https://www.sefaria.org/topics/samson-raphael-hirsch?sort=Relevance&tab=notable-sources
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Gertrude Hirschler
For 30 years I have been talking to the Creator of the universe via a translation of the Siddur and commentary on the Siddur by Rav Hirsch as translated to English by Gertrude Hirschler.
For 30 years I have been studying the Chumash largely through the translation and commentary of Rav Hirsch as translated to English by Gertrude Hirschler.
For 30 years I have absorbed the hashkafa of Rav Hirsch as expressed in his articles in the Collected Writings many of which were translated by Gertrude Hirschler.
For many years, not quite 30, I have been studying Psalms via the commentary of Rav Hirsch via a translation by Gertrude Hirschler.
So that's a pretty important person in my life this Ms. Hirschler. And yet all these years I did not know what she looked like. Search her name on the web. You won't find a picture.
That is until now. For thanks a relative of hers I now have a photo of the incredible Gertrude Hirschler and will share it with you.
But first a few details on her life as collected from Gertrude Hirschler by Susan J. Lief Rotenberg, Jewish Women's Archive:
Gertrude Hirschler was born on August 11, 1929 in Vienna, Austria to Bernard Hirschler and Alice Dukes. She was the elder of daughters.
Her father was a successful businessman and the family lived comfortably until forced to flee the Nazis in 1939. They landed in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hirschler attended Baltimore Hebrew College, the Teachers Training School, and Johns Hopkins University night school from which she graduated with with a B.S. in 1952.
In addition to her translations of Hirsch, Hirschler translated numerous other works such as Rabbi Alexander Z. Friedman’s Wellsprings of Torah. She also penned numerous articles for encyclopedias and edited Ashkenaz: The German Jewish Heritage.
Hirschler, who was Torah observant, passed away in 1994 and is buried in Baltimore.
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Photo copyright 2017 Stengler
Friday, June 13, 2025
Friday, June 6, 2025
aided substantially in the destruction of the European Jews
Zionist obsession for a state has been so maniacal, so out of bounds from Torah and basic human values, that Zionists actually contributed to Jewish death in the Holocaust. In the words of Rav Avigdor Miller, “The Zionist leaders together with the Reform ‘rabbis’ aided substantially in the destruction of the European Jews.”[1] The list of their diabolical actions is so long that we can only touch upon them here.
In 1940, a ship of refugees sailed down the Danube River seeking to continue on to Eretz Yisroel. The ship’s captain requested more money to continue the trip. However, Henry Monitor, the head of the United Jewish Appeal in America, refused the request, saying, “Many of the passengers are old people and women, who are not suited for such difficult journeys. What are needed for the Land of Israel are young people who understand the meaning of the National Jewish Homeland. This represents the greatest threat, if the Land of Israel becomes filled with unproductive elements, and it will impede the efforts to achieve a state.”[2] A similar statement was uttered by Yitzhak Greenbaum of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency. He said, “When they asked me: Can you not release funds from the Keren Hayesod to save Jews in the Diaspora, I said no, and again I say: No. In my opinion, it is necessary to resist this wave that is pushing Zionist activities into the background.”[3]
As Brisker Rav biographer Rav Shimon Yosef Meller points out, Greenbaum persisted in his shocking attitude as late as 1943 when the full extent of the catastrophe in Europe was known. Greenbaum said:
We should devote only our surplus resources and our surplus efforts to saving the Diaspora. When two options are offered: the chance to save multitudes of Jews in Europe or redemption of the Land, I choose without a moment’s hesitation redemption of the Land. Speaking too much about the slaughter causes a weakening of our efforts to increase Hebrew might in Israel. If it were possible to buy food packages with funds from Keren Hayesod and send them by way of Lisbon, would we do so? No, no![4]
In the 1930s American President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended an offer to accept refugees, 150,000 of them, and Great Britain planned to follow suit with similar numbers. Roosevelt’s emissary Morris L. Ernst came to England but was opposed by Zionist leaders there. He reported later that they told him, “This is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.” Roosevelt informed Great Britain that the project must be abandoned: “We cannot put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership won’t stand for it.”[5]
In 1938, President Roosevelt convened a conference on Jewish refugees at which conference the delegation from the Jewish Agency declined to influence the United States or the other participating nations to accept German Jews. At that time, the Nazis made an offer to release Jews at the price of $250 per person, but the Jewish Agency headed by Golda Meir ignored the offer. In 1942, Rav Solomon Schonfeld persuaded the British Colonial Office to allow Jews to find safe haven in the British colony of Mauritius, an island nation off of the coast of Africa.[6] A vote was put before the British Parliament, but a Zionist spokesman stated that Jews opposed the motion because it did not include Palestine.[7] The motion was defeated.
