Stephen Samuel Wise

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Stephen Samuel Wise (1874 – 1949) was a Hungarian-born U.S. Reform rabbi and Zionist leader.

Contents 1 Education and Early Career 2 Zionist activism 3 Public Office 4 Criticism of Wise 5 Translations 6 Death 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Education and Early Career

He was born in Budapest on St. Patrick's Day, 1874, and thus reportedly always wrote in green ink.^{[citation needed]}

He was the son and grandson of rabbis. His grandfather (named Weiss) was Chief Rabbi of a small town near Budapest: Orthodox, very anti-Reform, but liberal politically. (Some biographies inflate this to "Chief Rabbi of Hungary.") His father had earned a Ph.D. and ordination in Europe.

His maternal grandfather, Mor Fischer, created the Herend Porcelain Company. When Wise's father, Aaron Wise sought to unionize the company, Mor gave the family one-way tickets to New York.

Stephen Samuel Wise came to New York as an infant with his family. His father became rabbi of Rodeph Sholom, an 'uptown' Manhattan Conservative congregation of wealthy German Jews.

He studied at the College of the City of New York (1887-91), Columbia College (B.A. 1892), and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1901), and later pursued rabbinical studies under Gottheil, Kohut, Gersoni, Joffe, and Margolis. In 1893 he was appointed assistant to Rabbi Henry S. Jacobs of the Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, New York City, and later in the same year, minister to the same congregation. In 1900 he was called to the rabbinate of the Congregation Beth Israel, Portland, Oregon. In 1933, Wise received an L.H.D. from Bates College.

[edit] Zionist activism

Wise was the first (honorary) secretary of the Zionist Organization of American. At the Second Zionist Congress (Basel, 1898), he was a delegate and secretary for the English language. He was also a member of the International Zionist Executive Committee in 1899. Wise's commitment to Zionism was very atypical of Reform Jews during this period.

In 1918, leaders within the American Jewish community convened the first American Jewish Congress in Philadelphia's historic Independence Hall. Wise, joined by Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and others to lay the groundwork for a national Democratic organization comprised of Jewish leaders from all over the country, to rally for equal rights for all Americans regardless of race, religion or national ancestry.^[1]

Reform Jewry, dominated initially by assimilationist Jews of German descent who feared allegations of dual loyalty and had tried to de-ethnicize their Jewish identity in hopes of being accepted as just one more denomination in America, was largely opposed to Zionism until at least the late 1930s.

[edit] Public Office

In 1902, he officiated as first vice-president of the Oregon State Conference of Charities and Correction; and, in 1903, he was appointed Commissioner of Child Labor for the state of Oregon, and founded the Peoples' Forum of Oregon. These activities initiated a lifelong commitment to social justice, stemming from his embrace of a Jewish equivalent of the Social Gospel movement in Christianity.

He founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, an educational center in New York City to train rabbis in Reform Judaism. It was merged into the Hebrew Union College a year after his death.

He was a close friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who turned to Wise for advice on issues concerning the Jewish community in the United States. Although Roosevelt was often very abusive in this friendship. Some nights, he would get drunk and spend hours hurling ethnic slurs at Wise and beating him with crucifixes. This behavior lead some to believe that the President was slightly anti-Semitic.

[edit] Criticism of Wise

Wise has sometimes been criticized for his initial failure to recognize the Holocaust prior to American entry into World War II, and his dismissal of early reports of the Final Solution as propaganda. Like much of the American Jewish community at the time, his mistakes in this area probably stemmed from a desire not to fan the flames of anti-Semitism by drawing undue attention to the sufferings of the Jewish people in Europe under Nazi rule, fearing an upsurge of anti-Semitism in the United States.

The book "Holocaust Victims Accuse," by Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, asserts that Stephen Wise prevented the shipment of food packages from American Jews to Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, because of the fear that it would be interpreted by the Allies as giving aid to the enemy, since Warsaw is in Poland. (As Wise had no official authority, this claim should be regarded as dubious.)

In 1942, he received a confirmation of the Holocaust by telegram from Gerhart M. Riegner in Switzerland, which he was reluctant to to get the information to President Roosevelt and publicize the information. Some say that his effort was blocked by Breckinridge Long at the State Department until Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau interceded. Others feel Wise was unwilling to burden Roosevelt, that during the Holocaust he showed lack of imagination and lack of leadership and that he considerably damaged the chances of rescue, in part because of his ego and jealousy of those who were more dynamic and imaginative, such as Hillel Kook.

At that time, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, in his ongoing effort to help Jewry during World War II, enlisted Rabbi Wise for his assistance. It seems that nothing came about from this.

Students of this period describe Wise as so close to President Franklin Roosevelt that he failed to press the administration for change and for action. Not until 1943, when Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver seized control of organized American Zionism from an ailing Stephen Wise, was a more militant policy adopted and great efforts begun to sway the American public, congress and the administration.

Wise is known to many as someone who relentlessly opposed Hillel Kook's (Peter Bergson's) and his rescue group's activism on behalf of Europe's Jews. Wise, and other American Jewish leaders like Nachum Goldman, applied considerable pressure to try to reduce Hillel Kook's support. When Kook's group presented the pageant "We Shall Never Die" in Madison Garden and in other cities around the USA Wise tried to convince local leaders not to allow the show to take place. In spite of Wise's obstruction Hillel Kook succeeded to put rescue on the American agenda, although with much unnecessary delay, which cost large number of lives. His group's efforts resulted in President Roosevelt establishing the War Refugee Board, which is said to be responsible for rescue of over 200,000, mainly in Hungary, in part thru the Raoul Wallenberg mission which it supported. Some have argued that if Wise and other Jewish leaders in the free world acted differently than large numbers of Jews may have been rescued.

[edit] Translations

Wise translated "The Improvement of the Moral Qualities," an ethical treatise of the eleventh century by Solomon ibn Gabirol (New York, 1902) from the original Arabic, and wrote The Beth Israel Pulpit, among other works.

[edit] Death

Rabbi Steven Samuel Wise died on April 19, 1949, aged 75. He is interred in an unmarked mausoleum on top of a hill in Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• Jewish Encyclopedia article on S.S.Wise
• Stephen S. Wise (Jewish Virtual Library)
• Biography at PBS.org
• The Wise-Silver struggle for control of American Zionism