Hillel Kook; As Peter Bergson, Led Campaign to Save Jews in WWII

Hillel Kook, who rallied Americans to save thousands of European Jews from the Holocaust during World War II, has died in Israel. He was 86.

Known by the name Peter Bergson in the United States, Kook died Saturday in Kfar Shmaryahu, a suburb of Tel Aviv.

Because he so often ran afoul of the American Jewish Congress and other mainstream Jews, Kook was little remembered as a Holocaust-fighting hero until 1999, when American-born Israeli journalist Louis Rapoport published his book, “Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe.”

The book reminded the world of Kook’s role in prodding Congress to conduct hearings on the plight of European Jews and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board, an effort in early 1944 that saved hundreds of thousands from the Holocaust, which killed about 6 million Jews.

Born in Lithuania, Kook fled pogroms with his family when he was 10 and moved to Palestine, where his uncle, influential Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, later became the first chief rabbi of Israel.

As a teenager, Hillel Kook became involved with the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the militant Jewish underground. In 1937, he worked with Revisionist Zionist Party members in Poland and other parts of Europe to smuggle Jews into Palestine--although mainstream Zionists there branded the immigrants as riffraff.

To protect his family from retaliation, Kook decided not to use his real name. He chose the Anglicized pseudonym Bergson because his father was Dov or “bear” making him “son of bear” and because he admired the French philosopher Henri Bergson.

An acolyte of Revisionist Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky, Kook followed him to the United States in 1940 to recruit a Jewish army under Allied command. After Jabotinsky died, Kook became the leader of the unusual group, which he renamed the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews in Europe, focusing on emerging reports of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews.

Kook befriended playwright Ben Hecht and other influential entertainers and leaders, Jews and non-Jews, to create plays, place advertisements and stage demonstrations. Dubbed the Bergson group, his organization raised money by staging such Hecht-written productions as “A Flag Is Born” starring Marlon Brando and “We Will Never Die.”

Even more important, Kook and his followers raised American consciousness, prompting the government rescue effort.

In one dramatic effort, after the British and American governments rejected a Romanian proposal to ransom 70,000 Jews, Bergson on Feb. 16, 1943, published a full-page ad written by Hecht in the New York Times and the Washington Post headlined “For Sale to Humanity: 70,000 Jews.” The advertisement, denounced as a hoax by the American Jewish Congress, stated: “Roumania is tired of killing Jews. . . . Seventy-thousand Jews are awaiting death in Roumanian concentration camps--Act Now.”

Kook also staged a demonstration of 400 Orthodox rabbis in Washington on Oct. 6, 1943. Although Kook was not particularly religious, he fully grasped the visual impact of 400 Talmudic scholars with beards, black coats and hats marching on Capitol Hill.

Having won his point with the establishment of the War Refugee Board, Kook returned to working for an independent Palestine--renaming his group the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, which was opposed by many mainstream Jews who had their own ideas about how to establish a Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, denounced Kook and his followers as “a group of self-appointed people who represent nobody but themselves.”

After Israel declared independence in 1948, Kook returned there--only to be arrested for armed Irgun resistance to the Israeli army. Soon freed, he was elected to the country’s first Constituent Assembly.

Changing course once again, Kook resigned his seat in protest over the political direction taken by the more traditional Ben-Gurion.

In 1951, Kook moved to the United States, bowed out of politics and made a career as a Wall Street stockbroker.

After he retired in 1970, he returned to Israel, where he again worked for separation of synagogue and government.

Kook is survived by his second wife, Nili; two daughters, Astra Zemko of London and Rebecca Kook of Israel, and three grandchildren.