Elmer Berger

By Andrew I. Killgore

More than 40 years ago Rabbi Elmer Berger, who had been serving Jewish congregations in Pontiac and Flint, Michigan, decided that the program of political Zionism in Palestine was incompatible with Judaism's universal moralities and prophetic spirit. Believing that American Jewish concern over Hitler's persecution of European Jewry was being cynically exploited by the Zionists to further their own cause, the young Rabbi helped found, in 1943, the American Council for Judaism, an explicitly anti-Zionist organization. This was a turning point in the life of a young man ordained only 11 years earlier after graduation from Hebrew Union College and the University of Cincinnati, both in Ohio.

After World War II ended, and world sympathy for its Jewish victims resulted in the creation of Israel, Dr. Berger and his colleagues in the Council were fully occupied explaining to both American Jews and non-Jewish U.S. Government officials that Judaism's basic values could not be reconciled with disregard for the rights of the Palestinians upon whose lands the new Jewish State had been created.

Claiming A Legal Victory

In 1964, Rabbi Berger and Professor W. Thomas Mallison, Jr., of the George Washington University Law Center, obtained from the U.S. Department of State an official rejection of the "Jewish people" nationality claim as having any validity in international law. This constituted an important repudiation of Israel's Zionist nationality policy, which had acquired some standing in 1917 when the British Government used "the Jewish people" phrase in the Balfour Declaration.

Despite his intellectual and legal victories, however, Rabbi Berger was being overwhelmed by an emotional tide which, fed by the media, became too strong for many of his Council colleagues to resist after Israel's 1967 military victory. As many of them modified their opposition to Zionism, Dr. Berger resigned his position as Executive Vice President in 1968. The next year, at the urging of several Council members who agreed with his unchanging anti-Zionist views, he founded American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ), the organization he heads to this day.

Rabbi Berger believes that Judaism is a universal religion to be professed by people anywhere who can also be loyal to the country in which they hold citizenship. While perhaps his single greatest contribution to anti-Zionism was gaining U.S. Government rejection of the "Jewish people" concept, Dr. Berger has also contributed or helped contribute such useful clarifying terms to Middle East discussions as "Arab-Jews" and "de-Zionized Israel."

He has travelled extensively in Israel and the Arab countries over a period of 30 years. Many of the life-long friends he has made on such trips fondly recall all-night discussions with him on the issues of religion and morality that have shaped his deeply-held views on the Middle East. For many years he was accompanied in his travels and ably supported in his work by his lawyer wife, the late Ruth Winegarden.

Rabbi Berger now divides his time between New York and the AJAZ office there, and his winter home in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of The Jewish Dilemma; A Partisan History of Judaism; Judaism or Jewish Nationalism; Who Knows Better Must Say So; Letters and Non-Letters; and Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew; and a co-author of A Just Peace in the Middle East: How Can It Be Achieved?. He also has written scores of articles and delivered hundreds of speeches.

Powerful Emotions

Political Zionism has generated powerful emotions among the world's Jews, especially since the Hitler era. Certain fundamentalist religious Jews are hostile to Israel because in their view only the Messiah can properly create a Jewish state. But Jews as a whole take their stands towards Israel on other grounds, with Zionists supporting and anti-Zionists such as Dr. Berger opposing. An increasing number of younger Jews find themselves caught somewhere in between, still supporting the existence of the Jewish state but deploring its actions as the Israeli drama takes an increasingly melancholy turn.

The brilliant Israeli victory in the June War in 1967 was followed by the bloody October War in 1973 that cost Israel 3,000 dead. Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza generated a vigilantism that turned the traditionally persecuted Jew into the persecutor, a source of anguish for many supporters of Israel. The 1982 Lebanon War further divided an Israeli society already becoming polarized along religious-secular and Oriental-European lines. Finally, an almost bankrupt Israel has become such a burden on the American taxpayer that it is only sustained by increasingly strident media and lobby pressure.

As thoughtful U.S. Jews of all persuasions contemplate these problems of the Jewish state, and its increasing population losses from emigration, Rabbi Berger's long-held views that a Zionist Israel is incompatible with Judaism seem more and more those of an Old Testament prophet.

Andrew I. Killgore, former U.S. Ambassador to Qatar, is president of the American Educational Trust.