The FBI's Secret File on the Zionist Militia Man Who Raised Funds From Jewish Gangsters
Maya Guez
A young Jew arrives in the United States from
Mandatory Palestine and tries to obtain weapons and recruit fighters for
an army to fight the Arabs. He gets funds from Jewish gangsters, and
even though he changes his name and conceals his identity, the FBI finds
out about his efforts, places him under surveillance and tries to get
him deported. This heroic story started during World War II and
continued afterward as well.
In 1940, Hillel Kook,
a member of the underground Irgun militia in pre-state Israel, arrived
in New York. To avoid being identified as the nephew of the late Rabbi
Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi during the period of
British rule in Palestine, he changed his name, taking on the nom de
guerre Peter Bergson.
In November 1942, he learned about the scale of the annihilation of European Jewry
from an article in The Washington Post. He then revised the aims of the
small Irgun delegation, and instead of obtaining equipment and raising
funds for the Yishuv – the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine – he
rechanneled his efforts to the rescue of Europe’s Jews. To that end, he
enlisted his Irgun colleagues in the United States, together with
entertainers and members of Congress, to get out the message of what was
happening to European Jewry.
he FBI became very suspicious of Bergson’s
activities and how he raised funds. Indeed, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover
contacted the agency’s Philadelphia office in 1946 and demanded to know,
within 10 days, what was being done to deport him. Nothing was done.
“Bergson finally returned to
Palestine on his own,” says historian Robert Rockaway, who located the
extensive FBI files about Bergson and the Irgun. “He was fed up with
being constantly under surveillance. His lawyer had to report constantly
to the FBI and the immigration services. He was always being sent
documents and harassed relentlessly. He and the people who worked with
him knew that they were being checked and watched all the time.”
Rockaway, 79, emeritus professor of Jewish
history at Tel Aviv University (and my partner in researching how Jews
fleeing the Holocaust were saved in the Philippines and Vichy France)
came across the FBI files on Bergson by chance during his years of
research on Jewish gangsters in the United States. Rockaway is the
author of books including the 1993 work (revised in 2000), “But He Was
Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters.”
“I knew that representatives
of Yishuv organizations received money from them. When I interviewed
them and their representatives, they told me about it,” Rockaway says.
“They underwrote the purchase of weapons, planes and machine guns for
them with which to fight the Arabs and the British after World War II.”
In addition, there were also
non-Jewish mafiosi, who controlled the port of New York, who helped
facilitate arms shipments to Israel.
The files showed that the
FBI’s surveillance of what was commonly known as the Bergson Group went
on from 1941 to 1948. During that period, the security agency
eavesdropped on telephone conversations of members of the group, opened
their mail, sifted through their trash, and even planted informers.
The Bergson file thus
consists of hundreds of pages that detail the wiretapping,
correspondence between senior FBI people, and reports of arrests,
searches and surveillance. But despite all the legal efforts and
bureaucratic attempts to curtail the group’s activities, it still
strived to influence American public opinion. It established the
Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, which lobbied
for legislation, and also organized the musical pageant “We Will Never
Die,” which, Rockaway notes, was seen by Eleanor Roosevelt in
Washington.
The script of the production
was created by the popular stage- and screenwriter Ben Hecht, with a
score by Kurt Weill. It was Hecht who drafted the full-page
advertisements that the Emergency Committee published in The New York
Times and The Washington Post to shock the American people into
pressuring the administration to act to stop the Holocaust.
One such ad, which appeared
in The Times on February 16, 1943, stated: “‘For sale to humanity:
70,000 Romanian Jews, guaranteed human beings at $50 apiece. Romania is
tired of killing Jews .... Seventy-thousand Jews are awaiting death in
Romanian concentration camps – Act Now.” According to the ad, Romania,
having already murdered 100,000 of its Jews over two years, was now
ready to ransom the rest for a pittance.
“The leaders of the American
Jewish community were afraid that all this noise would stir up
anti-Semitism,” Rockaway notes.
Nonetheless, the pressure
applied by the Bergson Group and its allies was effective and was in
part responsible for the administration’s establishment in January 1944
of the War Refugee Board, which helped with the escape and resettlement
of some 200,000 Jews.