In 1940, the Zionist paramilitary outfit the Haganah blew up an 11,885-ton ocean liner called the Patria as it sat in Haifa Harbor with 1,904 passengers on board. The passengers were Jewish refugees from Europe that the British were sending to Mauritius and Trinidad. The Haganah, claiming later that its intention was to disable the ship, planted a bomb that did not explode. So, it planted a larger bomb that blew a 3x2 meter hole in the ship, sinking it in 16 minutes. Over 200 Jewish refugees plus 50 crew members and British soldiers perished.[8]
In 1943, New York newspapers publicized Romania’s offer to release 70,000 Jews at the price of $50 each. Rav Avigdor Miller explains what happened next:
Stephen Wise the president of the American Jewish Congress and leader of U. S. Zionists publicly denied the authenticity of the offer and declared that no collection of funds “would seem justified.” The Jewish Agency in England also ridiculed the news of the Roumanian offer, but Undersecretary of State A. A. Berle affirmed privately that the Roumanian government had actually made such an offer to the State Department. Some time later, when all the Jews who could have been rescued had been annihilated, the facts of the offer were confirmed by Bartley Crum, an expert on affairs of the Near East, who declared that the 70,000 Jews could easily have been transported through Turkey by a few days’ travel in trucks, but the State Department had refrained from publicising the news of the offer due to Jewish (Zionist) pressure.[9]
Stephen Wise again thwarted rescue efforts in 1944 when the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People called upon the United States to establish a War Refugee Beard. Stephen Wise opposed the proposal before Congressional committee.[10]
The book Perfidy tells us one of the most shocking stories of them all, how Zionist leaders in Hungary, in particular Rudolf Kastner, deliberately withheld from 400,000 Jews in Hungary knowledge that Nazi trains were headed for death camps rather than safe haven. Moreover, Joel Brand, an emissary who went to meet Zionist leaders in Turkey and Palestine to plead for token funding to save Jews from annihilation was deceived by Zionist leaders and landed in a British prison, where he was held as the slaughter commenced.[11] After the war, Kastner testified on behalf of S.S. Lieutenant Kurt Becher, saving him from his war crimes. After his trial for his crimes, Kastner was assassinated. Some speculate that Israeli intelligence agents killed him to prevent the public from finding out how extensive the ties were between the Zionists and the Nazis.[12]
After the war, President Harry Truman asked the State Department to apply visa quotas from the war years in order to allow 400,000 refugees from Europe into America. Congressman William Stratton put a bill before Congress as required for this measure, but the major Jewish organizations, controlled by Zionists, opposed it and the bill was not passed.[13]
We have also many personal accounts of abuses of Holocaust survivors by Zionists. Maryla (née Husyt) Finkelstein grew up in Warsaw, survived the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek concentration camp, and two slave labor camps. Here is what she had to say about her experiences with Zionism and Zionists:
I was not a Zionist because I did not believe that this problem of a lot of Jews, of a congregation of so many Jews in the world, can be solved by a small country like Palestine. Naturally, I didn’t think that we should build our country over dead bodies. So, I did not believe that Zionism will solve the Jewish problem.
