Hillel Kook (بالعبرية: הלל קוק‎, 24 July 1915 –18 August 2001), also known as Peter Bergson (Hebrew: פיטר ברגסון), was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.

Kook led the Irgun's efforts in the United States during World War II to promote Zionism and raise awareness about the plight of Jews during the Holocaust. He later served in Israel's first Knesset.

الناشط في أمريكا

While in America, Kook led a group of Irgun activists under the pseudonym "Peter Bergson." The name "Bergson Group" or "Bergsonites" eventually became used to refer to all the members of Kook's immediate circle. The Bergson Group was composed of a hard-core cadre of ten Irgun activists from Europe, America and Palestine, including Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, Alexander Rafaeli, Shmuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky. The Bergson Group was closely involved with various Jewish and Zionist advocacy groups, such as the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and the Organizing Committee of Illegal Immigration. The group also founded some separate initiatives of its own, specifically the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, whose goal was the formation of an Allied fighting force of stateless and Palestinian Jews. Some credit the later formation of the Jewish Brigade, a British unit of Palestinian Jews, with Kook's activism. Two American members of the Bergson Group were author and screenwriter Ben Hecht and cartoonist Arthur Szyk.

Initially the Bergson Group largely limited its activities to Irgun fundraising and various propaganda campaigns. The outbreak of World War II saw a dramatic transformation in the group's focus. As information about the Holocaust began to reach the United States, Kook and his fellow activists became more involved in trying to raise awareness about the fate of the Jews in Europe. This included putting full-page advertisements in leading newspapers, such as "Jews Fight for the Right to Fight", published in The New York Times in 1942, and "For Sale to Humanity 70,000 Jews, Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece", in response to an offer by Romania to send their Jews to safety if the travel expenses would be provided. On March 9, 1943, the Group produced a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden written by Ben Hecht, titled "We Will Never Die", memorializing the 2,000,000 European Jews who had already been murdered. Forty thousand people saw the pageant that first night, and it went on to play in five other major cities including Washington, D.C., where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court Justices, and some 300 senators and congressmen watched it.

In 1943, Kook established the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry. The Committee, which included Jewish and non-Jewish American writers, public figures, and politicians, worked to disseminate information to the general public, and also lobbied the President and Congress to take immediate action to save the remnants of Europe's Jews. United States immigration laws at the time limited immigration to only 2% of the number of each nationality present in the United States since the census of 1890, which limited Jews from Austria and Germany to 27,370 and from Poland to 6,542; even these quotas often went unfilled, due to United States State Department pressure on US consulates to place as many obstacles as possible in the path of refugees.

The proposal to admit more refugees was ratified by the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and, in response to the pressure, President Roosevelt subsequently issued an administrative order for the establishment of a special national authority, the War Refugee Board (WRB) to deal with Jewish and non-Jewish war refugees. An official government emissary sent to Turkey was of considerable assistance in the rescue of Romanian Jewry. The WRB saved about 200,000 Jews. Those rescued through the WRB were probably mostly in Hungary, in part through the Raoul Wallenberg mission which was sponsored by the WRB.

Some of the members of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe were: Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson) and Alex Hadani Rafaeli, Alex Wilf, Arieh Ben-Eliezer, Arthur Szyk, Ben Hecht, Rabbi Ben Rabinowitz (Robbins), Eri Jabotinsky, Esther Untermeyer, Gabe Wechsler, Senator Guy Gillette, Harry Selden, Johan Smertenko, Konrad Bercovici, M. Berchin, Samuel Merlin, Sigrid Undset, Stella Adler, Congressman Will Rogers, Jr., Yitzchak Ben-Ami, Col. John Henry Patterson (author).

There were many others who actively supported the "Bergson Group", for example a number of the best known people on Broadway and Hollywood, probably due to Ben Hecht's contacts (such as Kurt Weill).