“The documents show that
from 1942 until 1945 the FBI tried to deport Bergson and harassed him,”
says Rockaway. They tailed him everywhere, listened to his phone calls,
repeatedly sent agents to check the organization’s books.
"Eventually the bureau grew
desperate and wanted to draft him into the U.S. Army," Rockaway says.
"He was young and strong [Bergson was born in 1915] and could have been a
soldier. But there are laws in the United States, and the FBI is
subordinate to them. Bergson had lawyers who defended him for two years,
until 1945. He knew he was being followed."
According to Rockaway, Jewish leaders including
World Jewish Congress co-founders Nahum Goldmann and Reform Rabbi
Stephen Wise, called Bergson and the Irgun “Jewish terrorists from
Palestine.” Goldmann reportedly told State Department officials in 1944
that Wise considered Bergson “equally as great an enemy of the Jews as
Hitler.”
One surprising source of aid
to Bergson were two FBI agents who were following the money trail
between Jewish gangsters and the Irgun – before themselves making
contributions to the Emergency Committee in 1943.
As Rockaway puts it, “It was
at the end of their shift, in the Irgun’s offices. They told the staff,
‘We are taking part in your struggle.’”
Bergson returned to Israel
in 1948, after the state’s establishment, and once again going under the
name Hillel Kook was elected to the first Knesset for Menachem Begin’s
Herut party. He went back to the United States in 1951, became a Wall
Street broker (Rockaway says Kook told him that “any fool can make a lot
of money in America”), and remained there until 1970, when he returned
to Israel again. Kook was married twice, and died in 2001.
Rockaway met him in 1996. “I
invited him to talk to my students about what he did in America,” the
professor says. “He was no longer a young man, he was in his 80s. My
students very much enjoyed the conversation with him. In Israel no one
knew him, and he didn’t like the leadership here. He said that
everything here was chaotic and confused. He was a good man and wanted
to rescue as many Jews as possible. It was clear to him that the
Americans could have saved more Jews – ‘hundreds of thousands,’ he said –
but they didn’t. They did nothing.”
During his investigations,
Rockaway discovered that the Haganah, too, received funds from Jewish
gangsters in the United States. “One of the [Haganah] emissaries was
Reuven Dafni, a founder of Kibbutz Ein Gev on Lake Kinneret, who had
parachuted into Yugoslavia in mid-1944 with Hannah Szenes,” Rockaway
says. Dafni worked for the Haganah in the United States beginning in
1946, and also attracted the attention of the FBI, he says.
According to Rockaway, Dafni persuaded the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel to make a large donation to the Haganah.
“They were introduced by
Siegel’s assistant, Allen Smiley, who was a Jew himself. Siegel asked
him, ‘What are you doing here?’ Dafni told him he was raising funds for
the Haganah, because the Jews were fighting the Arabs in Israel. Siegel
asked, ‘Hold on, do you want to tell me that the Jews are fighting?’”
Rockaway says.
“Dafni said they were, and
Siegel, who was sitting across the table, drew closer to him and asked
in astonishment, ‘Fighting like to kill?’ Dafni said yes. ‘Then I’m with
you,’ Siegel replied. He liked killing and agreed to take part in
everything that involved killing. He didn’t know that Jews were capable
of engaging in a blood fight.”
Siegel – a close friend and
associate of Meyer Lansky, Abner “Longy” Zwillman and other famous
Jewish gangster leaders, as well as of Charles “Lucky” Luciano and
Italian mafia bosses – met with Dafni every week in 1946 in the back of a
Los Angeles restaurant.
“Bugsy would show up with a
suitcase stuffed with bills of $5 and $10. In this way, Dafni received
about $50,000 during the year, before leaving Los Angeles,” Rockaway
says. “The day after he arrived in San Francisco, in June 1947, Dafni
went down to his hotel dining room for breakfast. On the front page of a
newspaper was a report that Bugsy Siegel had been murdered at the home
of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill. Dafni told me, ‘Thank God I took cash
and not a check.’”
Dr. Maya Guez is a researcher and lecturer at Tel Aviv University and Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem.
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