"the Day is Short and the Task is Great": Reports from Jewish Military Chaplains in Europe, 1945-1947 (Part Three: New Documents for the Study of American Jewish History)

In November 1940, with war already underway in Europe and its clouds hanging over the United States, Frank L. Well, president of the Jewish Welfare Board, met with Assistant Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson "to discuss the religious needs of the Jewish personnel in the armed forces." Patterson subsequently wrote to Well, "We shall do everything compatible with our primary mission of training to help safeguard the religious observations of men of the Jewish faith." However, when the United States entered the war in December 1941, neither the United States armed forces nor the American Jewish community were prepared to meet the religious requirements of Jewish military personnel. Similarly at war's end in 1945, the military and the organized American Jewish community failed to anticipate the extraordinary requirements of the liberated Shearith ha-Pletah, the European survivors of the Shoah. The burden of meeting the spiritual, religious, and material needs of Jewish soldiers and civilians fell directly on the Jewish military chaplains who served in the United States Army and Navy. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into the war, the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB), in cooperation with the three major Jewish rabbinical organizations, recruited 311 rabbi chaplains who served between 1941 and 1948. (1) The JWB created a semi-autonomous organization, the Committee on Army and Navy Religious Affairs (CANRA), to plan the effort to recruit, train, equip, and support the chaplains. Once in the field, the chaplains were required to file monthly reports with CANRA. Some of those reports are excerpted below. Their format has been changed for easier reading, and we have made minor changes to the texts to eliminate obvious spelling or grammatical errors.