The Irgun declared an open revolt against British rule in Palestine. To assist in recruiting and propaganda efforts, Kook established the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation and the American League for a Free Palestine, both of which were involved in lobbying U.S. and other diplomats and in trying to attract the American public to support the Irgun's rebellion. Kook remained strongly affiliated with the Revisionist camp after the war during the creation of the State of Israel. While he was unquestionably loyal to the cause, his position as the Irgun's leading American activist was not free from conflict. In 1946 Kook received a letter from Menachem Begin, who had become chief of the Irgun in 1943. Begin admonished Kook for various policy positions that strayed from the official Irgun party-line. These included Kook focusing on the transportation of illegal immigrants to Palestine instead of a "primary" assignment - arms shipments to Irgun fighters, as well as a (rather common) usage of the term "Palestine". At the time Kook was in the habit of saying "Palestine Free State", which Begin thought left too much potential for bi-nationalism. Begin demanded that Kook refer to the future Jewish state as the "Free State of Eretz Israel".

‏القضية الفلسطينية والانتخابات الأمريكية في الأربعينيات :

كانت العصبة الأمريكية من أجل تحرير فلسطين قد تأسست عام 1944 على يد هيلل كوك وهوعضوكبير في الأرغون. وقد لعبت هذه العصبة دوراً رئيسياً في توجيه الرأي العام الأمريكي والسياسة الأمريكية لدعم مشروع الدولة اليهودية بعد وفاة ‏الرئيس الأمريكي فرانكلين روزفلت الذي كان قد مارس ضغطاً معتدلاً على بريطانيا في مسألة الهجرة اليهودية. لعبت العصبة في ورقة الانتخابات الأمريكية عن طريق التأثير في عواطف الجمهور أولاً. استطاع كوك الذي يملك علاقات وثيقة مع بعض المشاهير عرض مسرحية في البرودوي بعنوان ’’ولادة فهم‘ ‏تروي المسرحية (من تأليف بن هيتشت) سيرة ثلاثة يهود نجوا من معسكرات الاعتنطق النازي ويحاولون الوصول إلى فلسطين. ينجوأحدهم ومسماه ديفيد (يجسد دوره الممثل الشهير مارلون براندو) ويحقق الهدف. في نهاية المسرحية يتوجه مارلون براندوإلى الجمهور ويسأل عدة مرات:’’أين كنتم؟... عندما حدثت ‏المقتلة..عندما اغتال وأحرق ستة ملايين يهودي.. لقد اختفيتم لأنكم تشعرون بالخزي.. اللعنة على صمتكم...‘‘. تحولت المسرحية إلى حفل لجمع التبرعات وجمعت العصبة يومها 400.000 دولار وألهبت الجوالسياسي في نيويورك وأضحت الهجرة اليهودية موضوع المنافسة بين الجمهوريين والديمقراطيين، وحيث دعم ‏حاكم نيويورك الهجرة اليهودية، اندفع الديمقراطيون وضغطوا على ترومان(33) لدعم الموضوع بدرجة أكبر إذ حتى الموضوع لا يؤثر فقط على أصوات اليهود الأمريكيين بل على البروتستانت ’’الإنجيليين‘‘ الذين رؤوا حتى الواجب يقتضي مساعدة ’’العبريين‘‘ على استعادة أرض الميعاد ولذلك ركزت النادىية ‏الصهيونية على استخدام حدثة ’’العبريين‘‘ أكثر من ’’اليهود‘‘. عن كتاب خط في الرمال للمؤرخ البريطاني جايمس بار.

External links

• Jewish Journal interview with actor Steven Schub on playing Hillel Kook
• Hollywood Reporter review of the Los Angeles production of "The Accomplices"
• American League for a Free Palestine at the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY
• Wyman Conference 2007 Videos
• The Day the Rabbis Marched on Washington, from the American Jewish Historical Society
• The Day the Rabbis Marched On-line Exhibit, from the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
• Irgun in Exile
• Bergson Bio, from USHMM
• The "Bergson Boys", from America and the Holocaust, PBS.
• هيلل كوك Knesset website
• The Bergson Group, America, and the Holocaust: A Previously Unpublished Interview with Hillel Kook, by David S. Wyman, from American Jewish History 89:1 (2001)
• A Rebel with a Cause: Hillel Kook, Begin and Jabotinsky's Ideological Legacy, by Eran Kaplan, from Israel Studies 10.3 (2005)
• Jewish World Review op-ed