After the Holocaust as I told you, there was more enlightenment. I started to think that maybe I am wrong. In my idiotic mind I thought that if we would have during the Second War a country like Israel and a representation in the League of Nations we would be saved. Well I started to think about Zionism. But the experience with the Judenrat. The experience with the leaders in the DP camp in Austria which had everything what they wanted. They had as much money for nothing as they wanted. And still there was pilferage, injustice, outright discrimination against the sick and the poor. They were so ruthless. I said to myself well I won’t be able to function under a Jewish rule. I cannot function in a society where the word protection is connected, not that they protect you but this is a door opening for the most plain job. I didn’t like them. I can give you millions of examples.
Now coming here to this country and what happened to me with the money from Germany was an outright antidote to any Zionist thoughts I ever had. If you could take Jews after such a horrible tragedy to steal money from not only me, but like me, a handful like me, to steal money, and force us to go back to primitive situation and to start build ourselves up from scratch after a concentration camp, life in a ghetto, horrors of war. If they could take away what the damn Germans agreed to give me, you understand, on the way to the forum, the money on the way to the forum, I was robbed by Jews and not poor because after the first thievery they were already rich. But they wanted the most. I'm telling you, this was my antidote to any thought of Zionism.
Oy Jewish people have to go through big and big and big indoctrination and cleansing to be able to stand up and ask and demand and show that we are a state, that we are capable of having a state. A state cannot exist on tanks because tanks kill, so what are you going to rule over dead bodies? We have to show that we can build. And the leadership must be brought up not from the scum. But from what is in the middle, the more human humans. What shall I tell you?
The Pope once was told, asked to recognize Israel. And the Jewish argument was we are a state. So, he said if you are state so act like a state and we will recognize you. Now imagine my tzuris – I have to side with the Pope. But I agree with him. You cannot have even in this wild crazy world, you cannot have a state behaving so rowdily like Israel. And it’s not a state. Again, and again, it’s a garrison. It’s a garrison. And I dream and I feel that our salvation, our lives, just lives, flesh and blood and bones, depends on the behavior in Palestine, in Israel, on Israel and Palestine territory. I don’t know even how to call it.
The leadership in Israel is the prolongation of the Judenrat and these commedists [?] in the DP camps and they finally arrived there to destroy and to really take our, get our mouths forever claiming that we have the right to live. And in order to live in today’s world you have to have a government. Whether you like it or not. I am not so fond of so many borders on the map. I wish we will be united all. Borders only create more wars. But be it as it may, we have to have representation, but not the kind we have.[14]
This Zionist interference with the entry of Jewish refugees to lands other than Israel has continued long after the post-war years. In 1956, the Canadian minister of immigration, J.W. Pickersgill, was asked if Canada would admit Jewish refugees. He replied: “The government has made no progress in that direction, because the government of Israel.... does not wish us to do so.”[15] In 1971, Herman Weissman, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, successfully opposed a Congressional effort to admit tens of thousands of Russian refugees.[16]
The Satmar Rebbe cautioned us all on Zionist interference with immigration.
The Zionists constantly boast that the only place of refuge on earth for Jews is their state. However, anyone with a brain in his head can see that it was because of the Zionists that the doors of other countries were shut to the Jews. This is because the Zionists always exert every effort to prevent Jews from going anywhere else other than to their own state. Any person who takes even the slightest action of offering Jews the possibility of finding refuge in any other country to fulfil the statement of our Sages in the Talmud (Tractate Pesachim, p. 87) that “G-d did an act of charity to disperse the Jews among the nations” faces savage attacks of all kinds from the Zionists, who hurl all types of insults, slander and curses, claiming that such a person is a self-hating Jew who hates the Holy Land.
