(Jewish Group) The heroic WWII rescue story that Netflix's 'Transatlantic' leaves out
Ahead of the June 1940 Nazi invasion, Jeffim Israel fled Paris to southern France. The 54-year-old refugee was desperate to get himself and his family to America. The Israels were not just Jewish and stateless; Jeffim was also a prominent member of the Menshevik party — Russian Socialists who were jailed and exiled by the more radical Bolsheviks after the October 1917 revolution.
A journalist who participated in the coup of the Russian czar, Jeffim held an official government position before Lenin’s reign of terror. After five years in prison, the Mensheviks were exiled. Jeffim, his wife Ida, and children, Max, 7 at the time, and Julia, 3 months, moved along with the others en masse to Berlin in 1923. There, Jeffim wrote political articles and was an editor for a Russian language publisher. With the rise of Nazism in 1933, the Mensheviks relocated again to Paris, then to Toulouse. The Israels were certain to be on the Gestapo’s list.
Jeffim had family in the Bronx. His four cousins, from the same tightknit Orthodox family in the Belarussian shtetl of Nesvizh, came to New York before World War I. The oldest of the cousins was Wolf Israel, my great-grandfather, an itinerant religious teacher for bar mitzvah boys in Russia; he cleaned subway cars in New York.
But the American double-cousins — as they were called since Jeffim’s parents were also cousins— could not help their European family secure visas. The U.S. government’s quota system made immigration nearly impossible.
Then, in July 1940, something miraculous happened.
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Good article. Of course, I can answer the question in the title easily: Because people, including, sadly, some Jews, don't want to hear about Jews being heroes or saving other Jews, it interferes with the "victim" narrative.