Chapter 11: At the Peace Conference: National Home, Jewish Rights

Chapter 11: At the Peace Conference: National Home, Jewish RightsStanding alone amid the events of that period was the issuance, in 1922, by the League of Nations, of the Mandate for Palestine incorporating the substance of the Balfour Declaration, previously proclaimed by the wartime British government, pledging the establishment in the Holy Land of a "national" home for the Jewish people." This vista of fulfillment of a nineteen-centuries-long dream, albeit reduced to the political definitions of the modem age, fired the hearts of Jews everywhere. Notably, active opposition to issuance of the Declaration and Mandate came less from the Arab world than from assimilation-bent elements mobilized by the Reform Judaism movement. Unable, despite their bitter efforts, to block issuance, this source had contrived through influential connections to engineer a contraction of its terms, with eventual costly results.
The acclaim of the Jewish-minded of all outlooks, voiced for its own American tradition-loyal constituency by the Orthodox Union, was recognized universally as the true manifestation of the Jewish people's position.
At this focal point in history, the thousands of North America's Torahloyal congregations and their congregant families spoke as one through the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.
The Orthodox Union, too, shared in mobilizing American Jewish efforts for securing Jewish rights in the postwar reconstruction of the states of eastern and central Europe. These efforts were channeled within a context of rivalry between the American Jewish Committee and the original American Jewish Congress (not to be confused with the present organization bearing the same name). 'The American Jewish Committee, composed of the wealthiest and most politically influential of the country's Jews and dominated by the assimilation-minded, was opposed to any national consciousness expression. Counter to this, the original American Jewish Congress had been brought together as a roof grouping of established organizations and local communities to work in support of the Jewish commonwealth-in-the-making and for Jewish rights as a national minority in the restored lands of Europe. The Orthodox Union participated in this coalition, and when the American Jewish Committee in its turn sought counter-interorganizational capacity, the Orthodox Union was courted by this entity, also. The relationship with both groups enabled the Union to contribute to the forging between them of a unified approach to Jewish rights issues at the postwar Peace Conference.
Attempts in subsequent years by the UOJCA to exercise meaningful influence on the policies of both the new organization that adopted the name American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee proved futile. Orthodox Union representation in both thus was terminated. In time other 'organizations also withdrew, leaving the two AJCs as individual membership organizations able to speak only for their own members.
CURRENTS OF NEW MOMENTUM
The ongoing overseas relief work of the traditional community continued to function through UOJCA channels. Emissaries of the 'great European yeshivoth, coming to garner funds for their institutions, invariably turned to the central organization and found a ready response. 'The benefits were by no means one-sided. The more personalized tie with the vital centers of the Torah world brought new impetus to American Orthodox Jewry.
These contacts, and the spur of world-shaking events to the sense of historic responsibility, found expression in more broadly conceived developments in elementary education. Bold steps were now made in secondary and advanced Torah learning, as well as in synagogal progress. The current was quickened, too, by the resumption of immigration for a brief few postwar years. In the period from 1920 to 1924, over 250,000 Jews arrived in the United States. Then, a series of discriminatory immigration laws an but dosed America's doors to immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Not for many years-not even in the terrible Holocaust days to come-were the doors to be reopened.
Reflecting modem-age effects, the post-World War I influx brought a greater proportion than before of those who had already gravitated away from traditional adherence. Other newcomers, however, had remained steadfast, bringing new strength to American Torah ranks. The influx included an unprecedented number of eminent rabbis and Torah scholars. Their presence was much felt in both congregational and educational realms.

