Q:
The manner in which the Holocaust began in Europe, is the same happening in America, United States?
A:
Now, I wouldn’t even attempt to say anything about that because first of all, it’s pleasant to persuade ourselves that the situation is different here. Nobody likes to think of a Holocaust, chalilah.
Secondly, who am I to make such predictions? You have to have an adam gadol or maybe even a navi.
However one thing is certain. We must learn from the errors of the past. It is certain that the resha’im of the Am Yisroel brought on the Holocaust. There’s no question that the atheists who took over the schools in Poland –the Tarbus schools and the Yiddishist schools – there’s no question that they brought the Holocaust on the Jewish people.
The Chofetz Chaim in his last years, he issued one kol korei after another to warn the people. He said, “Your children are going lost. They’re being raised as atheists, as enemies of the Torah.” All over Poland, the Tarbus schools were flourishing and they were schools where people learned to hate the Torah, to despise frum Jews. The Yiddishist schools were even worse than the Tarbus schools because there, their god was Karl Marx. Socialism was their Torah. And it was spreading all over Poland. It was spreading like wildfire.
If not for the Holocaust, who knows what would have happened to the Jewish people. The batei midrashim were closing down. Where once children had learned all day long and every synagogue was crowded with people, now they emptied out. After World War I, instead of synagogues, you had ‘reading rooms’. And people used to come on Shabbos and weekday evenings in reading rooms and read the literature in Hebrew and Yiddish. And it was all anti-Torah literature.
They used to have dances already in small towns. I myself saw dances in a small town of Lithuania, men and women dancing together in a private home, dancing to music.
And they had chalutzim camps for the youth. You know, between World War I and World War II all the youth dreamed of going to Eretz Yisroel – except the Yiddishist youth. And they had camps outside the towns, chalutzim camps. They called it hachsharah. Hachsharah was a household word and all the youth every evening sat in hachsharah til late at night, boys and girls together singing songs in Hebrew about going up to Eretz Yisroel and establishing kibbutzim, socialist kibbutzim, avodah. It was all in the Karl Marx spirit. And May the First was a big festival there. And so the youth was rapidly going lost.
So we have to learn from that. We have to learn that the liberals, the atheists, the resha’im, are the most dangerous enemies of our people. We have to learn that we have to save the Jewish youth from the street; we have to take them out of the colleges and out of the cults where they’re going lost, where they’re going into the hands of our enemies, going into various kinds of denominations of other religions; we have to try to rescue them. That’s our big job today. We have to build more yeshivas, more Beis Yankevs. You have to support all those institutions with more money.
Of course – and this is number one – our own children must be brought up with a staunch Torah spirit. We have to fight for our youth. That’s our biggest problem today.
And we should know that the liberals, the atheists, the people that are seducing America, the ones that are causing America to become ruined with immorality and radicalism are to a very big extent the Jewish radicals. I don’t want to mention any names here, but if you read the newspapers, who are the ones in the City Council who voted for gay rights? All Jews! Of course we have some fine Jews who voted against gay rights, but there were also Italians, stam goyim, Irishmen, Catholics, who voted against gay rights. But the biggest fighters for gay rights were Jews! And that’s a tragedy of the Jewish people. They’re our enemies, these people.
And certainly we have to learn the lesson. The Holocaust didn’t come for nothing. It’s a great falsehood for people to think that the Jews in Europe were living a life of righteousness and suddenly a Holocaust came. Ach! It’s very far – I was there – very far from the truth.
I was present. I saw Shabbos morning, every Shabbos morning, when I first came 1932, a bus left from Slabodka to Kovno every half hour packed with Jews going to work. Every half hour! In 1938 when I left to come back to America, every five minutes a bus left for Kovno packed with Jews going to work. I went to the harbor port in Kovno in the summertime with a rabbi, a local rabbi, and we saw Jews climbing into steamboats; crowding into steamboats on Shabbos, smoking, and driving down the river to vacation spots on Shabbos. Everything was breaking down rapidly.
And you have to know the ones most responsible were the newspapers, the radical irreligious newspapers, the leaders of the secular Zionists, the Yiddishists – they were the ones who were in control of Jewish public opinion and they were causing the Jewish public to slide downhill rapidly towards destruction.
And we have to learn from that, that our big job is to fight back against this, whether in voting – you should vote only for conservative candidates, no more liberals! No more Democrats! Only for conservative goyim, Italian goyim, if they’re conservatives. We have to vote for them to stop the tide of immorality and radicalism – and also, we also must see that our Torah institutions spread apace. We should bring in boys and girls from the street into the batei knessiyos, into our homes, and make them come back to their heritage and become what they’re supposed to be.
February 4, 1982
