Though I’ve been steeped in the minutiae of Jewish history since I was a child, I wasn’t always aware, growing up in an immigrant household in Toronto, that there was even a category such as that applied to the stories and sagas of Jewish communities in North America, more specifically Jewish American Heritage Month, as we are celebrating throughout the month of June (along with our Canadian cousins, who celebrate theirs in this same month of May).

I’d always been familiar with the stories of the heroes of our modern Jewish history. Growing up in a proudly Zionist home, one of the first books I remember reading was a picture book titled Mickey Marcus: The Story of Colonel David Marcus by Judith Halperin and Phyllis Kreinik, published in 1949.

David “Mickey” Marcus was a larger-than-life Jewish American hero. Born in 1901 and growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he somewhat improbably entered West Point in 1920 and graduated in 1924. After active duty, he got a law degree, worked for the DA prosecuting organized crime, and was then asked by Mayor LaGuardia to modernize NYC’s corrections system. When war became inevitable he mobilized, and though he was given important administrative responsibilities throughout the war, he somehow found his way into combat, even dropping into Normandy with the 101st Airborne division on the night of the invasion of Europe on June 6th, 1944.

During the occupation of Germany after the war, Marcus was given responsibility for administering displaced persons (or DP) camps across much of central Europe. It was there, and in the work he did preparing for War Crimes tribunals that he came to understand the enormity of the Holocaust, and he became convinced of the need for Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral land.

He was asked by David Ben Gurion to find a suitable commander for the nascent IDF, but he couldn’t find anyone more suitable than himself, so in early 1948 he went to Mandate Palestine. In May and June, shortly after the declaration of Israel’s independence, Marcus was given the rank of Aluf (the first General of a Jewish army in thousands of years) and command of the vital Jerusalem front. The city was under siege, and it was the highest priority for Israel to establish a resupply route to Jerusalem before a ceasefire was implemented. Marcus led the offensive against the Latrun salient, and most importantly, he found and built a road on the rocky path that became the “Burma Road”, ensuring Jerusalem’s starving residents and nearly out of ammunition defenders could be resupplied.

On the night of June 10th, 1948, unfamiliar with the base he was in and unable to respond in Hebrew to the sentry’s challenge, Mickey Marcus was killed by friendly fire at the moment of his greatest triumph. He was buried at West Point, the only commander of a non American military to be accorded that honor.

A name I wasn’t familiar with until my first trip to Israel in the late 80’s was Hayim Salomon. And I only became familiar with it because I saw it as the name of multiple streets in multiple cities in Israel. So, being the historian I am, as soon as I could, I researched who he was.

Hayim Salomon was an American patriot, but he was not born so. Born in Poland in 1740, a rare Polish-Sephardic Jew, he became schooled in finance and trade in several parts of Europe, mostly in the west, and after a couple of years in England he immigrated to New York CIty in 1775, where he brokered trade and investments for shipowners and merchants.

Salomon quickly developed a passionate interest in and dedication to the revolutionary cause. He joined the Sons of Liberty in 1776, and though the British suspected him and even jailed him a couple of times, he used his facility with languages to become indispensable to them and thus to both gather intelligence for the revolutionaries, and communicate in German with the Hessian troops who were thinking about deserting the British and fighting for what was becoming the United States of America. Eventually, he was caught, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, but he managed to escape and made his way to the US capital in Philadelphia. Once there, he reestablished his business, but he also remained devoted to the cause. He raised vast sums of money to finance the war, even lending and donating most of his considerable wealth. He did so again and again, and the refrain Washington famously uttered - “Send for Hayim Salomon!” became well known.

He helped finance and build the Mikve Israel synagogue in Philadelphia, one of the country’s oldest congregations. And he made it a point to find ways to support heroes of the revolutionary war who could no longer support themselves. And yet, having given everything, he died in 1785 with nothing to his name. The government hadn’t yet made good on his loans, and his sudden death was remarked in the papers but even then his family had great hardship. Nonetheless the great passion of Hayim Salomon’s life, the United States of America, would only grow stronger.

Seventy five years after Salomon died, a girl was born to the family of a local Rabbi in Baltimore, Maryland. The country was about to fall into years of civil war, division, and hardship. That is where Henrietta Szold grew up, and at the age of 17, having finished high school, she became a teacher, particularly apt in Jewish studies.

As an aside, when I was young, my father introduced me to a small but very thick book of over a thousand pages. This was Jastrow’s Concordance, a reference book any scholar of talmud or scripture learning in the original Hebrew or Aramaic would have used over the last 150+ years. Henrietta Szold used her grasp of Hebrew language and texts to help Marcus Jastrow complete his enormous reference book. She took classes (the first woman to do so) at the Jewish Theological Seminary, now the flagship institution of the American Conservative element of the Jewish community - though she promised, at the time, not to seek ordination.

The oldest of eight daughters, Szold became an advocate for greater participation of women in communal prayer and took it upon herself to publicly say kaddish for her mother.

Using her highly developed Hebrew language skills and knowledge of Jewish texts, Henrietta Szold became the first editor of the Jewish Publication Society at the turn of the twentieth century. At about the same time, she became familiar with what became the modern iteration of Zionism, and she became involved in the international movement that brought about the establishment of the institutions of the Yishuv in what is now Israel in the early part of the century.

With the help and support of women from across America and the diaspora, she founded Hadassah, the key institution bringing health care and modern medicine to the Yishuv and all residents of Mandate Palestine. She followed her convictions and in 1933 she emigrated and lived in Jerusalem, where she turned her efforts to helping create the Youth Aliyah which was responsible for bringing tens of thousands of young Jews out of Germany and out of Europe before the Holocaust consumed them.

She was a proponent of a dream of Israel where Jews and Arabs could coexist and cooperate, even becoming involved in a political party considering a binational state. Henrietta Szold died in 1945, before the war ended, and before the dream of Jewish statehood that she carried for half a century could be realized. The organizations she created still exist today, both here and in Israel.

What do these three genuine Jewish American heroes have in common, and what can they teach us?

I believe that the common thread running through these illustrious lives is their determination to ACT, to ensure that their dreams and passions could and would be actualized. Where they could, they helped, taught and inspired others. Where they were best placed to make a difference, THEY STEPPED UP!

It is in discovering strength, capacity, determination that we perhaps did not know, or even remember that we have, that we can emulate these exemplars of Jewish American virtue. Not one of them was perfect; none of them lived to see their dreams completely fulfilled. But as the great sage Rabbi Tarfon tells us in Pirkei Avot/Ethics of our Fathers (Chapter 2) Lo alecha ham’lacha ligmor, v’lo ata ven chorin libatel mimena.

“You are not required to finish the work, nor are you free to abandon it.”

Shabbat Shalom