the same time, this Jewish resident of Elkins served as the mayor, sheriff, judge, clerk  all rolled in one. The peddler came to town and it turned out, the town had a rule against wandering peddlers. He had to cool his heels overnight in the local clinker . Many years later, this pillar of the Jewish community, and a generous philanthropist, would preside at the service of his jailor’s grandson.

Jewish life for a teenager consisted of the local AZA-BBG, the Bnai Brith Youth affiliate, with at most a minyan of members. Obviously, one of the greatest worries for their parents was interdating—with such a small pool to chose from,  young Jews didn’t easily date each other—they had grown up  together, afterall, and were too close. The big event of Jewish life for the teens, therefore, consisted of pilgrimages to our fellow teenagers in Uniontown, McKeesport, or the great Mecca for us, Pittsburgh, a good four hour drive over winding road. Occasionally, our counterparts would make the trek to Clarksburg in return. Here was the chance to find partners that were within the pale of acceptability.

There was never a problem to get a good turnout for services on a Friday evening or Saturday morning, but Shabbat Minhah( afternoon) was a different story. One way to guarantee the tenth man was to pay the congregation’s teenagers for their attendance. This worked well for a while, until, it was told, the teenagers began to organize, demanded a raise, and went on strike. The congregation, in turn, was not intimidated, and fired the strikers. They got the minyan without the hired help.

There was another method for getting the minyan. Across the street from the synagogue was a lodge, I believe it was the Elks, and it held a club card inside. Whenever they were ready for the tenth man, they would call the lodge and the manager would send one of his Jewish members across the street to join the services.

The teenagers, too, who had now been drafted into minyan service without pay, after the failed strike, had their own “lodge”. Next door to the synagogue was the Masonic Temple, which had a youth affiliate, DeMolay, with it’s own club room, featuring a pool table. Here it was that the Jewish youngsters would hang out, waiting for the minyan to start, and it was here that I learned my best shots.

One time, my father asked the president, the same peddler turned philanthropist, why he didn’t bring his elderly mother, who was in New York, to live with him in Clarksburg. After all, it would be no problem for him to hire caretakers for her, and this way, she could enjoy being with her family every day.

But Rabbi,, as you know, when the Moshiach will come, he will raise up the dead and bring them all to Eretz Yisroel.

My mother is worried- the Moshiach will never find Clarksburg!

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Senator Robert Byrd, The Six Day War, and The Jews of West Virginia

(Opinion Appeared in Jewish Journal, July 6, 2010  Rabbi Norbert Weinberg)

 The Story of Senator Robert Byrd and the Six Day War as it appeared in the Jewish Journal

(Following the death of Sen. Byrd)

What did the Rabbi’s son share in common with the Preachers daughter?

Answer: They both kept Shabbat.

I introduce my comments on events in West Virginia of some forty plus years ago,with this curio because West Virginia, like the late Senator, was, when I lived there as a teenager, a state of unusual contradictions, as unusual as the idea of Jews in West Virginia.

Yes,Virginia, there are Jews in West Virginia, and they, together with Senator Byrd, played a significant role in 1967 during the Six-Day War to bolster vital support for Israel from the United States.

My father served as Rabbi to the Jewish community in a small city in the center of the State( Clarksburg), which had been the home town of a former Vice-Presidential candidate.

There were aspects of the state that we associate with hillbillies or the old South. When I went on hikes in the countryside, I could see farmers still plowing their forty acres with a mule. A devout Christian woman from a small neighboring town who read the Bible literally would come to the synagogue on Jewish holidays bearing first fruits from her garden. It was a land marked by coal mines that till today devour those who work them.

The KKK at one time had a strong appeal, and even the late Senator Byrd had his start in their nefarious ranks.It took him a long time to break with old segregationist attitudes ( He tried to block the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and in 1967, opposed Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court , for example. Remember that the Democratic Party has had its great failure in its dealings with African-Americans from before the Civil War until the 1960's).

.

There was a different West Virginia ,as well, and Senator Byrd was aware of it.

