Free When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman Page A

Ohio University and earned a PhD in organic chemistry. He decided to work for the government because he'd been told that as a Jew, he'd have a hard time finding work with a private corporation (at the time, companies like DuPont still had an unspoken quota system). Also, his wife, Evy—whom he'd met in Brooklyn College at an evening of Palestinian folk dancing—had family in Cleveland.
    But the loss of a Jewish community in those western suburbs was palpable. Even though he'd never been religious, Rosenblum missed the social role that a synagogue provided. Driving to the east side of the city for services was almost impossible. It took an hour over roads that were still cobbled. Rosenblum was stuck. Yet many of the almost twelve hundred people working at the NACA lab were Jews, including the lab's director, Abe Silverstein. Rosenblum realized that this was a large enough pool of young Jewish families to feed a new congregation. With the help of his boss, who would become the first temple president, Rosenblum and twenty-five families started Beth Israel in 1954.
    The congregation grew throughout the fifties, taking on more and more young families and eventually acquiring the building of the older west side synagogue. Cut off from the established Jewish center of Cleveland, the congregants had to build their community from scratch. If they wanted a day school for the children, they had to create one themselves. They developed a culture of self-sufficiency and volunteerism.
    It was out of this congregation that Rosenblum and a few other men formed their study group in 1962. It included people like Herb Caron, a clinical psychologist who worked at the local VA hospital treating veterans. Caron, a logical, academic-minded man, broke down in tears when he first read
Perfidy.
Many of the men had similar reactions. If they had been part of a larger community, perhaps the anger and pain they felt would never have risen to the surface. But in their small, isolated congregation, they encouraged one another and convinced themselves that they needed to do something productive with their outrage.
    At the same time, they began examining what could rightly be called the "Passion of Jabotinsky." With more force than any other Zionist leader, Jabotinsky had warned his fellow Jews about what Hitler's rise to power would mean for them. Joseph Schechtman's biography, the second and last volume of which,
Fighter and Prophet,
was published at the end of 1961, describes the tragic, final years of Zionism's most hard-line leader. Jabotinsky traveled widely, desperate to convince anyone who would listen that horrors awaited European Jewry. In an address given in Warsaw in 1937, on the mournful ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, Jabotinsky warned that "the catastrophe is coming closer. I become gray and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano that will soon begin to spit out its all consuming lava." All that was left to do, Jabotinsky said, was "eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you." He died of a stroke in the Catskills, in upstate New York, in August of 1940. He was visiting a Betar summer camp as part of this campaign to preach his warning to the Western world.
    Jabotinsky's words and, even more, the facts of his life had a strong effect on the group of middle-aged Jewish men in Cleveland. His ferocity stood in stark contrast to what they were coming to see as the shameful inaction of the Jewish establishment during the war. Those venerable leaders, some of whom were still alive and leading, had been too scared to push hard for fear of undermining their own positions. They were too cautious, too respectable. They fought one another more than they fought the government. They weren't desperate enough. They never got down on their hands and knees and pleaded. They never lay down in the streets and refused to move. Jabotinsky's legacy was the opposite. He fought.