(AUTHOR: Isaac Reznik, Vol. 74, #1, Pesach 2019) 2 December 2018 commemorated the 80th anniversary of the ‘Kinderstransport’, a s t h e rescue efforts that brought some 10 000 refugee Jewish children to the UK from Nazi Germany and other European countries in the years 1938-1940 are called. One of the most remarkable, yet still largely unheralded heroes of those times was Solomon Schonfeld, a young British rabbi who personally rescued thousands of Jews during the tragic decade of 1938-1948.
Solomon Schonfeld, the second son of Rabbi Dr Victor Schonfeld of London, was rabbi of the Adath Yisroel Synagogue, a small Orthodox congregation in London. A dynamic and charismatic personality, he was inspired to embark on rescue work on behalf of European Jewry by his former teacher, Rabbi Michoel Dov Weissmandl. This work was accomplished under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council, a body created in 1938 with the approval of his future father-in-law, Chief Rabbi J H Hertz and of which he became executive director.
Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, Rabbi Dr Schonfeld assisted the Austrian communal leader Julius Steinfeld in organising a Kindertransport of some 300 Orthodox Jewish youth, whose entry he secured through providing the UK government with his personal guarantee. He was subsequently responsible for all but single–handedly bringing to pre-war England several thousand youngsters, rabbis, teachers, ritual slaughterers and other religious functionaries ignored by the secular British Jewish establishment, providing his ‘charges’ with kosher homes, Jewish education and jobs. He also saved large numbers of Jews with South American protection papers. After the war, he devoted himself to the spiritual and physical needs of survivors in the liberated areas, including creating unique mobile synagogues. During the war, he approached His Majesty’s Government to heed R. Weissmandl’s pleas to bomb Auschwitz, but his appeal went unheeded.
Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, the late Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, was a noted example of the long-range impact of Rabbi Schonfeld’s actions, since he and his immediate family were among the thousands rescued by him from Nazi Germany. Lord Jakobovits arrived in London as a teenager in 1936. After staying for a year in the Northfield boarding school, he was enrolled in the Jewish Secondary School, Aberglaslyn. In his memoirs, he recalls the excitement of the evacuation to Shefford and surrounding villages, when the sleepy little Bedfordshire town was turned into a spiritual fortress throbbing with Jewish life. Never before, he ref lected, had there been such a concentration of Jews and Jewish life in Great Britain.
Lord Jakobovits further recognized the extraordinary contributions made by Rabbi Dr Schonfeld through his founding of the Hasmonean schools in London as well as other schools that formed the Jewish Secondary Schools Movement in England.
There are individuals whose achievements leave permanent marks on an entire community. There are even fewer whose single-handed efforts save thousands of Jews – who multiplied into tens of thousands.
Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld was an Anglo-Jew who accomplished both.
Isaac Reznik, a veteran Jewish communal worker, journalist and editor, has written extensively on aspects of South African and general Jewish history. He is a member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs.
Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld (1912-1984) as he looked during his 1946 visit to Auschwitzand Bergen-Belsen concentration camps to assist survivors.
