A Jewish Chaplain in FranceLevinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
Religion
A Jewish Chaplain in France
Levinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Jews
Judge Robert S. Marx of Cincinnati, Ohio, is now national president of
the Disabled Veterans of the World War and a member of the national
committee on hospitalization and vocational education of the American
Legion. But in 1917 and '18 he was Captain Marx of the 90th Division,
operations officer of his regiment during the St. Mihiel and Argonne
offensives, and reported dead on the day before the armistice, when he
was struck on the head and wounded severely. And on the other extreme, I
notice the case of First Sergeant Sam Dreben of the 141st Infantry, a
soldier of fortune in many revolutions and a member of the Regular Army
in the Philippines several years ago. Discovering a party of Germans
coming to the support of a dangerous machine-gun nest, Sergeant Dreben
with thirty men charged the German position, killed forty of the enemy,
took several prisoners, and captured five machine guns, returning to his
own lines without losing a man. For this daring and important act he was
awarded the D. S. C.
Of the various types of distinction emphasized during the war, all were
as true of Jews as of any other group. Numerous cases exist where four
or more members of a single family were in the service. There was the
Fleshner family, of Springfield, Mass., from which four sons of an
immigrant father and mother entered the service, the oldest of them only
twenty-three. The oldest of these boys lost an arm and an eye while
carrying ammunition through a barrage, but exclaimed later in the
hospital: "I'm the luckiest Jew in the army. Any other man in my place
would have been killed."
The New York Herald during the war described an indefatigable Red Cross
worker, Mrs. Louis Rosenberg of North Bergen, N. J. This old Jewish
mother had six sons in the service; the two oldest, each the father of
two children, when summoned for the draft refused to claim exemption,
and having invested their savings in two small notion stores, they left
their wives in charge of them and accepted the call to military service.
Mrs. Liba Goldstein, of Cambridge Springs, Pa., a woman of eighty-four,
born in Russia, had twenty grandsons in the allied armies, ten as
officers in the British army, eight in the American forces, and two with
the Jewish Legion in Palestine. And so one might bring out one example
after another, if one desired, all showing the eagerness of loyal Jews
to serve their country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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