Moreover, Zionist officials and ministers fan out all over the world, attending banquets with world officials to convince them to refuse to allow their nation to serve as lands of refuge for Jews, and on the contrary, implore them to coercively redirect these Jews to the Zionist state, in violation of the oath prohibiting mass immigration to the Holy Land as explained by the Talmudic sages. The Zionists coerce most of those Jews who have arrived in the Zionist State into heresy and apostasy, and the children of these Jews are defiled in dreadful ways. These “immigrants” continue to suffer poverty and enormous destitution. All the Zionists care about is that they should have a strong state with a huge pool of available soldiers for their army and other coercive organizations and activities.
These Zionist evildoers used their G-d-given free will to choose evil, arrogance and heresy, and have been the cause of all the suffering and tribulations to the Jewish People, to assure that Jews find no peace and respite in any country, and work to assure that the doors of the nations are shut. Furthermore, nations can claim that they do not have to offer refuge to Jews because the Jews now have their own state where they can seek refuge. The Zionists, who are viewed by the nations as the leaders of the Jewish People, demand that Jews not go anywhere other than to their state.[17]
Dr. Meir Margalit reports in his book Returning in Tears – Emigration During the British Mandate Period that Zionists also obstructed emigration from Palestine for people who wanted to leave during the mandate period. During the First and Second Aliyahs (1882-1903 and 1904-1914, respectively) more than half of new immigrants left the country. During the Mandate era, from 1923 to 1948, around 60,000 left, the rate of return being around 10% in 1948. After World War II, some Jews in Palestine approached the United Nations refugee agency, asking for inclusion on the lists of refugees entitled to return to their homeland. In 1947, a group called Organization of Returning German Immigrants submitted 485 requests for Austrian passports. The Polish consul in Tel Aviv referenced 14,500 Polish Jews requesting visas to return to Poland. However, the Zionist leadership worked to obstruct their return. Says Margalit, “There is evidence of a deal between the Jewish Agency and the Polish Consulate in Mandatory Palestine, whereby they would cause endless delays to the Jews who wanted to return so they would lose their desire to go back.” Margolit believes requests for emigration might have been even higher if not for the obstructions.[18]
Margalit tell us that the Zionists also forced emigration of the chronically ill. Yehoshua Gordon, the director of the immigration office in Tel Aviv during the Mandate era, complained that many of the deported infirmed were not receiving necessary treatment in Europe and were even “dying in the streets from illnesses.” Nevertheless, deportation of such immigrants became an official policy in 1926.[19]
In 1958, Foreign Minister Golda Meir expressed her interest in preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel. In a top-secret memo discovered a half-century later by the Israeli Foreign Ministry she wrote, “A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration.”[20] And so another crack appears in the image of the state being a haven for all Jews and Ahavas Yisroel being the prime motivation for the state’s founders.
Is real AhavasYisroel even possible without Ahavas HaShem? As Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the 7th Lubavitcher Rebbe, said, the Zohar says that HaShem, Torah, and Klal Yisroel are one. Therefore, love of HaShem, Torah, and Klal Yisroel are one.[21] So it should not be surprising to find that claims by atheistic Zionists of love of Jewry is not as advertised. Their real love is for a secular state. For that they need Jews, but only healthy ones as we have learned. However, it should be noted that most of the 800,000 Jews from Arab nations that the state absorbed were poor.[22]
Zionists try to pass off their state as a refuge from anti-Semitism yet not only are its doors not opened to all Jews, but it pushes out ones it does not want. Not only does the state endanger Jews worldwide, but the Zionists in their deranged establishment of the state caused countless Jews to perish. Could this possibly be described as the ingathering of exiles?
