“Unlikely Allies: The Shocking Nazi Mission to Rescue a Jewish Leader that Shook History”
“Prominent New York citizens concerned about whereabouts of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, … present location unknown.”
Four days later, Mordecai Dubin in Riga telegrammed Rabbi Jacobson, describing his failed rescue attempt and urging him to:
“Save lives. Rabbi and family. Try every way. Every hour more dangerous. Answer daily what accomplished.”
Rhoade’s lobbying campaign quickly picked up steam, with Phillip Rosen, head of the American Jewish Joint Committee’s European office writing to the U.S. representative in Riga:
“Greatly interested world famous rabbi Schneersohn … now Muranowska 32 Warsaw. Urge your doing utmost to effect his protection and removal to Riga …”
And on September 29, New York attorney Arthur Rabinowitz wrote Justice Brandeis requesting:
“… any aid you can render possibly through Ben Cohen … feel justified in troubling you by extreme danger to Schneersohn’s life and his great moral worth to world Jewry.”
Benjamin Cohen was a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so-called “Brain Trust” and the author of several major pieces of New Deal legislation. As a former counsel for the American Zionist Counsel, Cohen was a staunch defender of the welfare of Jews around the world. Yet despite mounting pressure from within his administration, President Roosevelt, then running for a third term, was reluctant to intervene in the rapidly-escalating European war. At the time, isolationist and anti-semitic sentiment in the United States was at an all-time high, stoked by such figures as legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh and Catholic preacher and broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin. But Max Rhoade persisted, and by doggedly badgering figures such as Brandeis, Cohen, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he finally succeeded in convincing the Roosevelt Administration to intervene on Rebbe Schneerson’s behalf – if only to throw the American Jewish community a bone and keep them quiet.
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