29 - Walter Wurzburger, ‘The Individual in the Crisis’, 9 October 1943, Brighton, Massachusetts

Summary

DURING the year and a half between Hertz's 1942 Passover sermon and the following address on Yom Kippur 1943, the military situation had improved dramatically for the Allies, with monumental victories at El Alamein and Stalingrad, and an Allied landing in southern Italy five weeks before Wurzburger delivered this sermon. But the situation of Europe's Jews had drastically deterior - ated. Some 60 per cent of all the Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished during these months, and while the full dimensions of the catastrophe were not yet public knowledge, reports had been widely circulated placing the number of Jewish victims in the millions. In August and September 1943 the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe placed large newspaper advertisements throughout the United States dramatizing the crisis; on 6 October, just two days before Yom Kippur, 400 Orthodox rabbis gathered in Washington, DC to petition President Roosevelt for American intervention to rescue surviving Jews in Europe. It was against this grim background that Akiba Predmesky delivered the powerful Yom Kippur sermon discussed in the general Introduction.

The sermon below is quite different, in many ways. The preacher, Walter Wurzburger, was at the very beginning of what would be a distinguished rabbinical and academic career. Born in Munich in 1920, he emigrated to the United States in 1938. He received his undergraduate degree and rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University, where he became a devoted disciple of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. In the autumn of 1943 he was serving at Congregation Chai Odom in Brighton, Massachusetts, having moved to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. Going on later to hold positions with congregations in Toronto, Canada, and Lawrence, New York, he also taught for many years in the faculty of Yeshiva University, edited Tradition magazine, and wrote import ant books on ethics and Jewish thought.

Like the address by George Silverstone reproduced above (Sermon 15), Wurzburger's sermon features a powerful narrative that had been given considerable exposure in American newspapers: that of ninety-three Polish Jewish girls who had taken their own lives rather than be given over to the lust of German officers. (It is indeed striking that when this story was published in New York Times, it occupied more column inches than a report published two months later that two million Jews had been killed.)