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5.0 out of 5 stars
A remarkable little biography of a remarkable man of faith and action, June 17, 2008
"The Rabbi of 84th Street - the Extraordinary Life of Haskel Besser," by Warren Kozak is a remarkable little biography of a remarkable man of faith and action. Mr. Kozak, a journalist by profession, writes a moving portrait of Rabbi Besser, now "an elderly Hasidic rabbi." Kozak, Jewish, but not Orthodox, is well-positioned to write this biography, explaining the history, beliefs and lifestyle of Rabbi Besser and the tight-knit Jewish community in Poland and the rest of Europe as Hitler moved to completely erase them from the planet.
A rabbi acquaintance of mine gave me the book as a Hanukkah gift. With a large pile of reading material always beckoning, I was reluctant to begin reading the biography, thinking that the story of an old Polish rabbi would hold little interest to a young American Christian - I could not have been more wrong. First of all, Kozak knows how to tell a story. Secondly, Rabbi Besser's life is at the center of some of the most momentous events of the 20th Century: WWII and Hitler, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cold War. Finally, Rabbi Besser's faith is a powerful testament, speaking volumes of his character and of the nature of the G-d we both worship in our own way.
So many of the events in Rabbi Besser's life are worth recounting; I'll mention two: his narrow escape from Europe on the day Hitler invaded Poland; and his amazing partnership with Ambassador Ronald Lauder.
Kozak spends about 20 pages to set up Rabbi Besser's childhood in Poland, detailing his home life and the history of his faith, then comprising a full ten percent of Poland's population. Seeing Hitler for what he was, Besser's father liquidated some of the family business on the eve of WWII and set about to safeguard his family by moving them to British Palestine. Young Besser, then 16, was left to tie up loose ends, a job the senior Besser had full confidence he could handle. Barely getting on a Romania-bound train in Warsaw two days before the invasion, Besser headed southeast. On board, he was almost attacked by a group of mobilizing Polish soldiers until a priest intervened - the priest was earlier impressed by Besser's regard for life when he asked him about a bomb in Haifa that killed innocent Arabs. The train made it to Lwow, 100 miles short of the border with Romania, when all train service was suspended because of the "imminent war situation." Told to leave the train, which was traveling an international route, Besser did so, then quietly boarded. He was likely the only passenger on the train as it traveled for another three hours to the border. At the international boundary, Besser was almost ejected from the train by a Polish border guard who threatened to shoot him as a deserter. As the guard left to get the police, the train lurched forward a hundred yards - into Romania. Possessing a valid Romanian visa, the Romanian guards demanded a bribe; one U.S. dollar did the trick. Finally, on September 1, 1939, the 16-year-old Besser boarded a boat for the Middle East, having parted with the last of his cash.
Besser's partnership with Ambassador Ronald Lauder, the son of Estee Lauder and former American Ambassador to Austria in the 1980s, is remarkable for the lives they both touched. As Kozak writes, "Ronald Lauder thought of himself in several different ways. He was a proud American, he was a New Yorker, and he was an active Republican. He knew a great deal about business, art, and foreign and military affairs. But he never really thought of himself as Jewish." Yet, Lauder readily combined his wealth, business savvy, and connections to Rabbi Besser's own assets and the two of them set out to ease the way for thousands of Jewish refusniks - Russian Jewish emigrants previously denied exit from the Soviet Union - who found themselves in Vienna, a people without a country. Through the Ronald Lauder Foundation, Besser and Lauder worked to revitalize European Jewry, starting Jewish schools, tending historic Jewish cemeteries, and assisting refusniks.
Close to the end of the biography, Kozak tells of how badly the previous century turned out for the Jews:
"The twentieth century turned out to be a terrible disappointment for many Jews," Rabbi Besser explains. "For two hundred years, Jews had finally been accepted into the world. But the modern enlightenment proved to be the first great disappointment because so many Jews who bought into it saw the end result when Europeans turned on them in the 1930s. You don't even kill insects the way they killed Jewish children.
"The second great disappointment came in Communism, which was supposed to end poverty in the world. It only created more poverty and more suffering before it finally collapsed.
"The third great disappointment came after World War II. The Germans and their collaborators were embarrassed by what they had done and the rest of the world shared part of that embarrassment for not protesting the massive genocide earlier. But now sixty years later all of those feelings of embarrassment seem to be gone and some even doubt that it ever happened.
"And, finally, the fourth disappointment happened in Israel. Herzl and the early Zionists believed that if Jews had a nation of their own, that would be the solution to anti-Semitism. Sadly it was not.
"In some ways it is the loss of faith in human beings that drives people to G-d. Usually Hasidism prospers after big tzuris (trouble)."
Warren Kozak's tale of Haskel Besser, the Rabbi of 84th Street, is well worth reading, for both Jew and Gentile.
Reviewer: Chuck DeVore is a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010, a California State Assemblyman, he served as a Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the Department of Defense from 1986 to 1988, retired from the Army National Guard as a lieutenant colonel, and is the co-author of "China Attacks."
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