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WITH the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi regime, Hertz spoke out powerfully from his pulpit about the fate of German Jewry. On the first day of Passover (11 April) 1933 he likened the anti-Jewish policies of the new regime to those of the ancient pharaoh who ‘knew not Joseph’ and began to oppress the Israelites despite the contributions to Egypt they had made, berating the ‘heathen Teutonic nationalism’ with its demands that Jews be excluded from German society. This was in response to the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses and the ‘Law for the Restoration for the Professional Civil Service’ with its ‘Aryan Paragraph’. Three months later, speaking at a special service of prayer and intercession, which brought together ‘all sections and organizations of the community … united as one religious brotherhood’, at the Royal Albert Hall, his outlook was bleak almost to the point of despair. German Jewry has been
Hurled down from its eminence; facing misery, insult, and degradation; and sinking in deep waters of intolerance and hate. It is battling for very life against a tidal wave of mass hysteria and racial persecution that threatens it with annihilation … Nothing less than extermination of the Jew would, it seems, satisfy the wilder spirits among the Nazis … Some of the ringleaders, at any rate, are evidently contemplating a vast St. Bartholomew's Night; and by judicious repetition are accustoming their followers to the thought of such a massacre.
The language seems eerily prophetic of events that were at that time years in the future.
The outbreak of war summoned the ageing chief rabbi to mobilize his full personal resources to sustain the morale of his people. In addition to his usual holiday sermons and messages, he was frequently called upon to speak at special occasions, all of them sombre; the rhetorical challenge was to balance an articulation of unprecedented tragedy with an expression of invincible faith and hope. On 8 July 1941 he told a gathering at Grosvenor House in London that ‘ten Continental nations are now in the grip of the spiritual Black Death called the Nazi terror’, and that Hitler's ‘declared aim is the total disappearance of the Jew from Europe’.
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