Perhaps even worse, on a spiritual level Zionism may have been the cause of the Holocaust. This was the view of the Satmar Rebbe, the Chazon Ish, Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl, and others. We presented earlier the view of Rav Yaakov Emden that rebellion against Rome in an effort to force the end of exile was the spiritual cause of the massacre of the Jews in Beitar. Regarding the Holocaust, as Rav Dovid Shmidel reports, a visitor asked the Chazon Ish “How could it be that all the nations of the world stood by silently while the Germans killed millions of Jews?” The Chazon Ish responded, “Is it not an explicit Gemara in Kesubos that if the Jewish people violates the Three Oaths, Hashem will permit their flesh like the gazelles and the deer of the field?”[23] Ironically, or perhaps it is more accurate to say hypocritically, Zionist propagandists reference the Holocaust with regularity as a justification for the state even if it be secular, yet Zionism may have been the cause of the Holocaust in the first place. If persecution is the result of violation of the Three Oaths then how could more violation of the oaths be the cure for it? If persecution is the result of sin and secularity, then how could more sin and secularity be the cure for it?
[1] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory (Brooklyn, NY: Beis Yisroel of Rugby, 5740), p. 232.
[2] R’ Shimon Yosef Meller, The Brisker Rav, Volume III, p. 325.
[3] R’ Shimon Yosef Meller, The Brisker Rav, Volume III, p. 325.
[4] R’ Shimon Yosef Meller, The Brisker Rav, Volume III, pp. 325-6.
[5] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #761; “New Nixon Tapes Prove that Anti-Semitism and Zionism Go Hand in Hand,” Torah Jews, visited Jan. 8, 2018 <http://www.truetorahjews.org/nixon>.
[6] Emma Youle, “Government honours Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld for saving 3,500 lives in Holocaust,” Ham & High, April 11, 2013. “New Nixon Tapes Prove that Anti-Semitism and Zionism Go Hand in Hand,” Torah Jews.
[7] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #755 and #757.
[8] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #756; “Patria Disaster,” Wikipedia < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patria_disaster>.
[9] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #759.
[10] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #760.
[11] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #767; “Perfidy (book),” Wikipedia; Ben Hecht, Perfidy (Lynbrook, NY: Gefen Books, 1999).
[12] Ben Hecht, Perfidy, p. i.
[13] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #762; “New Nixon Tapes Prove that Anti-Semitism and Zionism Go Hand in Hand,” Torah Jews <http://www.truetorahjews.org/nixon>.
[14] Maryla (nee Husyt) Finkelstein, Interview on Democracy Now, youtube, transcription by the author of this work, visited Jan. 4, 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUb61jengn0>. “Judenrat (plural: Judenräte; German for “Jewish council”) was a widely used administrative agency imposed by Nazi Ger-many during World War II, predominantly within the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. The Nazi German administration required Jews to form a Judenrat in every community across the occupied territories.” Wikipedia.
[15] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #763.
[16] R’ Avigdor Miller, Awake My Glory, #764.
[17] R’ Yoel Teitelbaum, Vayoel Moshe 1:111.
[18] Dr. Meir Margalit, Returning in Tears – Emigration During the British Mandate Period in Nir Hasson, “The Untold Story of the Jews Who Left Mandatory Palestine,” Haaretz, Feb. 16, 2018.
[19] Nir Hasson, “The Untold Story of the Jews Who Left Mandatory Palestine.”
[20] Lily Galili, “Golda Meir Told Poland: Don't Send Sick or Disabled Jews to Israel,” Haaretz, September 9, 2009.
[21] R’ Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Sefer HaSichos 5700, p. 2ff.; Likkutei Sichos, Vol. 2, p. 499 in Nissan Dovid Dubov, “The Connection Between Ahavas Yisrael and Ahavas HaShem” <https://www.chabad.org /library/article_cdo/aid/2312300/jewish/Chapter-2-Ahavas-Yisrael-and-Ahavas-HaShem-Loving-a-Fellow-Jew-and-Loving-G-d.htm>, visited Feb. 26, 2018.
[22] “Benny Morris ─ The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
[23] Yirmiyahu Cohen, I Will Await Him, pp. 285-6.
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