Rallying Cry

O

ne could say that Dr. Birnbaum got his first taste literally of the problem of being a Jew in a totalitarian country while he was still a young child. His family was living in Germany in 1933 the year when Hitler rose to power. His father Solomon Birnbaum was brutally attacked on the street by thugs. Even six-year-old Jacob didn’t escape. “I was attacked inside our garden ” he remembers. ”A group of boys hopped the fence and stuffed dirt into my mouth — it was terrifying. I resisted vigorously and ran away. Curiously my first reaction wasn’t resentment but a sense that they were Nazis and what else could one expect?”

Solomon Birnbaum moved his family to England in the late 1930s before war broke out. While the family was in London the young Jacob was sent to a Jewish school started by Rabbi Avigdor Schonfeld the father of Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld who organized the Kindertransports out of Germany and Austria.

Jacob Birnbaum began his own career as an activist after the war when he was just 19. Small groups of Holocaust survivors many of them young people were arriving in England. Penniless and without friends or families these young people often had nowhere to sleep except the floor of a shul. Birnbaum fought on their behalf attempting to convince the British authorities to provide these young survivors with a place to live and food to eat.

The challenges of working with these battered survivors brought forth his skills as a leader: “Some of them had fought with the partisans and they were wild! I still remember one — his name was Yosef Yehoshua — who had a scarred face. The other fellows rushed over to me exclaiming ‘Yosef Yehoshua has a whole suitcase full of knives!’ Well I was big and he was small but he was strong. I told him very quietly and politely ‘Yosef Yehoshua give me the knives and I’ll look after them. I’ll show you where I keep them and if you need them I’ll give you the key.’ ”