Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl ( Hebrew חיים מיכאל דב וויסמנדל, born October 25, 1903 in Debrecen , Austria-Hungary ; died November 29, 1957 in Mount Kisco near New York ) was an Orthodox rabbi, Jewish scholar and author (his best known work: Min Hamezar ), Rosh Yeshiva and Shtadlan , who became famous as the savior of the Jews of Slovakia during the time of the Holocaust. Thanks to his efforts, the mass deportation of Slovak Jews was postponed from 1942 to 1944.

Life

He was born in Hungary as the son of Yosef Weissmandl. A few years later the family moved to Tyrnau in what is now Slovakia. In 1931 he moved to Nitra to study under Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Ungar , whose daughter, Bracha Rachel, he married in 1937.

Weissmandl was a philosophy student at the University of Oxford and had volunteered on September 1, 1939 to return to Slovakia as an agent for the Agudath Israel World Organization . When the Germans began to deport Slovak Jews to Auschwitz in the spring of 1942, he and his cousin Gisi Fleischmann founded an underground organization called “Pracovná skupina”. In doing so, they smuggled hundreds of Jewish children across the border into Hungary, which was still considered safe at the time. The most important measure was the payment of a bribe to Dieter Wisliceny in the amount of 50,000 US dollars in order to successfully prevent the deportations for the period from autumn 1942 to October 1944. In July 1944 he met Rudolf Vrba , who had fled Auschwitz with Alfréd Wetzler at the end of April in order to report on what was going on in the concentration camp in Slovakia ( Auschwitz protocols ). Weissmandl was caught a few weeks later. He was able to escape from the train that was supposed to take him to Auschwitz and reached Switzerland in December 1944 on the train negotiated by Rudolf Kasztner .

In 1946 Weissmandl emigrated to the USA, but returned to Europe several times. He died in 1957, severely weakened after several heart attacks.

Works

  • Toras Chemed (Mt. Kisco, 1958)
  • Min HaMeitzar (Jerusalem, 1960)
  • Kikayon D'Yonah

literature

  • Abraham Fuchs: The Unheeded Cry (= Hebrew קראתי ואין עונה Karati V'ein Oneh 2009). Mesorah Publications, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-89906-469-7 (Chapter 1: A Biographical Sketch weissmandl.org ).
  • Ben Hecht: Perfidy. Julian Messner, New York 1961 (= Hebrew כחש Kaḥash Ladori, Tel Aviv 1994).
  • David Kranzler : Thy Brother's Blood: the Orthodox Jewish response during the Holocaust = קול דמי אחיך צועקים אלי . Mesorah Publications, Brooklyn, NY 1987, ISBN 0-89906-858-8 .
  • David Kranzler: Holocaust hero. The untold story and vignettes of Solomon Schonfeld, an extraordinary British Orthodox rabbi who rescued 4000 Jews during the Holocaust. KTAV Publishing House, Jersey City 2004, ISBN 0-88125-730-3 .
  • Gila Fatran: The “Working Group”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 8: 2 (1994: Fall) pp. 164-201 and No. 9: 2 (1995: Fall) pp. 269-276.
  • Jeffrey Satinover : Cracking the Bible Code. William Morrow, 1997, ISBN 0-688-15463-8 .

Documentation

  • VERAfilm, Among Blind Fools (video documentary)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lenni Brenner: For only with Blood shall we get the land . In: Zionism in the age of the dictators . 1983, 24: The Wartime Failure to Rescue (English, text archive - Internet Archive - as of March 25, 2002).
  2. ^ Rabbi Eli Brackman: Rabbi Michael Weissmandl. A Rabbi from the Bodleian Library who saved Jews from the Holocaust. Oxford Chabad Society, accessed March 27, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Weissmandl, Michael Dov. In: wymaninstitute.org. 2015, accessed March 27, 2019 (American English).
  4. ↑ Rudolf Vrba: I cannot forgive . 2012, p. 331-336 .
  5. ↑ Toras Chemed, web copy ( Hebrew ) hebrewbooks.org. Retrieved April 28, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Weissmandl, Chaim Michael Dov
ALTERNATIVE NAMES חיים מיכאל דב וויסמנדל (Hebrew)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian rabbi
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Debrecen
DATE OF DEATH November 29, 1957
Place of death Mount Kisco , New York