23 - Jacob Philip Rudin, ‘God in the Blackout’, 2 October 1940, Great Neck, New York

Summary

DURING THE MONTHS preceding the High Holy Days of 1940, the war in Europe had taken a terrible toll on the morale of Jews in Britain and the United States. The German blitzkrieg of the spring led to the rapid conquest of Denmark and Norway, and of the Netherlands and Belgium, and the retreat of Allied forces at Dunkirk. Especially shattering was the fall of France in June. By the summer, German armed forces were in control of territory stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to eastern Poland. In August the air offensive against Britain began, with the bombing of London starting on 7 September.

Preaching to a congregation of fellow German refugees in the Overflow Service at Hampstead Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah (held in a separate hall for those people who could not be accommodated in the main sanctuary), Rabbi Ignaz Maybaum tried to articulate their feelings:

During these days before our Jewish New Year's festival we here in London have night and day had death, devastation and homelessness in front of our eyes. Each of us had to ask, When will my turn come? Will the ‘severe decree’, as the New Year's Day service has it, spare me and mine? We asked ourselves that question while the German planes roared overhead.

He then continued to cast the role of his congregants in heroic terms, as protagonists in the struggle:

We here in London are with our wives and our children in the midst of the battlefield. German barbarism has wiped out all distinction between the military and the civilian population. Totalitarian war recognizes no difference between the battlefield and the hinterland. The world views the London battlefield, and the heroism it admires is not only that of the men in uniform. There is also the civilian heroism.

In London, even coming to the synagogue to pray on these holy days entailed a considerable measure of risk.

American rabbis, though showing no more inclination to urge American entry into the war than a year earlier, approached the holy days very much aware of the crisis faced by the British in the face of the Nazi onslaught from the air.