This is an editorial written by A.A. Freedlander from the March 18, 1943 edition of The Chicago Sentinel. The article describes the atmosphere surrounding the holiday of Purim in the year 1943 during the time of Nazi occupation:
"All realize that there cannot be the customary unrestrained Purim merriment when, as at present millions of Jews in Europe are not merely threatened with, but undergoing actual extermination and the most sinister savage anti-Semite of all times goes on exacting his toll of innocent Jewish life with seeming impunity."
Freedlander writes that Purim in 1943 feels more like Tisha B’Av, the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, with Purim festivities cancelled in Tel Aviv and the celebration of Purim prohibited in all Nazi-occupied countries. The author includes a long quote by the president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Judge Levinthal, discussing the tragic history of the Jewish people and mentioning the major historical persecutors of the Jews – Pharoah, Haman, Torquemada, Chmielnicki, Hitler – and stating that they “have held in common their acute perception of the utter physical defenselessness of the Jew.” Levinthal continues:
"We celebrate a Purim which marks the overturn of Haman’s plans and the vindication of the just and righteous cause of the Jews, but all too often we forget that SALVATION WAS ONLY TEMPORARY. (Capitals from original text)"
According to Levinthal, despite the misconception that it is the Jews’ destiny to suffer, this wasn’t the belief of our ancestors who prayed throughout history for salvation. He concludes with an explanation that it is this generation’s mission to stabilize the Jewish future and to restore national dignity.
"When Hitler is gone we shall celebrate another Purim in commemoration of his defeat, but let it be our last such festival, for we shall no longer be the defenseless, homeless, helpless folk whose very weakness invited attack."
The quote from Levinthal finishes with a mention of the hundreds of thousands of American Jews who were actively helping this reconstruction, by giving aid to the “establishment of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth” and the statement: “Our generation has a rendezvous with destiny; we shall keep the appointment.”
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Purim - Purim is celebrated on the 14 Adar as the day the Jewish people were saved from destruction during the fourth century BCE. The heroine of the Purim story, Queen Esther, worked together with her uncle, Mordechai, to reverse the decree of genocide issued against the Jewish people by Haman, the vizier of Persia. It is the tradition on Purim to dress up in costumes, distribute small food packages known as mishloach manot, give charity, and listen to the reading of the Megilla – the Book of Esther.
The Chicago Sentinel - The Chicago Sentinel, a weekly newspaper for the Chicago Jewish community, was one of the longest continuously published Jewish weeklies in the United States. The first issue of the Sentinel was published on February 4, 1911. The newspaper focused on cultural events and included many eye-catching illustrations and photographs. It also published short stories and reports about events in the various Jewish communities. The Sentinel differed from many other English-language, often highbrow, Jewish weeklies, because it reached out to the Zionist immigrants who preferred to read in English and not Yiddish. The Sentinel is a treasure trove for social, cultural, and religious historians who are interested in American Jewish life outside of New York during the twentieth century.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
Louis Levinthal – Louis E. Levinthal was from an influential Jewish American family, descending from an old Lithuanian and American rabbinical family. Levinthal studied law and served as judge in Philadelphia from 1937–1959. He was head of the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) from 1941–1943 and of other Jewish philanthropist and community organisations. In the years after World War II he was the special advisor for Jewish affairs to the postwar European command. Levinthal later moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem, where he served as chair of the Hebrew University.