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The picture of the pioneer Orthodox Union decades that now, in near-century-long perspective, comes into view is one of a diversity of Innovative, path-breaking moves consistent in aim, though not emerging from a planned program of organizational function. Like the makeshift melange of Judaic requisites whose deficiencies the Union was instituted to repair, the Union itself was flung into its work along rather makeshift lines. The activities were integrated only in common relation to the Mendes motive power, which persisted long beyond his presidential tenure. Improvisation spurred by the pressures of given areas of urgent need from the first had become the mode. This nurtured the tendency that in later years, with of activity, led to the many-faceted, but loosely the multiplication of fields 0 integrated, directional and operational structure of the present day.
A well-thought-out formulation of organizational mission, structure, and functional program in application to a carefully studied assessment of objective circumstances was hardly to be expected of the busy up-and-at'em thrust of the early period. When, long after, approaches to broad planning were made, they were crowded out by the pressures of daily demand. A comprehensive blueprint of the why, what, where, when, and how of American Jewish Orthodoxy's central force has yet to be promulgated.
Yet, what emerges in the picture of the Orthodox Jewish Union's beginnings is more than an aggregation of spontaneous actions. Beyond this is to be seen a brave new direction for the Jew of Torah commitment in the New World. We see him in new stance, with a new sense of his place in America and the new-age world.
Not always, in the years and decades to follow, was the purpose to be as dearly grasped, as pointedly directed. That which had been engendered by the founder and his colleagues, however, remained a moving force, bearing the Mendes vision of the American Torah community forward through momentous years to the yet newer age and its yet newer challenges now unfolding.
POINTING THE WAY
For the Orthodox Union, the years were to bring ups and downs rather than continuous progress, spirals of upsurge and decline. But, from the midcentury point on, the course was to remain on the ascendant. Hyperbole is unnecessary to underscore the strength and scope attained by the Orthodox Union as it now reaches the century mark, a status that must only have been dreamed of before.
Although some of the problems that plagued Jewish religious fife in the United States in earlier years have been allayed rather than definitively resolved, others have been more thoroughly excised. Certainly the worst of the evils rampant in the mass immigration years have been uprooted. The atmosphere engendered by the emergence of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, together with practical moves, made possible developments unattainable under prior conditions. In the perspective of the Orthodox Union's present-day capacities, it can be seen that the fife force channeled by continuing flow bore the nutrients of Torah-cause progress.
The rise of the UOJCA to its present status is a gauge of the phenomenal upsurge of American Orthodox Jewry in recent decades. The revolutionary change is not only a matter of multiplication of the numbers of the traditionally observant, of elevation of observance standards and facilities, of the numbers and enrollments of yeshivoth and other educational institutions. Beyond all this is the less tangible, but no less real and significant, revolution in presence-in the way Torah-loyal Jewry views itself and is viewed by others; in the way it speaks and is heard; in the way it acts in Jewish and public affairs, exercises its role in the world, and pursues its function in the life of humankind.
Diverse forces have taken effect in the resurgence of Orthodox Jewry. Among them, the role and work of the Orthodox Union have obviously been crucial. Less obviously now, but in the opinion of this writer not less truly, the purpose of Henry Pereira Mendes has been pivotal throughout.
It is the premise here that not only the birth of the Union and its initial duration, but its continuity throughout and the effect of that continuity in the rise of the American Torah community, are to be attributed to the spirit and purpose and personal qualities of Henry Pereira Mendes. It is troubling to find that today so few, even among the more informed, know of the crucial role Dr. Mendes played. It is not to the credit of America's Orthodox Jewish community that awareness of a figure so focal in its development has been permitted to fade.
To strike a personal note, the writer was not privileged to have known Henry Pereira Mendes. He died in 1937, several years before the beginning of my own engagement with the organization he had fathered. In the earlier years of this association, glimpses of Dr. Mendes came to me in the way some of those who had known him spoke of him.' Study of the written record, insofar as fragments have survived, and of the works of historical researchers, have given substance to gleaned impressions. But the sense of his moving presence was something imbibed from the beginning, something distilled from the process of absorption into the work that he had instituted, something felt rather than synthetically formulated. The feeling ripened rather than faded amid the demands of daily realities through the long years when the Union and I were so closely identified with each other. It pervades my thinking in the more detached reflection of these later years.
The same experience that nurtured the sense of a moving presence also brought the realization that none other than a personality of unique qualities could have given life to a vision so seemingly belied by an American Jewish, scene that, troubled enough as it was to be perceived in the advancing twentieth-century decades, must have been an altogether hope-defying mess in the late nineteenth-century years. One wondered: Were the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America not to have come into being in 1898, could it, or some equivalent, have been brought Into existence at any time since? Any answer other than "no" would have been idle fancy, and would still be so today. "No," that is, unless another Mendes were to appear. In searching the annals of American Torah Jewry, no such new-day Mendes has been detectable.
It is not a matter of level of greatness, as the believing Jew measures greatness. Orthodox Jewry, in America as in Israel and elsewhere, is blessed with the current or recent presences of figures of exceptional distinction, even of greatness-Torah teachers and leaders of our time, Jews whose contributions are of inestimable worth. But to have the capacity to win people to the standard of Torah-community cohesion, to bring that heaped-up.. atomized community a confident sense of itself, to give the Jew of Torah loyalty a coherent identity and an instrument of effectiveness for that, you need certain very unusual qualities; you need a Henry Pereira Mendes.

Footnotes:
1. Among these was Morris Engelman, then the last survivor of the founding group of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. He was an officer of the Union from its inception until the 1930s, and served on the Executive Board until his death in 1948. Others were Benjamin Koenigsberg and Albert Wald, long-time Executive Board members and officeholders.