The Jewish communities were doing well, and in Clarksburg, the local Jews were active in civic affairs. I personally never experienced any anti-Semitism, joined the local DeMolay (a kind of junior Masons) because the club-house was next door to the synagogue, and hung around at the local YMCA (yes, Christian,not Hebrew) with the rest.

Mother’s Day was an innovation of a church in neighboring Grafton, and my father, as Rabbi, delivered a Sunday sermon on Mother’s Day.

When the Principal of the High School blocked the selection of a black student as a cheerleader, the students made him back down. When Kennedy, a Catholic, ran for the Democratic nomination in 1960. the people of West Virginia, a heavily devoutly Protestant state, gave him the win, a fact which led to his nomination and then Presidency. If  a Catholic could win West Virginia, he could, and did,

win America.

You couldn’t even escape the Beatles craze—I had the first Beatles collarless jacket in town.

As for the Rabbi’s son and the Preacher’s daughter, the two of us would commiserate that we missed out on so many activities that our less religious coreligionists would attend on Friday evenings. Her father was a Minister of the Seventh-Day Baptist ( not Adventist) denomination, similar in all other ways to Baptists except that they insisted on observing the Seventh Day( Shabbat),not the the First Day. 

Another Shabbat observer was Senator Byrd’s colleague, the other Senator from West Virginia, who some forty years before Senator Lieberman, was the only Shabbat-observing Senator.No,not his contemporary , Senator Javitz of New York,but Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia.( He belonged to the same Baptist denomination as my class-mate). 

This factoid leads me now to the Six-Day War.

Recall that in May of 1967, Nasser closed blocked the access to the Straits of Tiran, ordered the UN forces out of the Sinai ( they politely obliged him), and massed tanks and troops in the Sinai. In Israel, mass graves were being readied for the casualties of war.My father reported to me the words of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly that the United

States of America would protect Israel.No assistance came forth.

In June, the fighting broke out; the people of Israel scrambled their jets and American Jewry scrambled as well- to demonstrate support for Israel.

The Jews of West Virginia, as from the rest of the country, sent delegations from the various communities; we were joined by noted journalist and the biographer of Ben Gurion, Robert St. John. At the time, I was home on vacation from NYU, and I was selected to join the delegation.I assume that I was one of the youngest of the delegates to go. We flew out of the small airport on one of the last of the DC-3s to still be flying.( Did I say it was a small airport?)

In Washington, we met with our Senators and Congressmen. The above -mentioned Senator Randolph assured us of his sympathies and made mention of his being the only Sabbath-keeper in the Senate.

It was Senator Byrd, however, who made the great impression on us.Senator Byrd was leveraging his long-career in the Senate ( since the early 50's) to move up in the ranks. By 1967. he became the Secretary of the Democratic Majority and he was a close friend of President Johnson.

Ten years earlier, he told us, when the first Suez Campaign broke out in 1957, he had been a vocal opponent of Israel’s actions, as had President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles. At that time, he was sure that Israel was in the wrong to go into the Sinai.This time, all was different. He had studied the documents and treaties regarding the rights to the use of the Suez Canal and access to Eilat through the Straits of Tiran. Egypt, this time,was the aggressor and the closures were clearly causus belli. Israel was acting in self defense.

Furthermore, the next morning, he declared, he would introduce a major appropriations bill on the floor of the Senate for immediate funding and arms for Israel. Indeed, that is what happened next. Appropriations were issued and President Johnson met with his Soviet counterpart at Glasboro State College. The US replaced France as Israel’s great ally. The rest is history.

Did we, the tiny Jewish community of West Virginia, cause this change of heart?

I would love to take the credit, but more probably, it was Senator Byrd, who looked to the changing landscape of America, and saw his future in the new direction of America—Israel as an ally and an America open to all races and creed. This was a major shift for a master politician who know how to move ahead..He became the longest serving member of the United State and the most powerful Senator as Majority leader and as President Pro Tempore, third in line of succession to the White House.