Jewish Vets In WWII Lauded

[Kyt]

Exhibit Recollects Service In Battle And In Fight Against Bias

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc...,7731194.story

WEST HARTFORD - Dr. David Weinstein at 92 was in his U.S. Army uniform again, gazing into a display case at the array of medals he was awarded for his service during World War II. They commemorate his participation in the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, and the capture of the bridge at Remagen in 1945.

He can describe each medal in detail, and is emphatic about why one should listen.

"We've lost thousands and thousands of our men and women," said Weinstein, a retired West Hartford dentist. "I'm still here to say what happened to us. I was able to save a lot of soldiers. I got them to hospitals and back to the U.S."

The story of the horrors and heroics of World War II are very much alive, but its eyewitnesses are dying.

Weinstein is one of 24 U.S. Jewish war veterans featured in an exhibit that opened Sunday at the George J. Sherman and Lottie K. Sherman Museum of Jewish Civilization at the University of Hartford. The exhibit - "Our Greatest Generations: Untold Stories of Jewish War Veterans" - will run through Feb. 24 and features current and war-era portraits of the 24 local veterans and artifacts they donated to the exhibit. Many of those featured gathered along with about 100 family members, students and the curious for a lecture by the museum's director and professor of modern Jewish history, Avinoam J. Patt.

More than half a million Jews served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, and Patt noted how those involved in liberating the survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese internment camps had a special kinship with the survivors. And for those liberated, Patt said, life was not easy.

Many of those freed from the concentration camps went to displaced person camps, many of which were crowded and squalid. President Truman's adviser, Earl G. Harrison, after inspecting the camps, wrote: "We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them." Improvements were swift in coming.

U.S. soldiers and Jewish chaplains helped rebuild synagogues and developed a system for the survivors to track family members. They conducted Jewish services and helped with the reconstruction of the Talmud - the vast compendium of Jewish law, customs, ethics and history. From two sets of Talmud brought from New York, Patt said, a special Army edition of 500 sets were made in 1948. They are the only sets to include the English language, in a preface dedicating it to the U.S. Army for its "major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation."

The return of the Jewish GIs to the U.S. directly influenced a dissolution of the bigotry against Jews that had been prevalent nationwide, and opened doors that had previously been shut or barely opened. Jews, previously subject to quotas at many colleges and universities, attended schools en masse under the GI Bill.

"Seeing Jewish GIs seizing the opportunity to fight for their country, there's something entirely empowering about that," Patt said. "It's only after the destruction of European Jewry that U.S. Jewry rises to a position of prominence on the world stage."

Superior Court Judge Referee Jerry Wagner, featured in the exhibit, agrees.

"America at the time of World War II was a country of considerable bigotry. There were openly anti-Semitic senators in Congress," Wagner said. "I'm convinced one of the greatest forces for changing that was the influence of Jewish vets coming back."

The exhibit and history of Jewish war veterans compiled by Patt and Richard Freund, director of the university's Maurice Greenberg Center of Judaic Studies, was sponsored largely by the family of the late Navy veteran Jack Rosenblit, whose portrait graces the cover of the exhibit catalog. Rosenblit, of West Hartford, died in August 2006.

"He was so proud to be in the Navy and so proud to be an American GI," Rosenblit's widow, Elka, said Sunday. "This is my way of celebrating his life."

There were others who died before they could see the exhibit take shape. Army Lt. Sholom Bloom was among the soldiers who, in February 1945, liberated an internment camp for Jews run by the Japanese in Manila.

Lotte Cassel Hershfield was 15 at the time, and remembered Bloom well, long before they settled in West Hartford with their families.

"The Jewish chaplain conducted services and [Bloom] came to the services," Hershfield said.

After a diet of brown rice for three years, Hershfield vividly recallsthe first meal the U.S. soldiers made them. "It was Spam, dehydrated potatoes and dehydrated eggs," she said. "It's a meal I will never forget."

Remembering was what Sunday and the exhibit were all about.

"This generation is dying," said Leah Bronner, an Army nurse who, with her husband, Felix, are also featured in the exhibit. "People should be reminded of the past. World War II was the war that had to be won, for the sake of the entire world's safety. How it could have happened, in a Germany with our culture and art, is beyond human understanding. The only thing left is to figure out how it could never happen again."